I still use and recommend GitHub Issues. I use GitHub for all code, so itās nice to have everything in one place. And I appreciate that theyāve resisted āimprovingā it with a bunch of features.
ā 2016/08/31 1:47 pmMonthly Archives: August 2016
On this day, last year
One year ago today, I posted the first screenshots of Snippets.today for iPhone. I never wouldāve guessed that a year later Iād still be working on the beta, still not quite ready to ship.
One theme from that post a year ago is even more true today, though. To succeed I need to not just announce and market the product, but tell a story about why it matters. This realization is what has held up the Kickstarter video for so long. It doesnāt need to be perfect ā Iām sure it will be flawed in a few ways ā but it needs to be right, in that it should frame the idea of independent microblogging correctly.
More from that post last year:
Earlier this year I gave a talk at CocoaConf about tips Iāve learned to be productive while juggling multiple projects. But as I worked on the talk, it turned out to be about something else. It was about Walt Disney moving from Kansas City to Hollywood. It was about crazy side projects that no one else believed in. It was about Texas Hold āEm poker and risking everything for an idea.
I still feel that risk. A long-overdue product is difficult to push forward, the weight starting to carry as much burden as potential. And everywhere I look thereās a new excuse to procrastinate.
Supertop podcast
Everyone who builds blogging software should have a blog. Everyone who builds podcasting software should probably have a podcast, too. (And sometimes, like for Marco Arment, even a few podcasts.)
So I was happy to see Supertop start a podcast recently to talk about the Castro 2 launch and other thoughts on being a 2-person indie shop. Episode 3 features Brent Simmons:
PĆ”draig and OisĆn are joined by Brent Simmons to discuss indie app development in the wake of Vesper shutting down.
One subject Iām glad they touched on is the special challenge for a company that needs to support multiple salaries, but isnāt big enough yet to actually have significant revenue like a large company. Last week, Daniel and I talked about the balance of loving being independent but also knowing that one day you want to expand to support a small team. Itās not easy.
āApple follows the law and pays all of the taxes we owe wherever we operate.ā Unfortunately reminds me of this, from Trump: āI fight very hard to pay as little tax as possible.ā
ā 2016/08/30 8:57 amDoing a bunch of Bootstrap and Rails work this week, went back to using Dash for quick reference. Helps to get documentation into another app and out of Safari tabs.
ā 2016/08/26 3:12 pmCore Intuition 247 covers so-called lifestyle businesses, extended vacations, and the challenge of making a living as an indie.
ā 2016/08/26 2:33 pmEmail archiving with Evernote
For a long time, Iāve struggled with having important email archived in one place. Iāve switched between several clients over the years, from Eudora and Mailsmith and even Cyberdog, in the very early Mac days, to more recently the fairly reliable Apple Mail. Yet I still occasionally lose old email when switching between machines and not handling the migration properly.
Last year I set out to fix this. While I didnāt do an exhaustive search of archiving options, the main solutions I considered were:
- Switch to Gmail. There are plenty of native clients for Gmail, but I fundamentally donāt like the idea of an ad-supported email service. Iām very happy with Fastmail and want to continue using it.
- Local archiving with EagleFiler. This gets the email archived in a central place outside whatever mail client Iām using, which is great. However, Iād like something that is focused on cloud search first.
- Save to files on Dropbox. All of my notes are stored on Dropbox, so why not put an email archive there too? But Dropbox doesnāt seem well-suited to accessing and searching easily.
- Save to Evernote. Iāve never actively used Evernote for notes. Using Evernote for email would keep the email separate from normal notes on Dropbox, and Evernote already has excellent support for forwarding email into their system. Iād be able to search the archive from my Mac, iPhone, or the web.
Iāve settled into a pretty basic workflow of using Evernote to save any email that looks moderately valuable. This is usually a handful of messages each day, not every email I receive or send. By picking and choosing what gets archived, I can ignore everything else, letting it sit in Mailās archive indefinitely or deleting it.
Hereās an AppleScript I currently trigger in Mail for any selected message I want to archive. Itās set to command-shift-S via FastScripts. If Iām away from my Mac, or I want to preserve HTML and inline attachments, I can save an email by forwarding it to a special Evernote email address. (I also pay for Evernote Premium.)
Now that Iām about a year and thousands of archived messages into this setup, Iām declaring it a success. I plan to continue using Evernote in this way for years to come. Letās just hope theyāre on the right track with their own business.
Finally cancelled the cloud backup products I never used, and switched to Arq + Amazon Cloud Drive. This is how I do a remote backup of my Drobo. One day Iāll have a big enough MacBook drive where I can just have everything local and synced to Dropbox (still have a 2 TB plan there).
ā 2016/08/25 12:26 pmNSDrinking is on for tomorrow, 8pm at Radio Coffee & Beer. Come chat about Mac/iOS development over a coffee or beer (or tacos).
ā 2016/08/24 10:50 amWe published Core Intuition 246 tonight. Daniel and I talk about vacations and work in the summer, macOS Sierra betas, and why Iām redoing my Kickstarter project again.
