It’s the day before the WWDC keynote, an event that used to be anchored by Steve Jobs. He’s been gone 14 years and there has yet to be another executive at Apple who could do what he did. Every once in a while we see a glimpse of a leader in tech who stands out, capturing a tiny bit of the vision that Steve had. Some of them, like Elon Musk, will ultimately disappoint us.

I wrote this post a week ago, edited it a bunch, and still wasn’t sure it was right. I was concerned because I tend to receive extra pushback on my AI-related blog posts. Many people who read my blog or use Micro.blog have a natural distrust of big tech companies. They don’t like Meta, Google, and now OpenAI. They see the downsides of AI the same way they see the downsides of massive social media platforms.

My view is a little different. AI could have a democratizing effect, making the world’s knowledge available to more people, as a complement to the web rather than a threat to it. Truthfully, we just don’t know yet.

While I was sitting on the draft, I started reading the book The Optimist by Keach Hagey, about Sam Altman and OpenAI, to see if there was anything in it that would change my mind. It actually reinforced some of what I had been thinking about.

We all change the world in small ways. Some people change the world in bigger ways. Sam Altman is one of those people who makes big things happen.

Jason Snell is skeptical about whatever Sam Altman and Jony Ive are dreaming up. His blog post captures a sentiment I’ve seen from more than a few people:

I’m skeptical about OpenAI in general, because while I think AI is so powerful that aspects of it will legitimately change the world, I also think it has been overhyped more than just about anything I’ve seen in my three decades of writing about technology. Sam Altman strikes me as being a drinker of his own Kool-Aid, but it’s also his job to make everyone in the world think that AI is inevitable and amazing and that his company is the unassailable leader while it’s bleeding cash.

I’ve listened to dozens of interviews with Sam over the last couple of years. I’ve read many of his blog posts and tweets. I don’t know him, I can’t vouch for his character, but I’ve developed some opinions about him:

• Sam is ambitious. The pace of new products at OpenAI, the scope of the data center in Texas, his UBI experiment, and the bizarre Worldcoin side hustle are all a bit insane.
• Sam was ousted by his company’s board and then orchestrated a return within days. No small thing. Steve Jobs was also ousted, taking over a decade to get back to Apple.
• Sam has a unique way of explaining things that I find compelling, although he doesn’t have Steve’s stage presence. No one does.
• Sam had a falling out with most of his co-founders and OpenAI leadership, from Elon Musk to Ilya Sutskever, and to some extent Dario Amodei and Mira Murati. He has rebuilt the leadership team and business structure, reestablishing control.
• Sam is not constrained by what everyone else thinks. This is a requirement for creating something truly new. It also means he sometimes comes off as distant or elitist.

The politics can’t be avoided either, because increasingly everything is political and therefore polarizing. I don’t like seeing Sam share the stage with Trump when announcing Stargate. I don’t like Tim Cook donating money to Trump either. I don’t like how quickly the most powerful people in Silicon Valley brushed aside Trump’s criminal record and rhetoric. It now feels like a lifetime ago when Sam blogged about endorsing Hillary Clinton.

But Jony Ive trusts Sam. They’ve hung out and talked about the future. They’ve shared prototypes with each other. Sam has met Jony’s family. And yet somehow the rest of us on the internet are a better judge of who is trustworthy?

I was a little late to generative AI. When Daniel Jalkut and I would talk about early AI models on Core Intuition, my take was essentially: I’m going to be more productive by ignoring all of this and just writing my own code while everyone is distracted with AI. I’ve come full circle since then. I now believe that AI is the most significant advance since the web.

Look at the chain of thought on models like o3, as they search the web, use tools, and reason about a problem. It is remarkable. AI is not overhyped.

For whatever reason, Sam got a bad rap as soon as he rose in prominence. Some people don’t trust him. Perhaps the OpenAI board poisoned his reputation. Perhaps he really is “not consistently candid”. Perhaps he was the face of AI when there was widespread concern about the technology. We love a villain to center attention on.

I’ve tried to call it like I see it based on my belief that most people are good, trying their best to navigate the world, making mistakes and learning. When OpenAI was accused of ripping off Scarlett Johansson’s voice, I blogged:

When your company becomes the enemy, all that matters to people is what feels true. OpenAI’s Sky voice shipped months ago, not last week. We hear what we want to hear. OpenAI mishandled this, no question, but most likely Her is ingrained in Sam’s head vs. intentionally ripping off Scarlett.

People were upset with me for posting this. Now that we’ve had some distance and new information, it seems that I was mostly right. If anything, I didn’t give Sam enough of the benefit of doubt.

I agree with Jason and others that it’ll take a while to see how this plays out with OpenAI and Jony Ive. I was very critical of another high-profile Jony Ive project, the $10k Apple Watch Edition. On Core Intuition 379 in 2019, I said:

This isn’t the watch for the rest of us. The computer for the rest of us. And I actually wrote a blog post back in 2015 — when the Apple Watch came out — about the Edition. I never posted it and I really regret not posting it. I haven’t re-read it recently. I just pulled up the draft. But I have a feeling when I re-read it, it’ll be like, “Oh yeah, this was exactly right.” I wish I had posted it then as kind of a stake in the ground.

The blog post title was: “Apple Watch Edition is wrong for Apple”. And it just went through these points. Out of touch, for the super rich, $10k. This is not what Apple is about. Apple is about making computers and computer-like devices easier and more accessible to the mainstream, through great design, through innovation and great products, not about the super rich.

Sam is, of course, among the super rich. And while too much money can have a corrupting influence, for Sam it has been distracting too, funding so many ridiculously ambitious projects that I expect he’s spread too thin.

I do think there is a certain aspect to Jony’s late career where he hasn’t been as rooted in what normal users need. Jony is hyper-focused on the little details, sometimes to the detriment of the complete product. Sam is all about the big picture. I would not bet against their partnership.

Finally, there is replacing the smartphone. After the interview with Jony at Stripe’s conference, and in the context of the io announcement, there was an understanding that Jony was almost distancing himself from the iPhone, because we’re all addicted to the screens in our pockets. But if you listen to what Jony said, it was largely about social media, not the device:

The thing I find encouraging about AI is it’s very rare for there to be a discussion about AI and there not to be the appropriate concerns about safety.

What I was far more worried about was for years and years and years there would be discussions about social media — and I was extremely concerned about social media — and there was no discussion whatsoever. And it’s the insidious challenge of a problem that’s not even talked about that is always more concerning.

So yeah, the rate of change is dangerous. I think even if you’re innocent in your intention, if you’re involved in something that has poor consequences you need to own it. That ownership personally has driven a lot of what I’ve been working on, that I can’t talk about at the moment, but look forward to talking about at some point in the future.

The phone isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s the apps. Ad-based businesses that feed on attention. In the past, Sam has blogged similar thoughts:

I believe attention hacking is going to be the sugar epidemic of this generation. I can feel the changes in my own life — I can still wistfully remember when I had an attention span. My friends’ young children don’t even know that’s something they should miss. I am angry and unhappy more often, but I channel it into productive change less often, instead chasing the dual dopamine hits of likes and outrage.

This phrase “dual dopamine hits of likes and outrage” is something I wish I had written. The person who wrote that must be at least partly aligned with my own perspective on social media. They get something fundamental about human interactions, about social media, and about how the design of devices and apps can shape our behavior.

We should be building apps that return time to users and bring out the best in human creativity. If a new type of device helps us have more time away from the worst addictive apps, letting us learn or create in new ways, it could be a great thing. I guess I want to be an optimist too. Let’s see what Jony and Sam can do.

I received some good feedback about the latest episode of Timetable, so I thought I’d re-post the transcript here, for folks who don’t listen to podcasts or who just missed it. In a way, it’s an evolved mission statement, but more personal, reframed for 2025.

You can listen here.

Hi, this is Manton. It’s the beginning of 2025, and the world is still a mess. It’s four years since the January 6 attack on the capital, and misinformation is still rampant, like some twisted virus, corrupting society with half truths. It’s the beginning of 2025, and this is what I see.

I see that people are burned out. I see that people are tired of massive social networks. People are tired of ad-based platforms.

People are tired of being addicted to TikTok and the never-ending algorithmic timeline, but they can’t stop scrolling.

People are tired of the dopamine hit that comes from someone else, somewhere, clicking a like button, but they can’t stop performing.

People are distrustful of big tech. People are distrustful of billionaires. People are distrustful of artificial intelligence. Not because they think human jobs will be replaced, necessarily, but because they perceive a loss of humanity in what we do, a loss of creativity, of what makes our voice actually mean something.

We are ready for something that we control. We are ready for something quieter. We are ready for something true. We are ready to bring back a little bit of the old web as a shield against a web that feels increasingly like an ad engagement machine instead of a publishing platform and community for people.

I think blogging has a role here. I think Micro.one and Micro.blog can have a roll here too, a role in helping control our content, a role in making a quieter space that still feels connected to other platforms.

Now, does everyone feel this way? No, just the people that matter to me, right now. Maybe that’s you.

Thanks for listening. Happy new year. Let’s make it a good one.

The controversy with WordPress continues. In fact, it’s escalating as WP Engine has filed a lawsuit against Automattic, and even some employees inside Automattic are frustrated with Matt Mullenweg’s leadership. Matt blogged about offering Automattic employees a chance to leave if they disagreed with his actions against WP Engine:

So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher.

This is indeed very generous. It’s not often you get a chance to leave a job and walk away with six months of salary. For many people that might be a down payment on a new house, or enough money to pay off debt, or time to travel before figuring out what to do next.

Ultimately 8% of employees took the offer. For the rest, I expect what Jeffrey Zeldman blogged about will resonate:

…when I chose to move in-house, I knew there was only one house that would suit me. In nearly six years at Automattic, I’ve been able to do work that mattered to me and helped others, and I know that the best is yet to come.

A few years ago, when there was drama at 37signals over the policy to no longer discuss politics at work, the founders offered a similar incentive to leave the company. Jason Fried originally announced the decision about politics in a blog post this way:

Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well.

After the issues spiraled inside the company, David Heinemeier Hansson blogged about the severance offer to employees:

Yesterday, we offered everyone at Basecamp an option of a severance package worth up to six months salary for those who’ve been with the company over three years, and three months salary for those at the company less than that. No hard feelings, no questions asked. For those who cannot see a future at Basecamp under this new direction, we’ll help them in every which way we can to land somewhere else.

At the time, some folks thought this was the end of Basecamp / 37signals. More people would surely resign, the founders' reputation wouldn’t recover, and they’d have trouble hiring. Three years later, it’s clear that hasn’t happened. The company is larger than it was before, and the founders have said in hindsight it was one of the best decisions they’ve made.

Nevertheless, for many people the event has left a bad taste in their mouth. I still hear from Micro.blog customers who don’t like when I link to Jason Fried’s blog, or when I mention that we use Basecamp internally. As Jane Austen fans will know: “My good opinion once lost is lost forever.” This is understandable. I feel the same way about some companies.

Why do I bring all this old 37signals news up? I think there are parallels with Matt Mullenweg today. For many people in the WordPress community, they won’t quickly forget how he blew everything up, wrecking what seemed to be a friendly competitive spirit inside the WordPress ecosystem, with bloggers, developers, volunteers, and hosting companies all working toward furthering WordPress’s mission to democratize publishing.

How it plays out from here may largely hinge on whether Automattic or WP Engine is successful in the lawsuit. Automattic has brought on a big-time lawyer: Neal Katyal, who was Acting Solicitor General during the Obama administration, and who admittedly I mostly know from his guest appearances on MSNBC. In a post from Automattic, Neal is quoted:

I stayed up last night reading WP Engine’s Complaint, trying to find any merit anywhere to it. The whole thing is meritless, and we look forward to the federal court’s consideration of their lawsuit.

I think trademark law may be on Matt’s side. The private texts from Matt to WP Engine look quite damning, though. I also wonder how the case will be influenced by Automattic letting most companies freely use the WordPress mark with few restrictions for years.

If Automattic wins, or they can settle the lawsuit, the community will recover. Calls for Matt to resign are unwarranted. WordPress exists at its current level of success in large part because of him. His vision has also provided a good home for Tumblr and Day One. I’m not going to toss all that aside because he picked a fight with a private equity firm that charges a lot for hosting.

As I discussed with Daniel on Core Intuition last week, one good thing to come out of this is that it clarifies how Automattic, the WordPress Foundation, and the wordpress.org website all fit together. Perhaps in the future the WordPress Foundation will have more direct control over all the non-profit pieces of the ecosystem.

Get out the popcorn as we watch this drama unfold! But also let’s remember there are real people here, trying to do what they think is right. Matt has been blogging more than ever. He’s been sitting for interviews. While I’m sure the lawyers discourage it, I’d like to see the same human face on the WP Engine side. I don’t think we’ve had that since Jason Cohen handed over his company to new owners.

On the latest episode of Upgrade, Jason Snell and Myke Hurley covered an important part of the Apple Intelligence beta that I’d like to highlight. Leading up to WWDC, Daniel and I talked on Core Intuition about how great it was going to be to have a small on-device LLM available for developers to use. Why pay to send requests from your app out to OpenAI or Anthropic (or even run your own servers with Llama) when you can just use Apple’s model directly?

But that hasn’t happened. I’ve transcribed the relevant segment from Upgrade discussing this, included below. There’s more before and after that is good too.

Jason: The fundamental purpose of a developer beta is supposed to be for developers to use new features in order to plan their release for when that version comes out. That’s what a developer beta is for. That’s why it’s called a developer beta. And the problem with it is, developers can’t do much with Apple Intelligence. The big thing they can do is the Intents stuff, which isn’t in there.

Jason: It struck me… So you’re talking about Apple Mail and summarization. What Apple hasn’t done is make — maybe this is why it’s not going to be available in the EU — what they haven’t done is make an API so if you’re the developer of…

Myke: Yep.

Jason: …let’s say Mimestream…

Myke: Slack.

Jason: …or anybody. That there’s not like, I’m going to hand a message to Apple’s LLM and ask for a summary. I’m going to go to SummaryKit, or whatever, hand them this information, get a summary back and put it in my UI. No, it’s just in Mail. And so I think that’s one of the frustrations that I’ve got with the way Apple is sort of saying “it’s for developers” and all that, because a lot of these features… And I understand why. I realize it’s early days yet. But Apple Intelligence, a lot of these features are only going to be useful if you’re using the stock Apple apps. And I don’t love it.

Jason: And I’m sure that in the fullness of time there will be APIs for third-party developers to use that will give them access to the same kind of model and summation and all of that that Apple uses, but I don’t believe any of that is available right now.

I’m very puzzled by this omission too because it seems like the most basic low-hanging fruit to open up for developers. There’s an LLM on the phone. Let developers use it. It could be as simple as a single API call to pass the prompt and text to process. This must be there already as a private API that Mail and Messages are using.

Perhaps Apple is worried about how they are scaling the private cloud compute and don’t want developers to use anything that might touch it. Perhaps Apple Intelligence is limited to so few devices that it would create confusing minimum hardware requirements for third-party apps. Perhaps Apple never wants to give developers direct LLM access because Apple considers Apple Intelligence a user feature, leaning on third-party data without developers having any control over AI features in their own apps.

Who knows. But it means developers will need to stick with OpenAI and similar APIs for at least another year or longer. Apple has a unique architecture for AI. I like the potential, even if their strategy seems mostly about their own users. If there will be innovation with AI on iPhones, though, only Apple can do it. Meanwhile the rest of the tech world continues full-speed ahead with a more developer-focused approach to AI, with many platforms to build on.

Many of the hot takes about fair use for AI training are either “AI is stealing content” or “everything on the web is free”, but the discussions in between those extremes are more interesting. Let’s explore it with a thought experiment. This blog post isn’t a declaration that I’ve figured it all out. It’s just to get us thinking.

First, review how blogging and fair use has worked since the beginning of the web. Every day I read a bunch of news articles and blog posts. If I find something I want to write about, I’ll often link to it on my blog and quote a few sentences from it, adding my own comment. Everyone agrees this is a natural part of the web and a good way for things to work.

An example outside the web is Cliff Notes. Humans can read the novel 1984 and then write a summary book of it, with quotes from the original. This is fine. It also indirectly benefits the original publisher as Cliff Notes brings more attention to the novel, and some people pick up their own copy.

Now, imagine that C-3PO is real. C-3PO is fluent in six million forms of communication, and he has emotions and personality quirks, but otherwise he learns like the rest of us: through experience.

C-3PO could sit down with thousands of books and web sites and read through them. If we asked C-3PO questions about what he had read, and then used some of that in our own writing, that seems like fair use of that content. Humans can read and then use that knowledge to create future creative works, and so can C-3PO. If C-3PO read every day for years, 24 hours a day, gathering knowledge, that would be fine too.

Is that different than training an LLM? Yes, in at least two important ways:

• Speed. It would take a human or C-3PO a long time to read even a fraction of all the world’s information.
• Scale. Training a single robot is different than training thousands of AI instances all at once, so that when deployed every copy already has all knowledge.

Copyright law says nothing about the speed of consumption. It assumes that humans can only read and create so much, because the technology for AI and even computers was science fiction when the laws were written. Robots and AI cannot only quickly consume information, they can retain all of it, making it more likely to infringe on a substantial part of an original work.

Maybe copyright law only applies to humans anyway? I don’t know. When our C-3PO was reading books in the above example, I doubt anyone was shouting: “That’s illegal! Robots aren’t allowed to read!”

The reality is that something has fundamentally shifted with the breakthroughs in generative AI and possibly in the near future with Artificial General Intelligence. Our current laws are not good enough. There are gray areas because the laws were not designed for non-humans. But restricting basic tasks like reading or vision to only humans is nonsensical, especially if robots inch closer to actual sentience. (To be clear, we are not close to that, but for the first time I can imagine that it will be possible.)

John Siracusa explored some of this in a blog post earlier this year. On needing new laws:

Every new technology has required new laws to ensure that it becomes and remains a net good for society. It’s rare that we can successfully adapt existing laws to fully manage a new technology, especially one that has the power to radically alter the shape of an existing market like generative AI does.

Back to those two differences in LLM training: speed and scale.

If speed of training is the problem — that is, being able to effectively soak up all the world’s information in weeks or months — where do we draw the line? If it’s okay for an AI assistant to slowly read like C-3PO, but not okay to quickly read like with thousands of bots in parallel, how do we even define what slow and quick are?

If scale is the problem — that is, being able to train a model on content and then apply that training to thousands or millions of exact replicas — what if scale is taken away? Is it okay to create a dumb LLM that knows very little, perhaps having only been trained on licensed content, and then create a personal assistant that can go out to the web and continue learning, where that training is not contributed back to any other models?

In other words, can my personal C-3PO (or, let’s say, my personal ChatGPT assistant) crawl the web on my behalf, so that it can get better at helping me solve problems? I think some limited on-demand crawling is fine, in the same way that opening a web page in Safari using reader mode without ads is fine. As Daniel Jalkut mentioned in our discussion of Perplexity on Core Intuition, HTTP uses the term user-agent for a reason. Software can interact with the web on behalf of users.

That is what is so incredible about the open web. While most content is under copyright by default, and some is licensed with Creative Commons or in the public domain, everything not behind a paywall is at least accessible. We can build tools that leverage that openness, like web browsers, search engines, and the Internet Archive. Along the way, we should be good web citizens, which means:

• Respecting robots.txt.
• Not hitting servers too hard when crawling.
• Identifying what our software is so that it can be blocked or handled in a special way by servers.

This can’t be stressed enough. AI companies should respect the conventions that have made the open web a special place. Respect and empower creators. And for creators, acknowledge that the world has changed. Resist burning everything down lest open web principles are caught in the fire.

Some web publishers are saying that generative AI is a threat to the open web. That we must lock down content so it can’t be used in LLM training. But locking content is also a risk to the open web, limiting legitimate crawling and useful tools that use open web data. Common Crawl, which some AI companies have used to bootstrap training, is an archive of web data going back to 2008, often used for research. If we make that dataset worse because of fear of LLMs misusing it, we also hurt new applications that have nothing to do with AI.

Finally, consider Google. If LLMs crawling the web is theft, why is Google crawling the web not theft? Google has historically been part of a healthy web because they link back to sites they index, driving new traffic from search. However, as Nilay Patel has been arguing with Google Zero, this traffic has been going away. Even without AI, Google has been attempting to answer more queries directly without linking to sources.

Google search and ChatGPT work differently, but they are based on the same access to web pages, so the solutions with crediting sources are intertwined. Neither should take more from the web than they give back.

This is at the root of why many creators are pushing back against AI. Using too much of an original work and not crediting it is plagiarism. If the largest LLMs are inherently plagiarism machines, it could help to refocus on smaller, personal LLMs that only gain knowledge at the user’s direction.

There are also LLM use cases unrelated to derivative works, such as using AI to transcribe audio or describe what’s in a photo. Training an LLM on sound and language so that it can transcribe audio has effectively no impact to the original creators of that content. How can it be theft if there are no victims?

I don’t have answers to these questions. But I love building software for the web. I love working on Micro.blog and making it easier for humans to blog. Generative AI is a tool I’ll use when it makes sense, and we should continue discussing how it should be trained and deployed, while preserving the openness that makes the web great.

I listened to the latest Core Intuition again to see if my initial take on Apple Vision Pro was way off or unfair. I think it holds up. Here’s a transcript of the conversation with Daniel, lightly edited.

Daniel: Hello, this is Daniel Jalkut.

Manton: And this is Manton Reece.

Daniel: And this is Core Intuition. “Something wrong about this product.” This week’s show is sponsored by RevenueCat.

Daniel: All right, Manton, as so many people are this week, you are traveling, of course, because it’s the most important week of the year for Apple ecosystem developers. So you are in…

Manton: Colorado. Haha, not California. I think I mentioned this a couple weeks ago that I had thought about going to Cupertino and planned a road trip around California again. And it kind of changed to Colorado.

Manton: So totally missed out on all the in-person stuff at WWDC. I did watch the keynote and I did watch some sessions. It was a big WWDC, really big. I’m still wrapping my head around everything and what it means.

Daniel: Yes, me too. A lot of podcasts, a lot of people commentating on WWDC start from the beginning of the keynote and progress through. I really enjoyed the ATP recap along those lines. I don’t think we have time for that.

Manton: No way.

Daniel: I think we jump right to the headset. Because the headset is… That’s the part that I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around. That’s the only thing, quite frankly, that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around. Everything else more or less about WWDC and the announcements made there makes perfect sense.

Manton: Yep. Lots of good announcements, lots of good OS updates.

Manton: Before we get into the headset, I think a lot of people have been lost in the reality distortion and have forgotten to follow up on the fact — I don’t know if ATP mentioned this because I haven’t listened yet, I haven’t listened to a couple of podcasts — but have forgotten to follow up on: did Apple do anything with AI?

Manton: I think the answer is no. Although they did mention transformer-based language models and machine learning, but they skirted around it. I don’t think they did anything significant with AI.

Daniel: Yeah.

Manton: And I don’t think they did anything significant with Siri. They dropped the “hey” from “hey Siri”, but I don’t think that counts. So I just want to point that out because we are so distracted with the headset, rightly so. I don’t want to give Apple a complete pass on totally missing the big story of this year.

Daniel: Agreed. And I was frankly a little surprised by that. I thought that they would… And as you know, I wrote an article about it a couple of weeks ago. I knew that my specific take on it, that they would announce something called Apple Intelligence and that would be their way of kind of owning the initials AI without having to join the pack, so to speak. I didn’t think that was necessarily going to happen. I would have been thrilled if it did.

Daniel: But I thought the minimum was going to be some, especially at a developers conference, something like, we’ve made a arrangement with Microsoft so you can run Copilot at native performance in Xcode. Something like that.

Daniel: It didn’t have to be Apple has reinvented AI. It just had to be: we we can see the elephant in this room.

Manton: No. They had a lot of good updates to Xcode. I mean, I watched sessions. I was really lucky, I was able to hang out with some of the other Colorado iOS developers up in Boulder yesterday. Watched some sessions with those guys.

Manton: And yeah, good updates to Xcode. No problems. But yeah, totally ignored anything with code generation as far as I can tell.

Daniel: Yeah. And real quickly, I’ll just say, I also said something about this. I said, oh, well, you know, sounds like they didn’t say anything about AI.

Daniel: And a few people chimed in, of course, with: well, of course they did. Like you said, the whatever mechanism transformer, blah, blah, blah.

Daniel: That’s not what we mean right now when we say AI. Right now, when anybody in this world we live in, who is not like an AI researcher says AI, they mean large language models and the way that they provide chat or completion based services to users.

Manton: Yeah. Assistant-like stuff and the way Apple is using, I think the transformer language model they were talking about, of course that is part of like chat GPT and whatnot. But I think they were talking about better auto-complete and behind the scenes, seamless stuff. Great. Fantastic.

Manton: But that is just not the same thing as assistants that help you and that feel intelligent, even if they aren’t.

Daniel: Right.

Manton: All right, headset. Vision Pro.

Manton: I was simultaneously blown away by this, and also I still really question the strategy. But from everything I can tell — I was listening to Dithering and Ben and John were just like, this exceeds our expectations of how technically good it is.

Manton: And so I’m trying to take a step back and kind of separate, did they nail this versus should they have bothered to build this?

Daniel: I’ve been joking for a while now, and I mean, the joke has totally come to a head with this idea that the reality distortion field is actually the product now.

Daniel: It’s hard to know, and I agreed with you, I was watching the keynote and everything is so stylized because obviously they can’t show you, or maybe they could, they definitely could show you what it looked like just from the point of view of the wearer. I’m sure there’s like a screen capture recording released in their debug builds right now.

Daniel: But obviously the way they presented it was kind of like giving you an idea by showing you video of a person who’s allegedly looking at the stuff.

Daniel: I actually had the thought during the keynote, wouldn’t it be cool if the way they made those videos was one person wearing a headset looking at a room that happened to have another person wearing the headset in it?

Manton: Welcome to the future, everybody’s wearing headsets, even when they’re in the same room with real people.

Daniel: Well, and that gets at the real… To be honest, when I say my version of wrapping my head around things has a lot to do with the social implications of what such a product means.

Daniel: I had the same gut reaction with Google Glass 10 years ago. You know, products that draw the user inward do not make me feel comfortable about them as social interactive products. You know what I mean?

Manton: Mmm hmm.

Daniel: And I mean, I guess to be honest, I wear my AirPods all the time everywhere. And I know there are people out there still who believe it is rude to be in public and to have headphones on, which I don’t agree with that assessment.

Daniel: And so that might be like kind of an instructive example of people have different takes. But my take is if you’re going to block your eyes out to the world, do not talk to me. Do not talk to me.

Manton: Haha. Yeah.

Daniel: And even with my AirPods, I have social standards, I take my AirPods out when I’m going to like a retail counter.

Manton: For sure. Yeah.

Daniel: And I find it very rude if people don’t do that. I forgive it if they at least turn off the volume and the person doesn’t know that, you know, I kind of forgive it. But the case of something literally covering your face, I don’t want anybody interacting with me like that.

Manton: No…

Daniel: And I definitely do not want anybody interacting with their kids during like pivotal moments of their childhood.

Manton: Yeah. And people will push back maybe on that and say like, well, at the birthday party, we all have our phones out anyway, taking video. It’s just not the same thing. It is not the same thing.

Manton: And I have missed things because I’m looking at my stupid screen. It’s just not the same as covering your face.

Daniel: I think it’s so instinctive to us that covering your face is a way of, I mean, like we do it as humans. We do it when we’re scared of something or we don’t want to engage with something.

Daniel: And I think there’s a lot of instinctive, like animal response to this idea that somebody’s face is covered. And the eyes showing through is very impressive, but very not enough for me.

Manton: Yeah. It was really impressive in the keynote, but I do wonder in real life if it’s just creepy.

Manton: And I wanna acknowledge that we’re judging a product that we haven’t seen. Like some people have actually tried it, friends of ours have tried it, and their opinion goes a long way. We’re just reacting based on what we’ve seen in the keynote and heard people talk and blog about.

Manton: But even putting that aside, I kind of went into the keynote thinking, if it’s technically amazing, would I still want to use it? And would I still develop for it?

Manton: And it turns out like it’s even better than I thought. Even my wildest like expectations of Apple just completely getting this right for what they’re trying to do, it’s even better than that. Super impressive.

Manton: And yet there’s something wrong about this product. And we’ve talked about like AR versus VR, mixed reality, etc. And I even more strongly feel now that I’ve seen it that the number of years I have in my head is 20 years.

Manton: It’s gonna take 20 years for this product to be more seamless with actual glasses-looking things that you can actually see through and people can see your real eyes. More like real AR, at least 20 years, if it ever happens.

Manton: And so it’s certainly a bet on the future, but it’s so far away. It’s so far from being a product that I could use in public, that I could use anywhere that there are people.

Daniel: Yeah.

Manton: I think that is an issue for me.

Manton: I was thinking about this last night, so I’m in Colorado. I’m going to campsites with this van that I rented and just seeing nature and whatnot. And last night I made dinner. I sat at my like picnic table at my campsite and I pulled out my laptop, popped open a can of wine and I caught up on some work.

Daniel: Haha.

Manton: I’m chilling out, kind of in nature, but there are other people around. And I thought, I’m working on my Mac. Would I put a headset on here? No, I wouldn’t. It would be so weird.

Daniel: Even in a fairly remote like.

Manton: Yeah. Because people might walk by, drive by, it would just be weird.

Daniel: You would be so self-conscious.

Manton: Yeah, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. It wouldn’t matter how much better the virtual screen is than my 16-inch, old-fashioned screen.

Manton: And I think there are areas like that. I work in coffee shops every day. I was working at a coffee shop here outside Denver this morning for a couple hours. I just can’t imagine this product ever being used in that environment.

Manton: Like I said, in 20 years, maybe it’s more like AR and more like real glasses, but this device is so powerful. It’s more powerful than my own Mac. To get it to the point that it can be seamless around people, man, it just seems so far off. I don’t know.

Daniel: I think I’m not quite as pessimistic about the timeline that this technology stands a chance.

Daniel: It’s funny because if you compare it to some Apple products, the chances are not great that it advances very quickly. For instance, the iPad was released 13 years ago. So if it advances at the rate, and just to be clear, the iPad today is an amazing device, so much more advanced than the original, but on the whole, it hasn’t changed that much.

Daniel: The usage is the same, basically. And I think a lot of people expected a lot more development on that front.

Daniel: On the other hand, something like the iPod is about 20 years old and is now essentially something that you wear in your ear. And that is the kind, so just to say, yeah, 20 years, maybe you’re right in that respect. But I could see it happening a lot faster because the unique technological angle here is going to fund this thing.