ā 2016/08/17 10:24 pmBasecamp 3.2 for iOS has a beautiful āwhatās newā page by Jason Zimdars. I love how Basecamp frequently uses hand-drawn art for their product marketing pages and podcast. This one was done in Procreate on the iPad Pro + Pencil.
ā 2016/08/17 2:54 pmSpurs at the Olympics
Iām watching Spain vs. France basketball right now, and later today is Argentina vs. the United States. No question the United States are the favorites for gold, but there are some really good teams, most with great NBA players.
From the double-overtime win by Argentina a few days ago, to Boris Diaw sipping an espresso in his room, Iāve been more engaged in following basketball at the Olympics than usual. And I love that so many Spurs players are everywhere.
Spain has Pau Gasol; Argentina has Manu Ginobili, who helped defeat the United States in 2004; Australia has Patty Mills; and France has Tony Parker. Gives me something to root for throughout the tournament.
Mac App Store developer survey
DevMate surveyed 679 Mac developers to put together a report on who is using the Mac App Store vs. selling direct, what concerns developers have, which tools they use, and more. On why developers leave the Mac App Store:
If youāre thinking giving away 30% of your hard-earned revenue is the deal-breaker, youād be surprised. Revenue share is not the main reason developers flee. The main reason is the long and unclear App Review process, closely followed by revshare and the absence of trial versions.
While sandboxing does show up on the complaint list, itās ranked low as a reason to not use the Mac App Store, even though it was why I pulled my app Clipstart from the Mac App Store 4 years ago. And not much has changed since I wrote about Sketch and other apps leaving the Mac App Store last year.
For anyone who has been following blog posts and conference talks about the Mac App Store, there wonāt be many surprises in this new survey, but I found the details interesting. The survey appears to be a good snapshot of how the Mac community is feeling about selling software.
Dogs barking at 6am, so took the opportunity to wake up early and get a few hours of coding in before the day really started. Finally cracked a couple bugs that needed significant time in the Xcode debugger.
ā 2016/08/16 10:11 amAmazing double-OT win by Argentina over Brazil. These close games ā including USAās 3-point win yesterday ā have me hopeful for some great matchups later in the Olympics.
ā 2016/08/13 3:01 pmWith her
Iām a Hillary Clinton supporter. I was in 2008, I was earlier this year, and absolutely I am now, as Donald Trump seems intent with each daily blunder to prove heās the worst candidate the Republicans have fielded in quite some time.
Having said that, even leaving the politics aside, I think the new podcast āWith herā from the Hillary campaign is fantastic. Itās exactly what a podcast should be: well-produced, yet informal, with just enough of a look behind the scenes to feel personal. You can subscribe in Overcast or iTunes.
Tim Berners-Leeās Solid
Iāve written about IPFS before, but Solid (from Tim Berners-Lee himself, among other MIT folks) is another new proposal for a more distributed web. I wasnāt familiar with it until reading this article at Digital Trends, which first makes the case for independent content vs. the big centralized platforms:
Now a handful of companies own vast swaths of web activity ā Facebook for social networking, Google for searching, eBay for auctions ā and quite literally own the data their users have provided and generated. This gives these companies unprecedented power over us, and gives them such a competitive advantage that itās pretty silly to think youāre going to start up a business thatās going to beat them at their own game.
The article continues with the types of data you might share in a Solid application:
For example, you might keep your personal information in one or several pods: the sort of data about yourself that you put into your Facebook profile; a list of your friends, family, and colleagues; your banking information; maps of where youāve traveled; some health information. That way if someone built a new social networking applicationāperhaps to compete head-on with Facebook, or, more likely, to offer specialized services to people with shared interestsāyou could join by giving it permission to access the appropriate information in your pod.
One of the showcase applications is called Client-Integrated Micro-Blogging Architecture, surely named mostly for its pronounceable acronym. From the CIMBA project site:
CIMBA is a privacy-friendly, decentralized microblogging application that runs in your browser. It is built using the latest HTML5 technologies and Web standards. With CIMBA, people get a microblogging app that behaves like Twitter, built entirely out of parts they can control.
Solid and CIMBA are built on the Linked Data Platform, which in turn is based off of RDF. Iām admittedly biased against RDF, because it often brings with it an immediate sense of over-engineering ā too abstracted, solving too many problems at once. Iām glad to see this activity around a distributed web, and Iāll be following Solid, but I also continue to believe that the simple microformats and APIs from the IndieWebCamp are the best place to start.
AUS/USA basketball game at the Olympics right now shaping up to be a good one. Australia up 5 points at the half. 3-pointers: Patty Mills 4-4, Carmelo 5-7.
ā 2016/08/10 5:56 pmTrumpās ā2nd amendment peopleā comment seems like it could blow up much more than previous off-script blunders. Reading the text of his speech in context, and listening to it, multiple timesā¦ Itās clear what he meant. Terrible.
ā 2016/08/10 9:09 amWeekend on the lake
Lake Livingston.