Daniel: I think even with a very modest amount of buyers, even as a loss product, even if Apple were losing money, I think staying ahead of the pack on this type of product is going to pay dividends for Apple. And the saving grace for me is that I do think there is a point at which it’s kind of the difference between the AirPods being a helmet you wear over your head or the little device you pop in your ear.

Daniel: I still feel a little self-conscious sometimes about my AirPods, but if it were a helmet that I had to wear, you know? Like, this is the helmet, and we’re going to see, you know, assuming everything goes the way I expect, we’re going to see, I think, a lot sooner than 20 years, the equivalent of the AirPod of this.

Manton: Yeah, I dunno. Okay, but let’s think about that, though. The technological leap from wired headphones to the AirPods, I mean, it is significant. There’s, you know, cool chips in the AirPods that allow it to do what it does, but it’s not the kind of leap we’re talking about from a $3500 headset that has 12 cameras to something that looks more like glasses that you could wear in public, even if they’re awkward, bulky glasses.

Manton: I’m really having trouble with that leap. I don’t see how you can do it. And think about how far the iPhone has come from gen one, couldn’t take video, to today. The iPhone’s great, it has come a long way, but even that is not the leap that we’re talking about, or I’m talking about.

Manton: That is a very natural year-by-year evolution, and that’s their core product, where they sell hundreds of millions of these things. They’re not going to sell very many of these. They’re not going to update it every year. I’d be surprised if they update the headset more often than every three years. So we’re talking five or six generations. I don’t know.

Manton: Man, I hate to be so negative. I just don’t think this is a product that Apple needed to build, or that I personally am gonna be into. I don’t know. It’s cool, though. It’s really cool.

Daniel: It is, well, and like you, me hearing the dithering, John Gruber and Ben Thompson describing it as not being able to distinguish the edge of the quote-unquote screen. That kind of was a wake-up call for me.

Daniel: There is no product, I think, I think even all the other VR headsets, I don’t think there is a product in the world. The combination of like, whatever Apple did to make the thing sit so close to your eye, and the fact that it’s such a high resolution, there’s no product in the world where you can kind of fool your mind into thinking you’re looking at reality.

Daniel: And that’s why the whole reality kit, whatever, sort of all makes sense now.

Manton: And really, every time they say, “only Apple could combine blah, blah, blah”, I always kind of roll my eyes a little bit. It’s totally accurate in this case. There is no company that could have built this.

Daniel: Nobody else has the money to do the research and the social influence to make it, you know, even vaguely. Like some random little like company headed by a billionaire could have come up with something like this, and it wouldn’t have gotten traction because it wouldn’t have captured the public’s imagination.

Manton: Right, and only Apple, they have all the right skills to pull this off. And they don’t have a great track record of hobby products improving. I would say none of their hobby products have really improved very quickly, which makes sense. Their business is built around the iPhone and the Mac. Apple TV is more or less the same as it was, you know, a dozen years ago.

Manton: And that’s fine, but they obviously care a lot about this product and they could change that reputation. They could have this fringe side product that they pump millions and millions, billions of dollars into, and they’re patient.

Manton: Again, they wait 20 years and then you have the Vision Pro and you also have the Vision Air or the Vision Lite or whatever you want to call it, a more mainstream device that is not as bulky, not as powerful, something that more like normal people maybe would be into. That could totally work. It feels really far off. I’m gonna be old or dead by the time this happens.

Daniel: I think there’s two things that are remarkable about this product. One that struck me right away was how much of an amalgamation of other Apple technologies it is in one unit. And you think about all the things they’ve been working on.

Daniel: The little digital crowd is just like the Apple Watch. The cameras actually remind me of whatever research they may have been doing into self-driving cars. You have super high resolution screens. The audio playback in the device is also using that kind of room reading, LIDAR type stuff.

Daniel: That’s one aspect of how “only Apple” could do this because they had all these other products in the works that sort of contributed to this device. But I also think this device is, regardless of its commercial success, it is a technological test bed that can easily spin off other devices that benefit from the advances they make with this.

Manton: Yep. And I can definitely buy the argument that someone had to build this. That’s not true, but there’s value in building this purely for the research and technology and just to see what’s possible. Because if no company pushes the edge and tries new things, we don’t get anywhere. There is a role for pushing, just seeing what we can do, whether it’s a compelling product or not.

Manton: So yeah, I totally respect that. And I think the people that worked on this should be very proud of what they’ve built. It really does look incredible. It’s just a question of, strategically, is this something that Apple should do? Is it good for humanity? And then secondarily, for developers, is this something that should be part of our strategy or not?

Daniel: Right.

Manton: If this is the — again, 20 years in the future — this is the replacement for the Mac, is this something that we should be fiddling with and paying attention to and watching all the WWDC sessions and playing with the simulator. I’m curious what you feel as a mostly Mac developer, how much are you going to pay attention to this?

Daniel: Yeah. I mean, it’s so much to take in because as you saw during the keynote, there’s like elements of how it, how it stands to just like integrate with your Mac and show you your Mac desktop apps on like virtual monitors within the device.

Daniel: And then there’s the other angle of native apps for this thing, maybe subsuming the uses of traditional Mac software, iOS software, all the above. So I’m going to keep an eye on it. I do, my instinct is to mostly ignore everything, especially since there’s no SDK yet. And I find it kind of awkward to even consider jumping into WWDC sessions about this when there’s no hands-on opportunity to do anything, even with a simulator. So I’m going to keep a cautious eye on it.

Daniel: I think there is something to what, I mean, you know me, like both of us have been pretty dismissive of AR VR the past several years. And I think the way we’re talking about this still reflects our skepticism about it, but it brings it into the real world in a way that I don’t think is going away.

Daniel: Having a point your iPhone at a table AR experience never felt compelling beyond the slightest novelty. But let’s just assume that this thing didn’t cost $3,500 and it costs $350, which might be the case in five years, 10 years.

Manton: 20. I’m sticking to 20 years.

Daniel: Haha. Well, the situation will be different when there’s a massive market of people who have these things.

Daniel: And I just want to say one more like slightly optimistic thing. I think my reticence and spooked-outness about this device is somewhat to blame on Apple’s presentation of it during the keynote. The way that they tried to frame it as something in particular that you would wear, like I mentioned, like when you’re engaged with your kids during special moments, that’s the opposite of what I think this type of device should be used for.

Daniel: And if I focus on the things that it’s good at… I won’t fault any parent for wearing a welding helmet while they’re building, you know, a rocking horse for their kid. That’s a special moment in a family’s history as well.

Daniel: But let’s not try to conflate the wearing the welding helmet with spending special time with your kids. Likewise, I think there are a lot of parallels actually with this to a device like a television, because televisions are famously attention absorbing. You can’t really talk to somebody who’s watching a television. And frankly, in my opinion, having a television on in any kind of social environment, unless you’re like watching a sports game with somebody is not conducive to sports or to social interactions.

Daniel: But I think if I try to look at this more generously, as like, it’s another kind of TV, or it’s another kind of welding helmet. You use it on your own time for your own purposes to either entertain yourself or achieve specific productivity goals. Then a lot of my negativity about it goes away. It’s just the idea of it being integrated as an everyday piece.

Daniel: It’s the same idea as if I envisioned everybody walking around with a television hanging off their forehead. No, we, nobody really wants to live in that world. So don’t highlight that as the use case for this device.

Manton: Yeah, I agree with you. I think that was a bit of a miss. Overall, I think the keynote will go down as the best in years, but I feel like some of those parts of the, you know, advertisement video that we watched, basically, we’ll remember them a little bit like the watch Apple Watch introduction. There was a lot of sort of gimmicky features. You know, texting your friend in class or sending pictures.

Daniel: Sending your heartbeat to somebody.

Manton: Exactly. I think some of these things will go down in that light. I love the Apple watch. I’m wearing mine now, I wear it all the time. But I think they were a little bit confused about their message when they introduced the watch and they sorted it out.

Manton: And I think this is going to be the same way. I think we’ll look back on some of those and be like, no, we’re not putting this headset on for a birthday party. That’s not going to be right.

Manton: And really, that’s why I kind of think about just strategically. I mean, we already have this problem that we didn’t have 15 years ago, which is that the family is sitting around TV, watching a movie or something and all the kids are on TikTok. This is already an issue.

Daniel: Yeah.

Manton: I’m not interested in it getting worse by actually having people close their whole face off from the world. So I think there are really legitimate uses for this, but in my life, they are very small.

Daniel: Yeah.

Manton: I like to work out of the house, I like to go places. I mean, I’m kind of an introvert. I don’t meet a lot of people and hang out with people in person. But when I do, when I’m around other people, it feels good to be around humans. We need that.

Manton: And just strategically, I guess I’m really pessimistic about it. I think maybe it’s okay for us to have those two thoughts in our head of just technically and pushing the envelope, this is a huge breakthrough. On the other hand, as a human and as a developer, I’m fine. Zig when they zag. If everybody else is obsessed with this and WWDC over the summer, I’m fine focusing on other things and just continuing working on Micro.blog and working on these other aspects of social networking.

Daniel: Yeah, I agree. In a sense, I am kind of relieved that I don’t feel like I’m going to have my work cut out for me in terms of new Apple technology over the summer. None of this is like, oh, drop everything.

Daniel: The one product that I think might have a little bit of a compelling case is like Black Ink with the idea of maybe like solving a puzzle on a virtual sheet or something. Even that’s a little bit of a stretch, but you know, maybe against a flat desk or something. But I don’t know. Obviously I have other Black Inks to ship before I get to that.

Manton: Yeah. I want to ask you, because I don’t know if you saw Apple News+, I think has some crossword thing.

Daniel: Oh yeah. Yeah, I did see that.

Manton: We’ll probably have a whole show next week about everything non-headset related. There’s really a lot at WWDC and we’ll have to tackle that next week. Because the headset is just the obsession right now.

Daniel: Yep, agreed. All right. Well, I hope you continue to have a great trip. I’m glad that this time around we’re recording, you’re in your van again. If folks remember the last time Manton recorded in his van, it was like a rainstorm.

Manton: Yeah. And unfortunately… So I bought a new mic. That’s a whole ‘nother story about going to three different Best Buys, trying to find something that I could take with me. I did a test recording and there’s a lot of background noise still. So apologies, everybody. Hopefully it turns out okay.

Manton: But thanks everyone for listening this week. Enjoy WWDC, and we’ll see you in the metaverse. I dunno.

Daniel: See you in my glasses.

I’m as tired of debating the App Store as anyone. I’ve been making essentially the same arguments for 10 years, on this blog and on the podcast. But the news from South Korea adds a new wrinkle that is worth highlighting.

The spirit of any law forcing Apple to allow external payments for apps is clearly twofold: give developers more control over interacting with customers, and let developers avoid paying the 15% or 30% on transactions by handling payments outside the store. Apple and Google are trying to follow the letter of the law while missing the larger point completely:

Apple said it plans to provide an alternative payment system at a reduced service charge compared with the current 30 percent charge, as the tech giant turned in its compliance plans to the Korea Communications Commission (KCC).

Ignore for the moment whether this response is legal or fair. Let’s think through how this would work in practice. Apple is developing APIs so that when using an external payment, Apple is still notified about the external transaction so they can collect their “reduced” service charge.

But iOS developers are used to paying Apple $99/year, and then getting a check from Apple once a month with 70% of the sales through the App Store. The 30% (or 15%) is taken out automatically, just like 3% is taken out for Stripe transactions. Developers don’t have to think about it.

In this new world Apple imagines, developers will be collecting all of the sales into their own bank account, and then paying Apple the 11% or whatever Apple ends up demanding. There is a huge psychological difference between these approaches, just as there’s a difference between getting taxes taken out of your paycheck automatically and having to write a big check to the government.

If this goes through, it will only underscore how ridiculous the App Store tax is. Why do developers have to pay Apple a platform fee when we’ve never had to do that for macOS? What is the point of the $99/year program?

Apple wants iOS, the App Store, and their App Review team to be inseparable as a single platform. That’s not a technical reality. If they keep pushing this approach, they’ll only run up against more regulation and more distrust from the developer community.

A few weeks ago, something in a discussion prompted me to look up the site 43 Things, which I used in 2005 to keep track of big things I wanted to do. The site is long gone, but a lot of it is preserved in the Internet Archive. I took a screenshot of the 10 things I had on my list back then:

The site was peak Web 2.0. Part personal to-do list, part community, part API. Something about the design was fun to use.

Now that it has been 15+ years, I thought I’d revisit my list and see how I’m doing now, with some context from 2005:

1. Finish my degree — I spent a year at UT Austin, but I was more interesting in working at tech companies than attending school. Later I went back to take classes at night. I always thought I’d eventually get my college degree. Seems unlikely at this point.
2. Animate a short film — Might be something I’ll get back to one day. A couple years ago I dug up some drawings and posted them to my blog.
3. Run a half marathon — Still haven’t done this. I’ve run a couple 5Ks.
4. Watch a space shuttle launch — Sadly the space shuttle is gone. There are more rockets than ever, though, so this seems doable.
5. Write a book — I consider this done.
6. Drive across the USA — I’ve driven from Texas to the west coast and to the east coast. Never all the way across. Can’t see this one happening unless I actually live on one of the coasts.
7. Learn Ruby — Done.
8. Work on a political campaign — I’ve volunteered for a few campaigns to call voters and knock on doors. Seems good enough.
9. Read 50 books in 2005 — I’m sure I didn’t ready that many books in 2005, but I could still do this for another year. Last year I read 33 books and this year my goal is 40.
10. Live to see Halley’s Comet return in 2061 — The most difficult thing on this list. I would be 86.

Daniel and I also discussed this list on Core Intuition 402 from 2020.

On the latest Core Intuition, Daniel and I talk about the just-released FastScripts 3, his app for quickly running scripts. He mentioned that even though AppleScript hasn’t had any attention in years, it’s still useful as a complement to Shortcuts and other workflows. Daniel said:

It’s like learning a little bit of French when you go to France. You don’t have to do it, but you’re going to have such an easier time if you do. And in my opinion, learning — even now, even in its state of relative neglect — learning a little bit of AppleScript on the Mac is like learning a little bit of French in France. You’re going to get a lot farther with everything you want to do.

Micro.blog doesn’t have AppleScript support, but it does have a URL scheme for starting a new blog post. For example, I wrote the AppleScript below to play around with FastScripts 3. You could trigger it with a keyboard shortcut from FastScripts to start a new blog post using a link for an open Safari tab.

-- we'll need access to AppKit for NSString's URL encoding
use framework "Foundation"
use scripting additions

-- global variables that we'll set later
set the_url to ""
set the_title to ""

-- helper function to URL-encode the text we'll pass to Micro.blog
on urlEncode(input)
	tell current application's NSString to set raw_url to stringWithString_(input)
	set the_encoded_url to raw_url's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:4 -- 4 is NSUTF8StringEncoding
	return the_encoded_url as Unicode text
end urlEncode

-- ask Safari for the current tab's URL and page title
tell application "Safari"
	set the_url to URL of current tab of window 1
	set the_title to name of current tab of window 1
end tell

-- make a Markdown string like [title](url)
set s to "[" & the_title & "](" & the_url & ")"
set the_mb_url to "microblog://post?text=" & urlEncode(s)

-- start a new post with Micro.blog for Mac
open location the_mb_url

My AppleScript knowledge is very rusty, and it took more than a few web searches to cobble this together, mostly because of the URL encoding. Now that it’s working it could be the basis for other automation with Micro.blog.

Last week I sent out a survey to ask how people are tracking books they are reading or blogging about. The response was encourage enough that I got to work building a new app for books. It’s called Epilogue.

As I discussed on Core Intuition, we already have a few iOS-only apps, but Micro.blog is before anything else a web-based platform. Vincent is working on an official Android app, and whatever we do next should be available on multiple platforms. So I decided to try something new with Epilogue, designing the UI with HTML to share it across both iOS and Android.

I’m pretty happy with the result. There are a few quirks in the UI — things we can probably smooth over in future versions or if necessary replace with fully-native screens. But I was able to build the whole thing quickly by iterating in Safari on my Mac.

Here are a few screenshots:

Epilogue is now available as a public beta on TestFlight. It will be available on Google Play soon-ish. I have it working, even if Android is still mostly uncharted territory for me. I also feel like I need to get some public feedback before going too much farther down this road.

It’s open source. GitHub says the language breakdown is:

What’s next? This first beta is for people who are already using Micro.blog. It’s for quickly adding a book or blogging about it. The search is new, powered by Google Books. We’ll wrap up 1.0 soon and then consider where to go with the app in future versions.

With a dedicated app, we could add more features than would fit into Micro.blog on the web, but I also don’t want to get too sidetracked. The goal is a lightweight app that can complement other book services, making it easier to blog about books.

The experiment to manage the books you’re reading in Micro.blog has been really well received. We’ve heard some great feedback about how to improve this feature and what its final form should look like when it’s rolled out to everyone.

I’ve made a few improvements recently, including making it easier to try. If you want to enable the “Bookshelves” link in your Micro.blog sidebar, just click on this link when you’re signed in to Micro.blog on the web.

The books list is now sorted with most recently-added books at the top. The data is also now available to Hugo themes. In any template, you can use some Hugo code like this to access the books in a bookshelf such as “Currently reading”:

{{ range .Site.Data.bookshelves.currentlyreading }}
   <a href="https://micro.blog/books/{{ .isbn }}">
     {{ .title }} by {{ .author }}
   </a>
{{ end }}

Thanks to Jason Becker for suggesting this. I had never used Hugo data templates before and there is a lot we could do with them. (And you can still edit a bookshelf to include it on any page without making theme changes.)

Some of the feedback I’ve been thinking about is whether “books” isn’t general enough for this feature. Daniel made this pitch on our podcast, and others have suggested music, movies, podcasts, or even beer as other things that could be tracked in “shelves”. These would all be fun to work on and useful, but they would make a fairly simple feature many times more complicated and take months of additional development time. I don’t think we could tackle that kind of scope expansion without distracting from our core priorities with Micro.blog.

For 2021, the plan is to stick with books. We’ll continue to tweak it and then enable it for everyone by default in a few weeks.

We just posted Core Intuition 441. From the show notes:

Daniel checks in with Manton, who is making an effort to take some time off from working so hard. They veer into a discussion weighing the merits of fixing little nitpicky bugs vs. adding meaningful features. They discuss the debate sparked by Sketch about native desktop apps vs. web apps, and Daniel concedes some of the advantages of web development.

Thanks for listening to the show. If you’d like to support the podcast with a subscription, check out our membership page.

With my iPhone X glass broken, I needed a replacement phone quickly. The timing is not great because Apple has an event tomorrow, likely for the iPad and Apple Watch, with an announcement for new iPhones to follow within a few weeks. On the other hand, it has been nearly 3 years since I bought my iPhone X, so I don’t feel bad upgrading even to last year’s iPhone.

Meanwhile, there’s Android. As Daniel and I have been discussing on Core Intuition, I’ve been increasingly frustrated with how Apple manages the App Store. It would be good for me to have more experience with Android, eventually developing an Android version of Micro.blog.

Last year I bought a cheap Android tablet (Galaxy Tab A) to use for testing. I’ve been using it much more often, and it has become my “catching up on email, surfing the web, and Slack-ing while in the living room” device. The hardware is slow, but it runs Android 10, and already it has been useful for seeing how Android users experience Micro.blog.

iMessage lock-in remains the biggest problem with Android for me. I tried AirMessage, which Ben Thompson had good things to say about on Dithering. AirMessage runs on your Mac and essentially forwards messages back and forth to Android. It’s clever, but because I use a MacBook Pro exclusively, AirMessage will stop working if I close the laptop or take it somewhere else.

One option I seriously considered is getting a Pixel 4a and using an old iPhone (or ordering a new iPod Touch) just to run iMessage, Micro.blog, and anything else that I needed iOS for. It doesn’t make sense to go all-in on Android while I’m in the middle of wrapping up a major iOS upgrade to Micro.blog 2.0. Having 2 inexpensive devices would force me to live in the Android world while also keeping iMessage and everyday testing for Micro.blog 2.0. It looked like I couldn’t get a Pixel 4a shipped very quickly, though.

In the end, I’ve decided to upgrade to the iPhone 11 Pro. It arrives tomorrow. It’s the 3rd version of the iPhone X-style phone, so I know it’s a stable, better version of what I already have. I don’t know what the iPhone 12 is going to look like, whether the quality will be rushed because of COVID, or what features they’ll stick in that I don’t need. I’ll continue to tinker with Android, and maybe that will be my next phone, but it felt a little too early for such a disruptive change.

The latest episode of Core Intuition is out. From the show notes:

Manton and Daniel review Daniel’s experiences as his first podcasting sponsorship airs, and they talk more generally about being willing to “sink money” as part of a learning process in business. Manton talks about his interest in developing for Android, and we lament the increasing feeling that we need to hedge our bets against being “all-in with Apple.”

We’ve also been publishing more episodes of Extra Intuition, our podcast just for members, with the 10th episode out this week. You can subscribe for $5 and get a special podcast feed for the extra show, plus access to a members-only channel in Slack.

A couple weeks ago I posted a sneak peek at Sunlit 3.0, our iOS companion app for photos. Today we’re opening up the beta and also making the source code public.

You can sign up on TestFlight here. There are still some rough edges, and this version is mostly for iPhone. iPad will be improved in the next beta, and macOS will follow later.

Sunlit can post to Micro.blog-hosted blogs, WordPress, or any blog that supports the Micropub API. You can use it with a free Micro.blog account or a paid subscription.

Composing a new post is much more flexible now. You can post a quick photo, or you can create a full blog post with multiple photos and text sections. I’ve created a screencast below to show how it works:

Jon Hays also joined me on the latest episode of Timetable to talk about the Sunlit beta and more.

For a long time I’ve wanted to add quoting tools to Micro.blog, so that it’s even easier to embed text from other blog posts and add your own thoughts. Markdown block quotes are fairly easy, but do require a little more copy/paste work and some editing.

So I was really interested in the recent launch of Quotebacks, from Tom Critchlow and Toby Shorin. We’ve needed a kind of “embed microblog post” feature in Micro.blog, similar to the embedding that Twitter and Facebook have. Quotebacks are exactly that, but they work for anything on the web.

I’d like to run with Quotebacks and see where it leads us. For now, I’ve added “Embed” links on the Micro.blog Favorites page on the web. This is an experiment. It will likely change, either rolling out in some form to all the platforms, or based on feedback maybe we’ll go in a different direction.

I’ve also forked the Quotebacks repository and tweaked the JavaScript with a couple changes:

• Instead of routing the favicons through Google’s cache, Micro.blog’s version just uses the profile photos on your account directly with a new data-avatar attribute.
• Because copied microblog posts always have a profile photo, it is displayed larger with rounded corners.

How does this look? I’m embedding a microblog post below using this feature:

We’ve posted Core Int 424, talking with @danielpunkass about the ARM rumor, how it compares to previous transitions, WWDC, and more.

I’ve kept the “Embed” links isolated to the Favorites page so we can try a few things without disrupting the rest of your Micro.blog workflow. There are other questions to answer, such as how this should integrate with sending Webmentions, but I think having something like this to play with is a good first step.

We published a new episode of Core Intuition today. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton react to Apple’s statement against racism, and also talk a bit about the Accidental Tech Podcast’s statements. They talk about trying to figure out what we can all do as individuals in the wake of this. Daniel talks about getting a Black Ink update out the door while continuing to struggle with finishing up MarsEdit 4.4. Manton shares an update on Micro.blog progress, and shares his new “stop keeping track of things” methodology for getting things done.

The podcast is 12 years old now, started right before WWDC 2008. I don’t know if we’ll still be recording 12 years from now, but let’s imagine we might be. What will America look like in 2032? I hope we will all be able to look back on the intervening years and say that we cared about something that mattered, supporting the people who made a difference.

Three years ago I created microblogging.slack.com to chat about indie microblogging and Micro.blog. There have been many great discussions in that time, and I appreciate everyone who has contributed or helped other members of the Micro.blog community. But to continue to improve Micro.blog regularly, I need to focus on fewer support channels.

Daniel Jalkut and I talked about this on Core Intuition 421. It is not sustainable for me to work on new Micro.blog features at the current pace as well as be responsive in Slack. If someone has a question about Micro.blog, I want to point them to the best place to get a thorough answer, and that’s email.

Slack also has a couple problems:

• It’s a proprietary platform that doesn’t fit well with our goals for Micro.blog. For example, you can’t have your own domain name for Slack, which makes migrating away very difficult.
• Because the search is limited to only recent messages, it is less useful as a resource to new members.

Last year, Jean MacDonald and I considered replacing Slack with Discourse. We may still do that, or it may be that forums around microblogging should best be run by the community rather than an official channel of Micro.blog. There is also a great IndieWeb chat accessible via Slack.

This weekend, I’ll be closing the current Slack. I will export all the data for backup — just in case we want to rebuild it in the future, or make the messages searchable — and then I’ll completely delete the Slack account, unless I can find a more elegant way to handle shutting it down or pausing it.

Thanks again to everyone who has participated in the Slack community, sending feature requests, helping others with Hugo theme questions, and just being supportive of the mission of Micro.blog. See you on Micro.blog!

Micro.blog supports primarily 2 APIs for posting to hosted blogs:

• Micropub, the IndieWeb API used in the official Micro.blog apps.
• MetaWeblog, the XML-RPC API used in MarsEdit for macOS.

XML-RPC used to be the standard for blog posting, widely supported in all blogging platforms. It is still used in WordPress today, and I’ve supported it in Micro.blog from the beginning. I’ve always wanted Micro.blog to be compatible with as many apps as possible, especially MarsEdit.

To understand XML-RPC, we have to go way back in blogging history, to 2001 and the original Blogger API by Evan Williams. Micro.blog’s support for XML-RPC still closely matches what the API looked like nearly 20 years ago.

As is obvious from the name, requests and responses in XML-RPC are sent as XML. Common data types such as integers, strings, and structs are encoded with rules outlined in the XML-RPC specification. To create a new post in the original Blogger API with the words “Hello world”, the request to the method blogger.newPost might look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
  <methodName>blogger.newPost</methodName>
  <params>
    <param>
      <value><int>app ID</int></value>
    </param>
    <param>
      <value><int>blog ID</int></value>
    </param>
    <param>
      <value><string>manton</string></value>
    </param>
    <param>
      <value><string>mypassword</string></value>
    </param>
    <param>
      <value><string>Hello world.</string></value>
    </param>
    <param>
      <value><boolean>1</boolean></value>
    </param>
  </params>
</methodCall>

Subsequent blogging platforms extended the Blogger API with their own features. Instead of blogger.newPost, Movable Type had mt.newPost with similar parameters, adding a title field. WordPress had wordpress.newPost.

To try to unify future improvements under a vendor-neutral standard, Dave Winer proposed the MetaWeblog API. MetaWeblog switched to passing content as structs, which could more easily be extended with additional fields, and added an image upload API, metaWeblog.newMediaObject. Dave patterned the field names after RSS:

The MetaWeblog API uses an XML-RPC struct to represent a weblog post. Rather than invent a new vocabulary for the metadata of a weblog post, we use the vocabulary for an item in RSS 2.0. So you can refer to a post’s title, link and description; or its author, comments, enclosure, guid, etc using the already-familiar names given to those elements in RSS 2.0.

Dave wasn’t the only one who hoped to bring consistency between feed formats and a blogging API. A couple years later, AtomPub was created based on Atom feeds.

Ben Trott of Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, blogged at the time about the benefits to basing an API on the Atom feed format, which back then was called Echo:

Benefits to developers: using the same data model and serialization for syndication, archiving, and editing simplifies the development of tools to work with (produce and consume) these formats, for obvious reasons: code written to produce an item in an Echo feed, for example, can also be used for producing data sent in an API request or packaged up for archiving.

AtomPub was adopted in Blogger but is not supported in any other modern blogging platforms. Earlier this year, MarsEdit developer Daniel Jalkut announced that he would also be phasing out support for posting to Blogger.

Between the early 2000s when there was so much activity around blogging standards, and the growth of the IndieWeb and W3C-recommended standard Micropub API in 2017, there was a notable lack of innovation in blogging. Everyone was pulled away to social networks. Platform-specific APIs became the norm. It is because of this lull that XML-RPC survived so long without a modern replacement.

So that brings us to today. Micro.blog has always worked with MarsEdit, but because it’s based on a standard that was frozen, MarsEdit could not support all of Micro.blog’s features. And while Micropub is clearly the future, there is more we could do now without requiring MarsEdit to be adapted for Micropub.

I’ve been working with Daniel to identity what is missing from MetaWeblog and rolling that into a new Micro.blog-specific flavor of XML-RPC. This is essentially what Movable Type and WordPress had done years ago. I had avoided it until now because Micro.blog should default to supporting standards wherever possible before inventing something new.

We talked through this on Core Intuition 416. Now that there’s an alpha of MarsEdit 4.4 available, I’ve documented the new API parameters here. It is based on MetaWeblog, but cleaned up with more consistent field names and support for new features such as creating and editing pages on your blog, server drafts, and downloading all posts.

Micro.blog now shows up in MarsEdit as one of the supported blog systems, along with Tumblr and WordPress:

I’ve been using the new MarsEdit for the last few days, and it really is a big improvement for Micro.blog. Keep an eye out for the final release.

MarsEdit developer Daniel Jalkut had a great post recently about protecting privacy by stripping out location information from a photo’s metadata before uploading it to your blog:

If you choose to publish photos in your blog posts, it’s important to understand that image metadata may reveal more to your blog’s readers than you necessarily intended.

We followed up on this for Core Intuition episode 409 and again briefly on episode 411.

Micro.blog also tries to strip out location information, but a couple of times it has been applied inconsistently because there are several different ways to get a photo in to Micro.blog. I’ve found and fixed a new bug related to this and want to document it here.

The native iOS and macOS apps for Micro.blog have always fixed the orientation information in a photo and stripped any metadata before uploading. The web version of Micro.blog also did the same thing on the server when using the Uploads tab. But I noticed a case where this processing was skipped when attaching a photo to a new post on the web and not uploading it separately in the Uploads tab or with a third-party app.

As a precaution I’ve decided to retroactively strip metadata from existing photos that have been uploaded over the last few years. I wrote some scripts to check these photos, updating both our primary photo storage and the published blogs that were affected.

I also stripped metadata from any profile photos that contained location information. In some cases, the colorspace may have changed. If you notice any subtle changes to your profile photo and want to re-upload it, you can do that under Account.

I’m sorry I missed this. If you have any concerns, let me know via help@micro.blog. You can also check one of your photos by downloading it from your blog and opening it in an app that can display metadata. (In Preview.app for macOS, choose Tools → Show Inspector.)

For the last couple of years we’ve used Mailchimp’s Mandrill service to send transactional emails from Micro.blog. These emails are for when you get a link to sign in, or a reminder that your trial expired. It was convenient to have everything in Mailchimp because we also used it to send our newsletters.

Because Mandrill was going to be down for maintenance a couple weeks ago, I decided to switch over to SendGrid. I’ve used SendGrid in the past and while I left disappointed at the time, that was years ago and I recently got some great help from a SendGrid employee while troubleshooting Sign in with Apple. It was easy to switch back.

I’m also moving our newsletter emails over to SendGrid and hope to resume sending the Micro Monday newsletter this week. The savings are significant. We were paying MailChimp about $220/month. On SendGrid, the comparable set of plans will be only $65/month.

Daniel and I talked more about sending email on Core Intuition a couple weeks ago. We’ve had some good feedback from folks about their favorite email providers, both for and against nearly every popular service, so I wanted to document the change here on the blog.

We are getting really close to episode 400. Feels like a big milestone to me, and I’ve been wondering if we should change anything with the podcast format when we roll over into the 400s. But in the meantime, here’s 395:

Daniel and Manton try to take stock of long-term personal goals, thinking of how they align with and overlap with money-making goals. Manton reports back after watching Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” talk at WordCamp US. Manton reflects on the important of simplicity for Micro.blog in contrast to WordPress, while Daniel considers that MarsEdit also serves as a more complex interface to Micro.blog. Finally, they digest the latest Apple announcements, focusing on the merits of the new AirPods Pro, and whether Apple TV+ is a justifiable pursuit for the company.

Daniel has already given me a sneak peek of next week’s manager check-in and it’s a good one. I think that is going to become a regular segment.

There’s a new trailer out for Klaus, which hits select theaters and then Netflix in November. Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew writes about director Sergio Pablos:

His goal hasn’t been to simply bring back 2d animation, but to push the craft forward, and Klaus’s distinct look is achieved via an innovative lighting and rendering pipeline that is applied to the drawn animation.

I’m excited for any hand-drawn feature film, especially one that comes from Sergio Pablos. Over the last few years his team has posted some early concepts and tests to their blog. I also mentioned Sergio on an episode of my podcast Timetable in 2017.

We posted episode 390 of Core Intuition. From the show notes:

Manton finds a workaround to his Sign in with Apple email problems! Daniel argues first that DTS should support pre-release software, and they discuss possible compromise approaches. Finally, they remark on Apple’s vigorous marketing push, and the thrill of promoting products we are proud of.

Only 10 more episodes to go before we hit 400!

Curtis Herbert has a great blog post about starting an Android version of his app Slopes. Adding social features made it more compelling to support multiple platforms:

In any given group of friends the odds of a mix of both Android and iOS users is very high (not to mention Europe is a big potential market for me, and Android is much larger over there than in the states). If someone on iOS loves Slopes, but their friend group ends up using one of my competitors because it supports both platforms and therefore the entire group can join in on the in-app fun, that’s going to go poorly for Slopes.

What I find so interesting about this decision is that Curtis seems to be intentionally expanding the scope of Slopes. Everything he writes about with Android makes sense if you first assume that the social features will be an important selling point and grow the audience for the app. Other indie developers might instead choose to keep the app focused on iOS and solve a more narrow set of problems, and that’s fine too.

I’m thinking of my discussion with Daniel Jalkut on last week’s Core Intuition about whether we should try to change the world (which often means bigger apps and more platforms to reach the most people) or focus on just building an app that’s really good at what it does (but might not be revolutionary).

Micro.blog would benefit from an official Android version, so a lot of Curtis’s post resonated with me. Luckily the third-party app Dialog (and upcoming app Gluon) can help fill that void in Micro.blog in a way that isn’t possible with non-platform apps like Slopes.

Finally getting around to posting this. The last couple of weeks since WWDC have been busy. But as I usually do, I still want to capture a little of the week in San Jose. (Looking back on my old posts about WWDC from the 2000s is a great reminder of what the earlier conferences were like, and I wish I had more of those posts.)

Arriving Saturday evening in San Jose, I rented a car and checked into my Airbnb. This is the first time I’ve tried Airbnb for WWDC. Hotel prices are out of control and I thought it would be a good way to see a different part of the city. Daniel and I caught up over dinner.

Sunday morning I drove up to San Francisco. I’ve made it a tradition to visit the Walt Disney Family Museum every year, and moving the conference to San Jose hasn’t deterred that. I stopped at Blue Bottle Coffee in San Mateo on the way.

The special exhibit at the museum was Mickey Mouse drawings. It was an incredible collection. Afterward I had a bite to eat at the Presidio Picnic. Fog covered the Golden Gate Bridge.

I picked up Jon Hays from SFO on the way back, and we stopped at the new visitor center for Apple’s spaceship campus, then got coffee and lunch down the road at Chromatic Coffee. Also detoured slightly for a quick look at Winchester Mystery House. (Skipped the $39 tour. Ouch.)

I didn’t need the rental car anymore, so we dropped it back at the airport and took an Uber downtown, planning to go to sfMacIndie and watch game 2 of the NBA finals. That’s when the evening went completely off the rails. We were cruising down the highway and someone rear-ended our Uber so hard it felt like the car was standing still. Everyone was shaken up but okay.

The keynote was packed with new stuff. I knew this was going to be a big year, but I was expecting most of the news to be around Marzipan (Catalyst). That ended up being a small part of the morning. I watched the keynote from AltConf and worked on highlighting WWDC-related posts in our new Discover section for the conference.

I was feeling a little out of it most of the morning. As the day progressed and I saw friends or met new folks, I started to feel better. Brent Simmons held a NetNewsWire meetup in the afternoon.

Tuesday at lunch was our Micro.blog WWDC meetup. This is the 3rd year in a row we’ve held the meetup. It was great catching up with everyone. If you made it to the meetup, thank you! I sent an email to everyone who had RSVP-ed.

That night was The Talk Show Live with John Gruber and his guests Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak. Great show.

Wednesday morning I stopped for coffee on 2nd street for a little work before walking over to AltConf. My flight was in a few hours so I had just enough time for one session: Leah Culver’s talk on making the podcast app Breaker as crash-free as possible. (Leah also co-founded Pownce back in 2006. I’m hoping to interview her for my book, Indie Microblogging.)

This was a bit of a strange year for me. While I’m sorry I missed some people and some events, I think it was good that I was back home early. I’m not going to make any other conferences this year. If you’re looking for places to go, I highly recommend IndieWeb Summit in Portland later this month, and Release Notes in Mexico in the fall.

Apple’s new stuff didn’t disappoint. I’m most excited for Catalyst and Sign In With Apple, which I blogged about here. These are both very practical solutions to real problems. The new iPadOS improvements are also welcome, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with SwiftUI. Overall, a great WWDC.

I introduced the Tweet Marker API in 2011. In the 8 years since, I’ve been lucky to have the support of some of my favorite apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot, plus popular Android apps, with some developers paying a monthly subscription to help keep the service running. But while Tweet Marker hasn’t changed recently, the Twitter world has changed.

Twitter previewed the next version of their API this week. I don’t see anything so far to contradict what I wrote last year.

I believe strongly that URLs shouldn’t change, and that public APIs shouldn’t just disappear. Owning your content and having your own domain name are important parts of Micro.blog too. So I was committed to running Tweet Marker indefinitely, regardless of what Twitter might do.

But two other factors were nagging at me:

• GDPR made me take a fresh look at some of the assumptions in the Tweet Marker API. Changes are overdue. They aren’t simple and would require coordination with client developers.
• Twitter’s third-party ecosystem has changed a lot since Tweet Marker was created. Twitter apps have a very uncertain future. Timeline syncing is often handled without Tweet Marker, such as via iCloud.

Tweet Marker’s time has come and gone. I’ve notified developers using the Tweet Marker API that I plan to wind down the service by July 1st. I’ve also cancelled all the paid subscriptions. (Actually I haven’t billed anyone in over 6 months, so I’ve been running the service for free.)

Daniel Jalkut and I talked about this back in December on Core Intuition 353. I plan to work on Micro.blog for the next 20 years or more, so it needs all of my attention.

Over a million people have used Tweet Marker. I’m proud of that. If you’re one of those people, especially if you supported Tweet Marker as a developer or with a subscription, thank you.

We all expected Dark Mode in iOS 13, but according to this rumor from 9to5Mac, the next major version of iOS is also going to feature some major changes to windows and detachable sheets:

There are many changes coming to iPad with iOS 13, including the ability for apps to have multiple windows. Each window will also be able to contain sheets that are initially attached to a portion of the screen, but can be detached with a drag gesture, becoming a card that can be moved around freely, similar to what an open-source project called “PanelKit” could do.

We also get an answer to one of the questions Brent Simmons asked about split views:

Split Views on Marzipan apps based on iPad designs that run on the Mac will get the ability to be resized by dragging the divider and have their position reset when double-clicking the divider, like existing Split View apps on the Mac.

I hope that support for multiple windows maps over to macOS with Marzipan. We’ve been saying on Core Intuition that this WWDC is going to be special. Marzipan is the biggest shake-up to the Mac since the Carbon to Cocoa transition.

There’s no shortage of opinions about Apple’s services-related event this week! I’ve listened to a few podcast episodes, and of course I had my own thoughts on this week’s Core Intuition and a separate blog post about News+.

My favorite discussion about News+ so far has been the latest episode of Connected. They talk about the good things Apple brings to this, but also the downsides.

Federico:

I was asked by someone on Twitter, do you plan on putting Club MacStories on Apple News+? The answer is a huge no.

Myke:

Literally every single person who subscribes to Club MacStories would cancel because they’re all users of Apple products!

Federico:

There’s always a cost to adopting a new platform. There’s a technological cost, and there’s an actual cost. And for me, it’s not worth it to rewrite my — what we do for Club MacStories for Apple News format — but it’s also not worth it to lose the money that I’m making from the service that I control.

Federico’s point here gets to the key issue with these aggregation platforms, whether it’s News+, Facebook, or the App Store. When you give up control over distribution, you also give up control over revenue. With publishing on the open web, there’s always an alternative: your own domain name and your own subscribers. (For the App Store, there’s no choice.)

Back to the episode…

Stephen:

I still don’t love how closed off News is. Like on the Mac, you just can’t get a URL to open it in a browser. You just can’t do it. You’ve got to send a text message to yourself or something. And on iOS, or really anywhere, sending content to things like Instapaper is very hit or miss. […] Apple News doesn’t play well with the web, and that’s very frustrating to me as a believer in the open web.

Myke:

We’re all worried about Spotify walling off podcasts. Well, Apple’s trying to do that to news. […] It’s probably good for consumers, but is it good for the industry? We don’t know yet.

Great episode. You should listen to the whole thing, because as I said there are some points in favor of Apple News as well, and the other announcements. But the segment I’m quoting from above was particularly good.

Apple responds to Spotify. Daniel Jalkut and I predicted most of this response on Core Intuition a couple days ago. I’m going to quote a few parts of Apple’s response and comment.

Eleven years ago, the App Store brought that same passion for creativity to mobile apps. In the decade since, the App Store has helped create many millions of jobs, generated more than $120 billion for developers and created new industries through businesses started and grown entirely in the App Store ecosystem.

Apple likes to brag about how much money they’ve paid to developers, but they leave out how much they’ve kept for themselves: about $50 billion. To Apple, they are doing us a big favor by letting us ship iOS apps.

We’ve approved and distributed nearly 200 app updates on Spotify’s behalf, resulting in over 300 million downloaded copies of the Spotify app. The only time we have requested adjustments is when Spotify has tried to sidestep the same rules that every other app follows.

It’s very important to remember that Apple’s rules are not laws. Apple’s rules have changed over the years, and especially around in-app purchase it often feels that they are applied inconsistently. Because Apple runs the platform, they can make any guidelines they wish, but there isn’t necessarily any inherent legal or moral justification in specific rules. We shouldn’t accept that all of Apple’s rules are fixed and cannot be improved.

When you get to the scale of the App Store, there are also new monopoly and anti-trust questions. For more about this, see Ben Thompson’s article on Stratechery.

Back to Apple:

A full 84 percent of the apps in the App Store pay nothing to Apple when you download or use the app. That’s not discrimination, as Spotify claims; it’s by design.

In 2011 I wrote a blog post with the premise that Apple made a mistake with how they handle free apps in the App Store, and what followed was years trying to make up for that mistake because of the burden of running the App Store. I think there was some truth to that, but now the business is very different. The App Store is a huge money-maker.

And we built a secure payment system — no small undertaking — which allows users to have faith in in-app transactions. Spotify is asking to keep all those benefits while also retaining 100 percent of the revenue.

And yet in the previous quote, Apple says that 84% of apps pay nothing and they are fine with that. Uber pays nothing to Apple. Games with ads pay nothing to Apple. Why is it wrong for Spotify to also want to limit how much they pay to Apple? The line Apple has drawn around in-app purchase is arbitrary. They could just have easily restricted Uber accepting payments, or banned third-party ads.

Just this week, Spotify sued music creators after a decision by the US Copyright Royalty Board required Spotify to increase its royalty payments. This isn’t just wrong, it represents a real, meaningful and damaging step backwards for the music industry.

This is irrelevant to Spotify’s complaints about the App Store. While I think Spotify’s argument would have been stronger if they had focused on a couple of their core complaints instead of mixing in issues such as Apple Watch development, Spotify didn’t bring up other concerns about Apple’s business that do not relate to the App Store. Apple trying to interject Spotify’s relationship with musicians is whataboutism.

Overall, Apple’s response isn’t very convincing to me. There are still 2 fundamental problems with the App Store: exclusive distribution and exclusive payment. In that post from 8 years ago, I concluded with:

Apple, want to charge 30%? Go for it. Want to make the submission rules more strict? Fine. Want to adjust how you run the App Store to reflect what’s happening in the market? No problem. Just give developers an out. We are going to be back here year after year with the latest controversy until exclusive app distribution is fixed.

I think I’ve been proven right about this. This issue will never go away until Apple allows side-loading or makes it easier to let customers pay outside the App Store. In the meantime, I’ve been arguing for a 15% cut instead of 30% for all paid downloads and in-app purchase, which would go a long way to making this easier for developers.

I often say that Micro.blog is a success if more people blog. One of the most important goals is to encourage people to post at their own domain name. For more about why that matters and what I think Micro.blog’s role is among other social networks, see my post about the way out.

But we hear from a lot of people who want Micro.blog to succeed in more concrete terms as well. They want it to be a larger business that can hire more developers and curators. I want that too! Micro.blog is the most ambitious platform I’ve built and as it grows we will need more help scaling it.

If you believe in what we’re trying to do with Micro.blog, here are a few simple ways to support the platform:

• Subscribe to one of the blog hosting plans. You get your own domain name, themes, photo or podcast hosting, the new Mastodon-compatible support, and much more. This is what I use to host my own blog and podcast.
• Give a friend a blog subscription. If you already have a paid subscription yourself, click Plans → “Give Micro.blog” to invite someone to Micro.blog and pay for their first year of blog hosting at a discount.
• Tell everyone what you like about Micro.blog. We don’t have any gimmicky viral features to spread the word automatically. For other people to find out about Micro.blog, you’ll have to post to your blog, tweet a link, or talk about it on your podcast.

We are approaching 2 important milestones: the 1-year anniversary of the public launch, and nearly 2 years since the Kickstarter. Micro.blog has improved significantly since then and it will continue to get better with your support. Thanks!

We start this week’s Core Intuition by following up on the Mastodon integration in Micro.blog. From the show notes:

Manton reports back to Daniel about the first week after adding Mastodon integration to Micro.blog. They talk about the merit and necessity of spending time marketing after all the coding work we do. Daniel talks about his recent struggle implementing support for Google’s OAuth2, and finally they talk about Apple’s new Hardened Runtime and the associated app notarization service Mac apps that are distributed outside the Mac App Store.

It’s nice to hit episode 350, but I was just listening to ATP’s 300th episode today and realized that they have reached their milestone in about half the number of years that it took me and Daniel. We didn’t record very often in the early years, and even now usually miss a couple weeks here and there, so I expect ATP will eventually pass us up in total episodes. 🙂

Earlier this year I migrated 15 years of posts on manton.org to Micro.blog blog hosting. Today I finished moving over 100 episodes of my podcast Timetable to Micro.blog podcast hosting. I had gotten out of the routine of recording Timetable, and I think moving it to Micro.blog will simplify the setup and make me publish the podcast more often.

Timetable had been hosted on WordPress using the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin. There were at least a few ways I could’ve moved the episodes, but ultimately I decided on the following:

1. Downloaded all the MP3s to my Mac.
2. Adjusted the WordPress settings to show 120 recent posts in the feeds, then saved the resulting JSON Feed of all episodes. This let me parse the JSON much more easily than working with the WordPress API or XML.
3. Wrote a Ruby script that uses the Micropub API to upload each MP3, then create a new post with an audio tag, preserving the original post content and date.
4. Pointed timetable.manton.org to use Micro.blog.

Even if you don’t know Ruby, hopefully you can see in the script how easy is it to work with Micropub, which Micro.blog uses as its native interface to create posts and upload files. I just call out to the curl command-line tool to do the work.

If you’re new to Timetable, each episode is only about 5 minutes. Some of my recent favorites include episode 91 (Lose yourself), episode 92 (Good, better, best), and episode 100 (One year).

A few months ago on Timetable, I talked about how Micro.blog needs the equivalent of a college orientation session to get new people used to how the platform works. I took some time this morning to record a quick intro screencast video. It’s a little rushed because I tried to fit it into 2 minutes, but I’m glad to finally have something. I’ll be working to update it soon.

I’m adding a link to the video at the top of the “welcome” email that new users get when they sign up. You can also watch it on the help site here.

Project Gutenberg is the code name for a redesign of the WordPress post editor. It’s an ambitious change set to ship next month in WordPress 5.0. Taking inspiration from Medium and appealing to web authors who use WordPress more like a CMS than a blog, Gutenberg features a block-based design for visually laying out the text and elements of a web page.

As I test Gutenberg, I keep coming back to one question: is it good for blogging? The goal with Micro.blog is to make blogging easier so that more people will have their own site instead of delegating their web identity to a social network. Gutenberg is more flexible than today’s WordPress, but it’s also more complex for someone who just wants to type in a few sentences and hit publish.

I’ve been talking about this with Daniel on our podcast Core Intuition. Many WordPress users will love Gutenberg, but there will be a significant number who just want a simple posting interface for blogging. This is where a traditional native blogging app like MarsEdit or the focused UI around microblogging seem like much better fits.

Put another way, as WordPress matures I think it moves further away from the ideal blogging interface for someone who wants to write every day. Even as we add features to Micro.blog — domain names, themes, full-length posts, photos, podcasting — the core platform will always be rooted in the simple idea of a text box and a timeline.

We posted the latest Core Intuition this weekend. It’s a 45-minute episode without sponsor breaks dedicated to the Mojave release and Mac App Store. More from the show notes:

macOS Mojave is out! Daniel and Manton talk about the ephemeral nature of App Store features, and the wisdom of not investing too much stock in being featured, or any other external recognition. They catch up on the state of the Mac App Store and wonder about the expected App Store versions of BBEdit and Transmit. Finally, they talk about their own continuing plans for supporting Mojave, particular with respect to Dark Mode.

As part of hopefully consolidating a couple of my servers, I’ve moved the MP3 hosting to Libsyn. We have 10 GB of previous episodes, so I’m still not entirely sure what the best long-term hosting solution is. We’ve changed our mind a few times over the podcast’s 10-year history.

This week we rolled out a few improvements to podcast hosting on Micro.blog. I talked about some of it on yesterday’s episode of Timetable. Here are the changes:

• Increased MP3 upload size to 35 MB. With the default setting in Wavelength for iPhone this is over half an hour per episode. At lower bitrates, it’s over 70 minutes.
• Added custom email address to site settings. Google’s podcast directory apparently likes a contact email in your podcast feed, so this allows it. (But it’s blank by default in Micro.blog for privacy.)
• Updated podcast feed to use your “about me” text as the podcast description.

Speaking of podcasts, check out the latest episode the Supertop podcast. In addition to updates about their podcast client Castro, they cover my blog post about Anchor and other thoughts on what impact Anchor might have on the podcast industry.

Nir Zicherman has a post on Medium about how podcast hosting should be free. Nir is the co-founder of Anchor, a company with $14 million in venture-capital funding. Nir writes:

Back in the day, you would have had to pay to store your photos online. But that outdated business model has virtually disappeared thanks to platforms like Google Photos, Instagram, Imgur, and others. At Anchor, we believe the notion of charging creators to host their content online is antiquated and unfair. And above all else, it serves as a barrier that prevents the podcasting ecosystem from growing and becoming more diverse, because it limits it to only those voices who can afford to pay.

I think Nir misses something important in his post. Many podcasts do not need to be directly monetized with ads, network memberships, or even listener donations. I never want ads on my short-form podcast Timetable, for example. I record Timetable because I enjoy it and because it helps people understand what we’re trying to do with Micro.blog, which in turn indirect benefits the platform. I want my own podcast at my own domain name so that I’m not dependent on a company that may or may not be around in a few years.

(Also, it’s misleading to say that it only costs Anchor $1/year to host a podcast. That might cover hosting, but it skips over all the other business costs including engineering, marketing, and support.)

Anchor seems to be going for the YouTube model. They want a huge number of people to use their platform. But the concentration of so much media in one place is one of the problems with today’s web. Massive social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have too much power over writers, photographers, and video creators. We do not want that for podcasts.

Micro.blog podcast hosting isn’t free. It’s $10/month. But for that price you get not just a podcast feed but also a full hosted blog with support for microblog posts or longer essays, photo blogging, custom themes and CSS, posting from a bunch of third-party apps and our iOS microcasting app Wavelength, and most importantly everything at your own domain name so you own the content. The competition for Micro.blog isn’t Anchor; it’s Squarespace and WordPress.

Some things are worth paying for. I share Nir’s goal that podcasting should be more accessible and more affordable to more people, but it’s dangerous to give one company too much control over podcasting. Anchor’s business model demands scale. It’s still unclear how that will play out.

One reason that IndieWeb Summit was such a success was the range of projects to come out of the second day as attendees worked on their own projects. There were new tools and features of existing platforms, but also personal site updates and just fun stuff. And web rings are fun!

I know, I know… Is it 2018 or 1998? I’ve added a help page on Micro.blog for how to add a web ring to your blog using 🕸️💍. One of the great things about microblogging at your own domain name is you can experiment with features like this.

Daniel and I talk a little more about this on the new episode of Core Intuition out today. Enjoy.

We just posted our pre-WWDC podcast episode:

Manton and Daniel check in just before WWDC to talk about expectations from the conference, and strategies for saving money on the trip. They indulge in a bit more Siri criticism, hope that Apple will announce new MacBook Pros, and question whether Apple will dare to poke fun at Google’s Duplex technology during the keynote.

If you’ll be in San Jose, hope to see you at the Micro.blog lunch meetup on Tuesday. I’d love to talk to listeners about Micro.blog or Core Intuition, and we have a major update to Sunlit in beta that I’ll be showing off.

We just posted Core Intuition 322. From the show notes:

Manton and Daniel react to Apple’s news release about expectations for the Mac Pro coming in 2019. They speculate about what could explain such a long delay, and Daniel devises a theory, or pipe dream, that the Mac Pro may be ARM-based. They also discuss Apple’s disclosure of a Pro Workflow Team comprised of creative professionals, and compare it to Apple’s apparent study of the needs of education professionals. Finally, an update from Daniel about MacBook Pro keyboard repairs, with a surprise twist!

Stephen Hackett also commented today on Matthew Panzarino’s visit to Apple Park to get a status update on the Mac Pro:

There’s also the increased rumors around ARM-powered Macs. Like with the Intel transition, Apple’s pro products will surely be the last to make this move. It may be that 2019-ish Mac Pro will be the Intel Mac’s swan song.

I think Stephen is right, but on Core Intuition today we explored the opposite: what if the 2019 Mac Pro is the first ARM-powered Mac? What it was like to be at WWDC when Apple announced the Intel transition, the value of third-party pro apps, and much more on this episode. Enjoy!

We start this week’s Core Intuition talking about the Apple education event in Chicago. More in the show notes:

Daniel and Manton talk about Apple’s Chicago education event, and Apple’s challenge in breaking into the education market so dominated by Google. They scrutinize whether the special event was “event-worthy” or not. Daniel talks about his motivation problems with shipping MarsEdit updates, and complains again about App Store Review uncertainty. Finally, they talk about the challenge of knowing whether a product with lackluster success is on the brink of something great, or should be moved on from.

Thanks for listening and subscribing to the show.

The latest Core Intuition is out. Daniel and I talk about WWDC and related topics for the full episode:

Daniel and Manton talk about Apple’s announcement that WWDC is officially happening in San Jose again. Daniel struggles to make a financial case for attending, while Manton continues to believe it’s essential to at least be in town for a few days. They talk about the possibility that other conferences would be a better use of time and money. Finally, they indulge a little speculation about WWDC and whether the promo art ever hints at any of the actual news to be announced.

Thanks for subscribing! Looking forward to seeing some Core Intuition listeners out in San Jose.

We just published this week’s episode of Core Intuition, talking about the new Sunlit release and other topics. From the show notes:

Manton and Daniel celebrate Sunlit 2.0’s release, and talk about the decision to make it a free app that supports the Micro.blog platform. Daniel admires Manton’s proclivity for shipping new things, and they both despair the difficulty of canceling existing projects. Daniel rants modestly about the difficulty of getting his MacBook Pro keyboard repaired, and finally, they discuss the App Stores and the ongoing disparities between Mac and iOS versions of them.

Thanks for listening!

We posted Core Intuition episode 313:

Daniel and Manton talk about digging oneself out of customer support debt, and strategies for improving the efficiency of support mechanisms. They react to Apple’s disabling of free In-App-Purchases, and speculate about whether it was intentional or not. This leads them into a re-evaluation about the risks of selling on the App Stores, and the lure of selling directly to customers.

And just for subscribers, Extra Intuition episode 4, with Daniel and I talking about cryptocurrency and my experience trying to cash out.

New episode of Core Intuition is out. We talk about what’s new with Micro.blog, cryptocurrency, and more:

Manton talks to Daniel about just missing jury duty during a busy work week. They talk about the virtues of differentiating a product by both features and personality. Finally, they react to the Stellar cryptocurrency’s surprising value, and the potential for cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to change the world.

Thanks for listening!

Another week, another set of new podcasts. Daniel and I talked on Core Intuition about opening up Micro.blog and speculated on UIKit for the Mac:

Manton and Daniel talk about the major update to Micro.blog, and how to cope with demand as it either meets or doesn’t meet daily limits. They opine about the virtue of having a baseline product on which to build future updates. They react to Mark Gurman’s report that Apple has a plan to make it easier to bring iOS apps to the Mac, and finally, they catch up on Daniel’s post-release MarsEdit activity.

I also posted episode 91 of Timetable. It’s about 3 minutes on Eminem lyrics and getting your one shot.

This week on Core Intuition, Daniel and I talk about how the MarsEdit 4 release is going:

Daniel and Manton catch up on MarsEdit 4’s progress a week after releasing. They talk about the anxiety and fear of making a huge mistake when releasing, and the relief of discovering you haven’t. They reflect on the effectiveness of direct email to inform existing customers of updates, and Manton looks forward to releasing Micro.blog to the public, and how much PR fanfare he should be looking to generate.

I’ve been working on several new features for Micro.blog this week. Consistent with Daniel’s advice on the show, I think we’re going to roll out new stuff for Micro.blog next week and start ramping up promotion. Really excited about the way things are coming together.

Today I posted another episode of my daily podcast Timetable. It’s a short episode about the MarsEdit 4 release and why even competing apps should be compatible and embrace the open web. Here’s a transcript.

Today, MarsEdit 4 shipped. I posted to my blog with a link to the new version, and I included some comments in the blog post about using MarsEdit with Micro.blog.

Congrats to Daniel. This has been years in the making. It’s great to see it come out, and we’ll be talking more about this on my other podcast Core Intuition later this week.

Even if Daniel wasn’t my friend and co-host of Core Intuition, I’d still be excited about MarsEdit, because more blogging software is a good thing. The Mac version of Micro.blog kind of competes with MarsEdit, since you can use Micro.blog to post to WordPress, just like you can with MarsEdit. But it’s also a nice complement, because you can use MarsEdit to post to blogs that are hosted on Micro.blog. And MarsEdit is full-featured and has more features that you might want to upgrade to, even if you’re using Micro.blog.

And this is how I think software should work, and why the open web and open APIs are important. You should be able to switch between apps without changing everything.

You should be able to use MarsEdit to post to your blog. You should be able to use Micro.blog — the Mac app or the iOS app — to post to that same blog.

Imagine if you could use the official Twitter app to post to Facebook. You open Twitter, you click new tweet, and then you click in the destination (somewhere in the UI), and you select Facebook instead. And instead of going to Twitter, it goes to Facebook.

Sounds crazy. How could that possibly work? Why would Twitter or Facebook ever allow something like that?

But that’s how it should work. We are so used to these silos and these apps that are not compatible with anything, that we just accept it. But that’s how it should work.

You should be able to use multiple apps to post to different services. And that’s what’s happening with apps that are built with some compatibility in mind, especially on IndieWeb standards. That’s what’s happening with MarsEdit and Micro.blog, although on a much smaller scale.

I’ve been thinking about how much work we have to do to reach the audience of potential indie microbloggers. Last night, I attended AustinRB, a local meetup here in Austin for Ruby programmers. There was a great talk on metaprogramming — really enjoyed it. And as I mentioned yesterday, Tom Brown, who is also helping me out with IndieWebCamp planning… He gave a talk on the IndieWeb.

And listening to questions from the audience, it was just so obvious how far we have to go. Everyone is so used to Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, that in a way we have to outline the IndieWeb and services like Micro.blog in a way that mainstream users of other social networks can relate to.

It’s a big jump to go from only thinking about Twitter, to all of a sudden thinking about your own domain name, sending replies between independent web sites perhaps, to thinking about a timeline that is based on feeds from all over the web. It’s a big jump.

And in a way, it’s kind of discouraging when I think about making that case for how the web should work. It’s a massive task to explain the value of the open web and the danger of relying on 100% centralized networks.

But on the other hand, there are a lot of people in the world, a lot of people who want to write on the internet, who care about what they say and how they say it. WordPress powers 29% of the web.

The market is there. It’s just a matter of reaching everyone. And so that’s encouraging.

And it starts in communities like the IndieWeb. And hopefully in the community we’re trying to build on Micro.blog.

It’s not too late to register for IndieWebCamp. It’s this weekend in Austin. Go to IndieWeb.org. I hope you can join us. There’s a lot of work to do to build the web that we need. Thanks for listening today.

As I’ve been improving the import and export functionality in Micro.blog, I’ve done a lot of work with WordPress’s WXR format, which is based on RSS. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with WXR, it’s more complicated than it needs to be for non-WordPress sites, especially when you start to tackle image uploads that exist outside of the post text.

Micro.blog can also push an entire site’s Markdown, HTML, and images to GitHub, which is the most complete mirror and perfect for migrating to another Jekyll server. It introduces so many extra files, though, it’s not reasonable to expect that other blog platforms could support the same level of detail.

I’d be happy to ignore the WordPress-centric nature of WXR and use it as a common blog archive format if WXR provided a mechanism to store image uploads. Helping people migrate from WordPress to Micro.blog-hosted blogs has only emphasized to me that a better format is needed.

In chatting with the IndieWeb community, the idea was proposed that an HTML file using h-feed would provide portability and also an added bonus: it could be opened in any web browser to view your archived site. Images could be stored as files with relative references in the HTML file. (I’d throw in a JSON Feed file, too, so that importers could choose between using a Microformats parser or JSON parser.)

The files would look something like this:

• index.html
• feed.json
• uploads
  • 2017
    • test.jpg

The basics from h-feed would follow this structure:

• h-feed
  • h-entry
    • p-name
    • e-content
    • dt-published
    • u-url
  • h-entry
    • ...

Only index.html and feed.json would be required. Any other paths in the archive would be determined by the contents of the HTML. (I’m using “uploads” in this example, but it could just as easily be “archive”, “audio”, or any other set of folders.)

For large sites, the HTML could be split into multiple files with appropriate tags in the header to page through the additional files. While it could contain CSS and your full blog’s design, I’m imagining that the HTML would be extremely lightweight: just enough to capture the posts, not a way to transfer templates and themes between blogs.

The whole folder is zipped and renamed with a .bar extension. Easy to move around and upload all at once. I’ve created an example file here (rename it .zip to open it).

I’d love to hear what you think. I talked about this on a recent episode of Timetable as well. Might be a nice topic to follow up on at IndieWebCamp Austin in 2 weeks.

We just published this week’s Core Intuition, talking about the latest iPhone X news:

Daniel and Manton recap their experience placing pre-orders for the iPhone X, discuss Apple’s unusual PR strategy for iPhone X reviews, and debate the appropriateness of Apple firing an engineer for letting his daughter film a YouTube video of his pre-release phone.

When you’re done listening to that, also check out Timetable 77. Still waiting for my iPhone X to arrive.

For the initial rollout of Micro.blog, we had a bunch of pins you can unlock, to encourage people to blog more. For example, pins that get unlocked after a certain number of blog posts, or when you upload a photo. We also added a couple of new time-based pins for special events, like mentioning “iPhone X” during the Apple event last month.

Today I added a Halloween pin. You can see some of the pins for my account in this screenshot:

I also talked about this on today’s Timetable. Happy blogging! 🎃

Jason Snell mentioned on this week’s Upgrade that he had found a way to frame his iPhone 8 review, and today he posted it. Where most iPhone 8 reviews last month seemed overshadowed by the upcoming iPhone X, I think Jason’s review may have benefited from a little distance from the September Apple event.

It also reminded me about the missing headphone jack, which in the excitement of the pre-orders I had forgotten about. Sigh. From the review:

These upgraders also get to experience for the first time what the rest of us had to come to terms with a year ago: A one-way ticket to Dongletown, courtesy of a Lightning-to-headphone-jack adapter required by the removal of the headphone jack.

And on wireless charging, which I’m equally skeptical about:

Inductive charging is slower than USB charging, so if I’m trying to top up my battery before heading out, I’ll invariably prefer plugging in a Lightning cable. Dropping the phone on top of the small circle of the charging pad so that it’s properly aligned for the charge—the phone indicates that it’s charging and a small light appears on the charger base—is not really any less difficult in terms of mental focus than plugging in a Lightning cable.

As Daniel and I have discussed at several points on Core Intuition, I think Apple really gambled on splitting the product line between the 8 and X, and the pronunciation fumbles only add to the confusion and perception that the 8 isn’t a cutting-edge product. It’s at once the best phone in the world and old news.

It remains to be seen whether this split will impact sales. I’ll be watching for the quarterly results and Ben Thompson’s take.

Meanwhile, I’ve stuck to my first impression that it’s time for me to have a phone with the best cameras again. That means the iPhone X. I’ll miss the size of the iPhone SE, but now that my iPhone X pre-order is wrapped up, I’m looking forward to trying something new, and hoping that it captures a little of that first-generation iPhone feeling, when we knew we were holding a bit of the future.

We posted episode 302 of Core Intuition today. From the show notes:

Manton and Daniel anticipate the night of iPhone X pre-orders, and the shame of waking in the middle of the night to order a phone. They catch up with their faltering ambitions to ship MarsEdit and Micro.blog, and acknowledge the merit of sharing ambitions with others to help motivate progress. Finally, they contemplate whether eliminating a feature altogether is preferable to shipping it with obvious deficiencies.

Good luck to everyone trying to pre-order an iPhone X tonight!

Just posted episode 2 of our members-only podcast Extra Intuition, with special guest Gus Mueller! From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton are joined by Gus Mueller of Flying Meat. They talk about their early days in the indie Mac community, and Gus’s commitment to developing for the Mac. Along the way Gus let us know about a new Mac app he’s working on, and invited listeners to get in touch about beta testing it!

Gus announces a brand new Mac app he’s working on. Really exciting to see this when it ships. You can listen by becoming a member.

Daniel and I wanted to do something special for our 300th episode, so we’ve launched a membership program for Core Intuition listeners. Included in the membership is access to a brand new podcast we call Extra Intuition, plus a private Slack channel for members to discuss the show and suggest future topics.

It’s been a fun journey over the last 9 years of recording Core Intuition, and the main podcast will stay as it has been, with new episodes for free every week. Extra Intuition is our chance to deviate a little from the formula and try something new.

Daniel has also posted about the membership and first episode:

Our first episode of Extra Intuition is already live, and it features a discussion about the early days of our friendship, and how we decided to start Core Intuition.

We’d love your support. Thanks for listening!

I posted a new Timetable today after listening to the Release Notes podcast where Charles and Joe discuss requiring in-app purchase subscriptions. As I talk about on Timetable, I’ve been working on the Mac version of Micro.blog, so it was a good opportunity to make a final decision on Mac App Store support.

Speaking of Release Notes, I’ll be out in Chicago for the conference next week. If you’re attending, hope to see you there. Ask me for a Micro.blog sticker.

One more week until our 300th episode! From the show notes for today’s episode:

Daniel and Manton talk about Daniel’s struggle to finish and release MarsEdit 4. They compare notes about using the WordPress API to import content, and Manton reveals he is working on a Mac app for Micro.blog. They check in about the impact that increasing competition, or perception of it, on their long-time friendship and collaboration.

We’re announcing something new next week. Hope you can tune in for it.

For this week’s Core Intuition, Daniel and I spend the whole show talking about Twitter’s 280-character change and related fallout. It makes a good complement to my initial blog post, as well as yesterday’s episode of Timetable.

And of course I liked this part of Colin Walker’s blog post:

Having gotten used to a 280 character limit on micro.blog I can honestly say it makes a world of difference.

Dave Winer wrote about the need for Twitter to take risks:

So if you think the 140-char limit is so great, why isn't Twitter making money for its shareholders? If you were management at Twitter would you be conservative or would you take risks? As a shareholder, I want them to take risks. Big ones. Why not? They don't really have anything to lose.

My daughter’s Twitter account has access to the new 280-character limit, so I’ve had a chance to see the new UI. Instead of counting down, it uses a circular progress bar until you get near the end of the limit. The UI is further proof that Twitter didn’t make this change on a whim. They plan to ship it.

I posted a new episode of my Timetable microcast. Here’s a bit from today’s episode about blogging and tweeting:

My "blog first" strategy is actually really simple. I just follow the rule that I never post directly to Twitter unless I'm replying to a question. If I want to post something to Twitter, I fire up MarsEdit on my Mac, or I open the Micro.blog iOS app, and I post it there. Then of course Micro.blog sees that and sends it to Twitter for me.

I’m getting back into the groove of publishing these episodes. This was the third episode of Timetable this week.

We posted a new Core Intuition, all about the iPhone X and other products from yesterday’s event. From the show notes:

Manton and Daniel react to the announcement at Apple’s annual iPhone event, comparing notes on the allure of the iPhone X, Apple Watch 3, and new Apple TV. They talk about the impressiveness of all the significant product updates being made in parallel, and lament the slightly confusing state it leaves the high end iPhone market in.

Approaching 300 episodes over 9 years. If you’re new to the podcast, consider subscribing in your favorite podcast app. Thanks!

Michael Gartenberg writing for Six Colors about the iPhone X:

It’s arguably the most beautiful product ever made by Apple and the jewel in Apple’s crown. The aesthetics must be seen to be appreciated. This is something Apple competitors aren’t even close to. If the iPhone 8 raises the bar, iPhone X raises the bar so high it can’t be seen. This is, quite simply, the best smartphone money can buy.

High praise. Apple had me at the cameras, but I’m relieved that the design of the phone itself is so great. On Core Intuition last week I had worried that if the design fell short (or Apple did something clunky like put a Touch ID sensor on the back) that I’d have second thoughts.

This is the first iPhone in years that many people are going to stand in line for. It might not be priced high enough.

Slightly longer Core Intuition this week as we cover several topics. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton follow up briefly on Manton’s backup strategy, and catch up with Daniel's progress with MarsEdit. They talk about the merits of using cryptographic signing for software licenses, and balance the risks and rewards of combatting piracy. Daniel talks about the recurring lure of taking a salaried job, and how the privileges of staying indie continue to win out. Finally, they look forward to next week's iPhone event and the expected hardware announcements from Apple.

I’m excited about the upcoming iPhone event on Tuesday. Seems like it’s set to be a big one.

Daniel and I talked mostly about subscriptions on this week’s episode, and then closed with a wrap-up of our projects as summer winds down. Here’s a transcript of the first part of the show, lightly edited.

Manton:

Hi Daniel. You know a topic that we’ve had on the show a few times over this last year is subscriptions and pricing and revenue, especially in the context of Micro.blog and the new MarsEdit release. We’ve talked about in-app purchase and different revenue models for MarsEdit. And developers keep trying things. The big news in the last week was Ulysses has switched to a subscription model.

I find this interesting, and I know we chatted in the Core Intuition Slack a little bit about this as kind of a preview of the show. I’m not sure how to feel about this in general because Ulysses is the first app I’ve seen — the first big app — that is doing subscriptions without changing their app. What I mean is a lot of apps that do subscriptions, they have subscriptions because they’ve done something significant like add their own syncing backend, or publishing service, or there’s some service-oriented aspect to the app that justifies subscriptions. And Ulysses is just saying — they had a big post saying — “You know what? This business is going to work better for us. We think it’s going to be better for users too. We’re just switching; the app’s not changing. We’re just going to start charging per month.”

Daniel:

Right. And they have their typical making the case for it blog post: Ulysses switches to subscription. And as you said it’s very straightforward; they’re not doing this halfway. And their basic points are things we’ve heard from other developers and I think you and I, Manton, we appreciate this as well, even if we’re not convinced that subscriptions are the right choice necessarily for all of our products.

But you know there are some really compelling things. One of the things that rings truest for me is getting away from that whole major upgrade cycle. And especially when you’re looking at someone like me who has been now seven years since the last major update, whenever a developer makes that argument, “Oh, now I can just work on features and add them to the app and release them when I feel like it, or as soon as the feature’s done users can start benefiting from it.” All of that sounds so good to me.

There’re a lot of great arguments to be made. I don’t necessarily share your feeling that customers expect something service-oriented. I can definitely see that argument in it. I know it’s made often. But I am going to be watching Ulysses closely because I think a lot of customers are starting to understand that it’s sort of just like… Maintenance is a service. Maintenance of the software is a service and that’s something that a lot of people can justify paying for. You know especially with an app like this where it gets at sort of people’s… This is one of those part of people’s identity type of apps, where it’s like: you use this because you are a writer.

You can also say a big risk here is that there are a lot of different ways to write and there are a lot of different apps you can use. Somebody who uses Photoshop for a living… Historically it’s been harder to justify using other tools because it’s just such an industry standard, so I guess something like Ulysses is going to be like: is what they provide to people unique enough and something that people like enough and identify enough with that they’re willing to say, “Okay, part of my identity is I’m a writer with Ulysses and I’m going to pay $40 a year for that privilege?”

Manton:

Yeah, I think there’re a couple of things to go through with this, and your comment on maintenance is a service… That’s true, but nothing has changed with software in that regard, right? Software has always been work: supporting customers, doing new versions doing bug fixes, having compatibility updates for new versions of the OS. The difference with software as a service like web apps and subscriptions is: there is a real cost. If you’re running Dropbox or something you can’t do that for free.

And users I think get that there is a hosting cost, there is a bigger cost to running those services, and that’s why they are charged by the month usually, because it’s not free to run them. Whereas an iPhone app that you ship, it’s not free to support, of course. And Ulysses has a medium-sized team. They have an actual team behind this, and they probably have potentially multiple engineers and multiple support people. That’s not free, but it’s different than thousands of dollars a month in hosting costs that have to be offset or there’s no business whatsoever.

That’s how I draw the line usually, where there are some types of businesses that they have to be charged per month. They cannot be done any other way. You could support them by ads, potentially, if you’re big like Facebook and Twitter, but otherwise you have to charge users per month because you just can’t run the service otherwise.

And apps aren’t like that. Apps, there’s choice. There’re different ways you can make a business out of selling an app.

Daniel:

It’s true, but I really don’t think most users think about it that much. People who click the button or tap the button in an iPhone game to get like 100 emeralds or whatever, they’re not thinking through, “Well it costs cost money to make virtual emeralds.”

Manton:

That’s a unique case.

Daniel:

Well, it’s a unique case but it reflects the fact that I think in the vast majority of cases it’s far simpler: users recognize and accept that software is either available to them or not available to them based on whether they pay, and they choose whether to pay not based on some intricate analysis of the market viability or the business sustenance. They just think, “Do I want this, and am I willing to click this button to say yes, pay?”

That’s one thing. I do agree that there’s a challenge in marketing subscriptions in general. I just don’t think that you know the arguments about whether the developers need to pay for keeping servers running or not really comes into it as much. It’s more just about a pure value proposition to people.

Manton:

I don’t think so, though. I really think users… They don’t think about it in the terms that I just outlined, but their gut feeling is, “I’m paying for this because this is the kind of service that needs to be paid per month.”

If you ask someone will they be shocked if they go to WordPress.com and it charges them per month, of course they won’t. Yes, it’s a web site hosting service, it charges per month. But then if you ask them if the text editor should charge per month. Most people will say no, it should be a one-time… And this is not because they know the business models perfectly, but it’s just this is the accepted way this software has been done. And software as a service — subscriptions, traditionally — it’s a mature market, 15, 20 years. People are used to subscribing to these things, and so they understand it. And a text editor is not the same thing. I think users get that.

I mean it’s still too early to know how well this is going to work. I have a feeling, since Ulysses is really well loved… (I use it. I use it on the Mac and on the iPhone. I love the app; it’s really well done.) I have a feeling it’ll work out fine. But you just take a quick look in the App Store and you see the reaction is not kind. One-star reviews. “Loved this app, now I hate it because it’s subscriptions.” So that reaction shouldn’t shock anyone, because this is kind of a big switch and people are not used to paying per month for this type of app.

Daniel:

It doesn’t shock me, the reaction, but I also think that this is a classic example where a very angry, loud minority, probably, is going to get the attention. They’re going to make a stink about it. We saw this happen with TextExpander a year ago when they switched to a subscription model. As far as I can tell, TextExpander is doing very well, and it’s because, again… I mean you can argue and probably will that they have a service component…

Manton:

I will, yeah. [laughter]

Daniel:

But I honestly I don’t think that that plays into it. I don’t think typical users are thinking through the mechanics of how software works. I suppose at one point you know somebody could have made an argument that people aren’t going to pay money for software anymore because you don’t get a box and it doesn’t come with a CD-ROM and there’s no physical thing there. But we made that leap and we got to the point where it was like, okay, now people are paying $600 for an Adobe download.

This is always going to be changing. How software is marketed, how it’s priced, what people are willing to pay for it, how they get it. And I don’t think the technicalities of whether there’s a running server process on a web host somewhere has as much to do with it as you think it does. I think it’s just, point blank, does this do things I want and am I willing to pay for it.

You and I, we do customer support for our customers. A lot of them don’t understand the intricacies of how software is delivered and how it’s installed. They just know that it gets on their device somehow and then they use it. All of your arguments are totally valid about this sort of mindset of this classic traditional, savvy computer user. And I think we have to keep in mind, more and more, these ideas about how we think software is supposed to be sold and delivered. You know every year there’s a whole new class of adults who comes into purchasing power who has never known some of these old ways of selling software.

I think there’re problems with subscription pricing, but I don’t think if you took an average sampling of people, I don’t think that… I guess I have to admit I would be really curious to know what an average sampling of people would think about it. But I just don’t think that they would be going to the sophisticated analysis that you are, as much as you think.

Manton:

I agree they wouldn’t have that analysis exactly, but again their instinct — their first reaction — would be this app is good for subscriptions and this app is not. Again, no one is shocked if they go to Spotify that it’s a subscription. No one would say this should be a flat one dollar forever charge. It’s just accepted that, yes, this type of app is a subscription product. And the opposite is true for a text editor. The default assumption for people is that it’s a one-time fee and maybe they have to pay again later at some point, but they get to keep using that app.

And that’s another distinction that’s worth pointing out: there’re a lot of different ways to do subscriptions. Right now we’re talking about automatically recurring subscriptions where you pay per month or per year and at the end of that period it renews and you can’t use the app after it expires. That’s what we’re talking about. There’re other kinds that people have experimented with too, though.

For example, Sketch — great vector drawing app that I love — that is kind of subscriptions, but not really. It’s more like a support contract where you pay for a year and you get updates. After that year, you don’t get updates anymore. But the app doesn’t stop working. You can still keep using it.

And that’s kind of a middle-ground that I know a couple developers have experimented with, and I think for certain types of apps that works really well. I think for Sketch that works really well, especially because their competition is in the fully recurring — you know I’m talking about Adobe — fully recurring, automatic renewal subscriptions. They are almost there but not quite. Their app is less expensive. It’s better for some people. And so I think that fits that market really well. But there’re a couple different ways to do this and traditionally the recurring subscriptions has not been used for apps like Ulysses. It’s just rare to see an app like that have that kind of business model.

Again, with TextExpander, like you hinted at, my argument there would be: first of all, they still have the standalone version that you can buy; and second of all, when they introduced subscriptions they have a team version that syncs your snippets to all your computers. Same thing for just you using it solo or with a couple of people. And so they introduced the business model change with the addition of new features that were enabled by subscriptions. And that’s the distinction of where I draw the line there.

Daniel:

Yeah. Obviously there’s been more apps doing this kind of subscription, or like you said with Sketch, kind of a semi-subscription approach. And I guess I’m just not going to be too surprised if after a few years, whatever this sort of hunch that you think people have that something is or isn’t suitable for subscriptions, that they’ll just kind of get over it. I guess that’s the bottom line. Does this reflect a sort of market necessity, or is it just kind of like a whim.

I guess we’ll be able to watch a dueling example of this playing out because one of the competitors to Ulysses is Scrivener. And as I was reading the responses to Ulysses going subscription, I saw at least one customer saying this kind of snarky comment like, “Thanks for making my decision to switch to Scrivener.” And in fact if you go to the Scrivener forums, one of their customers asks point blank, “Are you switching to…” Or they said, “Please don’t switch to a subscription model.” And the Scrivener developers, they answered very bluntly saying, “We don’t want to switch to a subscription model.” They put a flag in the ground for traditional purchase one version, pay for upgrades, etc… So I guess we’ll be able to see as time goes forward which one of these models works best, or if they both work, and how it affects customers' happiness.

Manton:

Right. And this is a really neat example that we have because there’s this contrast. Both those apps are different, certainly, but they both appeal to writers, and so there’s certainly overlap. Some people love both apps and use them for different purposes. The business model is now very different. And with Scrivener I think it’s $45 for the Mac version. Add on some more for the iOS version. But that’s a one-time fee. So if someone uses that app for five years, let’s say, they’re going to be paying much, much less than Ulysses. Probably roughly one-fifth the price.

Doesn’t matter in the short term so much. And subscriptions are also nice because you can start using an app with a very low investment of just the monthly fee. But in the long run if that continues, people will notice the price difference and they’ll think about it.

And the reason I’m coming from this side of things is that I am a little concerned that… This subscription fatigue thing. I really do think it’s real. I think people will be burned out on subscriptions if all apps are subscription-based. I think that will be a big problem for the market and just the industry in general. And as someone who is trying to build a business that can only work with subscriptions, I have no choice. It has to be subscription-based because of the hosting costs of running a social network and a blogging platform.

I’m a little concerned that people will be burned out and I don’t want them to drop my service. I want them to drop something else if they decide they have to cut their monthly expenses.

We’ll see how it plays out; it’s super early. I was just listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast, and they briefly addressed this in one of their Q&A episodes. The consensus on the show was the market will sort of out, don’t worry. If too many people charge for subscriptions and users are burned out, they’ll stop buying those apps and those apps will have to die or change their business model.

They weren’t worried. I am more worried than that. I think there is a concern. We’ll just have to see if that is valid. I know developers right now are looking at Ulysses, and if it works for them, they will copy it. That’s going to work for some people and not for others.

Daniel:

You know when it comes down to it, part of this subscription thing is developers, actually starting to demand payment for what they do.

Manton:

[laughter] Yeah.

Daniel:

And you know, when you look at people like me… It’s funny, the Scrivener folks say in their post as well that it’s been seven years since they had a major upgrade. And I look at that and I think, Ulysses can switch to subscription pricing and they can charge $40 a year. If you compare that with Scrivener, they can have seven times fewer users and still make the same amount of money.

A lot of us who are amateur at business, we have this problem: we neglect to ask and demand payment for the true value of our work. Part of the problem when you go indie, and you go from having a well-paid job to maybe making half of that and hopefully trying to get back up to where you’re making the same amount of money you were for the big job. Part of that disparity of income is I think a failure to demand payment for what what your work is worth.

And so I think it may be an extreme that going to this $40 a year might be an extreme counterbalance to that, but I think it’s an example of pushing back in the other direction. I think it’s fair to say people who have been using Scrivener for seven years, having paid for it once for $40… Whatever that amount per year is is not a fair compensation for the work. So somewhere in the middle maybe. If it’s going to come down to a test of whether a business model that asks for $40 a year wins or a business model that asks $40 every seven years wins, the subscription pricing is going to win. That’s ultimately going to keep the product better maintained and better developed. It’s going to cause users to like it more.

And I don’t know the subscription fatigue thing, I agree, but most users don’t need like 20 apps — 20 paid apps, anyway. I have some subscription fatigue for things like Netflix. I only have Netflix and then I added HBO. And I have my Apple Music subscription. I’m not going to go subscribe to all of Apple Music and Spotify and whatever else — Tital or whatever else. But I am willing to add subscriptions for things that bring me new value that I can justify.

And I think that people are going to be the same way with with apps. Maybe there’s only five apps I want to subscribe and pay for, but I’m going to pay for those. If every user out there subscribed and paid for five apps at $40 a year we would be doing pretty well as a software industry.

Manton:

So Daniel, you make some good points about subscriptions, and I also think that you’re right in a way that maybe subscriptions for these types of apps — that I personally think is pushing the limits — it is at one extreme, and maybe we’ll come back into the middle a little bit. Because of course I completely agree that apps should not go without revenue for seven years, and that’s not really the user’s fault, exactly. Developers should be more disciplined about… I’m trying to say that without insulting anyone, including my co-host.

Daniel:

Anyone on this show. [laughter]

Manton:

But that’s too long, we can all agree. If your if your model is paid upgrades, maybe you can go that long if you have a successful app, but you shouldn’t. You should go at most two or three years before doing a paid upgrade. That’s a reasonable amount of time. Especially for Mac software, you’re not going to get any one-star reviews if you do a paid upgrade after three years. People understand that there’s going to be a paid upgrade at some point, most likely.

So maybe there’s a middle ground there. Maybe this is pushing the limits. As you were talking about you just want to pay for Netflix, but not Hulu and HBO and Apple Music and all these other things, I think there’s a parallel to the app world here as well, and it’s Setapp.

We’ve talked about this a little bit on the show, but Setapp is like the cable package for people who don’t want to buy one-off subscription services. We pay for Netflix, we pay for HBO, we pay for Hulu, we pay for Playstation Vue, we pay for all these things. And at some point you kind of want to consolidate that into a cable-like package where you’re paying one company and you’re getting a lot of things. And we don’t quite have that in the streaming world and we don’t certainly have that in the developer world, but Setapp is that model where it’s a subscription but you pay for many things at once, so that you’re not burned out on paying 20 different developers $4 a month.

Daniel:

Yeah, I think it’s a great argument if you say what if you had to pay for a subscription for each of the shows that you watch on TV. There’s a logical extreme where obviously it’s not going to work, and maybe that’s an example where the ATP argument that the market will figure it out comes into play. I mean there’s just no way I would pay… Imagining that scenario is a bad scene because I think in practice what would happen is that I would just stop watching TV. So it’s bad news for the TV makers if you follow that same argument. If I have to pay for each of the shows that I relatively religiously watch now then I would find a new hobby, I guess. And maybe software buyers would likewise… I don’t know what they’d do. Maybe they’d switched to writing with a typewriter or something.

It’s going to be interesting to see because I don’t know if Setapp is exactly the right solution. I really applaud them… They’ve really tackled this experiment with gusto, and it sort of seems like it’s working for them. It doesn’t seem like it’s working nearly as well as they had anticipated, from what I’ve picked up. I saw some links talking about how much they’ve sponsored and how many big events they’ve sponsored, and you sort of start doing the math on it and it doesn’t really sound like it’s… I wish I had it all at the tip of my fingers, but some other information came out where it showed I think that they had shared their subscription count and doing the math on it it sort of seemed like, well that sounds like not a great deal.

You actually saw some concrete evidence of how well they’re doing on Dan Counsell’s blog. It’s his Micro.blog-hosted blog as it happens, and he shared his numbers for RapidWeaver. Actually RapidWeaver and Squash, two of his apps, but I have to assume RapidWeaver is by far the greater revenue source in this case.

Both of them are in Setapp. We don’t know a ton about how Setapp developers are compensated except for it’s been shared that it’s sort of proportional to the price of the app standalone. RapidWeaver is not one of the lower-priced apps in Setapp, so I would have to assume Dan Counsell’s cut is higher than many participants in Setapp. So keep that in mind, but he shares his numbers and he points out that the numbers are actually going up. Fairly fairly quickly, really, over a few months. In May, he says he took $1446 from Setapp, and in August it’s up to $1913. Which is a great growth rate if you just look at it in isolation. However, I’m not sure that reflects a great overall business numbers from Setapp, if you consider that he’s probably being compensated better than many app developers in the program.

Let’s say generously that he can look forward to you know $30,000 a year in revenue from Setapp in the near future. And if that’s true, boy that’s really great if it’s extra money, if it’s not eating into his sales, etc. But this is being looked at as the future of software, it’s not great. $30,000 a year is not great for most developers in the U.S. at least trying to make a living off of software. And particularly for an app like RapidWeaver that I have to imagine — if not now then definitely in its heyday — was making way more than $30,000 a year. I imagine it still is making multiples of that per year.

So I don’t I don’t expect Setapp to be mature and to the point where it does fulfill this dream of keeping developers fully employed by participating in the program. But I do think this is evidence. This is middle evidence. This is evidence that there’s real money coming through Setapp, and it’s also evidence that it’s not a real great amount of money.

Manton:

Right, and I haven’t seen too many real numbers, but this is consistent with what we’ve heard — even some people in the Core Intuition Slack, who are on Setapp, have said — which is it’s some extra money. It’s not, “I can’t shut down my direct sales or my Mac App Store sales and just use Setapp”, but it’s money coming in. It’s growing. And the consensus I hear is, “I’m willing to just let it grow and see what happens”, because it’s extra money.

You’re kind of hedging your bets by being in Setapp because whether you sell directly and have paid upgrades as RapidWeaver has had for quite some time — and I know they’ve had some big successful paid upgrades that they’ve blogged about — or whether you’re taking Ulysses’s approach or TextExpander or 1Password, those kind of approaches with subscriptions. In case your primary bet doesn’t work out, if Setapp grows, that’s extra revenue that will appeal to a different set of users. If someone is burned out on subscriptions or they’re tired of paying paid upgrades or they don’t want to pay $45 at once for the app, and they go to Setapp, they are still your customers, which is nice.

I feel like Setapp, in a lot of ways I think people have been a little too negative about it, and maybe the expectations at the beginning were just too great for it. But if Setapp sticks with it, and develops stick with it, and it keeps growing, I think there’s something there. It doesn’t need to take over the world, but it could still be a nice bit of extra revenue for developers that are there.

Daniel:

It’s interesting because one of the apps in Setapp is none other than Ulysses. So you get this interesting situation where if a few more of these Setapp apps start offering subscription pricing on their own, then you get to the situation where if you’ve got three $40 a year apps then you do start to face that point. If I were subscribing to Ulysses and let’s say RapidWeaver had its own subscription, and Screens is on here. If I was subscribing to each of those independently, I would be paying more at that point than the Setapp price.

Manton:

Is the Setapp price $10 a month, or $20?

Daniel:

$10 a month.

Manton:

So it would only take a couple subscriptions individually to say, “Well, maybe I’ll just use Setapp instead.”

Daniel:

If that happens, that’s going to be an interesting example of where developers might suffer. A lot of this hinges on the Setapp model not taking money away from the developers. So if you’re in a situation where you’ve got three people paying $40 a year each for three apps that are also Setapp, if that individual gives up those subscriptions in favor of Setapp then suddenly those three developers are making a ton less money.

At some point I don’t know whether this Setapp setup is going to be something these folks want to stay in. And I can see for example Ulysses being in Setapp as sort of a way to get some subscription money before they had chosen to go that route route.

I don’t know if we’ve seen an example yet — if we have, I don’t think it’s been highly publicized — but I don’t think we’ve seen an example yet of companies leaving Setapp. I wonder if some of them will be compelled to if doing the subscriptions themselves is a better deal.

Actually, Blogo is in here, which is one of my competitors, and it’s also I think exclusively a subscription app on its own. And they made the switch a year or two ago. But that’s another example where it’s like okay, get a few of these and if you’re paying for them separately of course you’re going to go switch to Setapp, save some money, but then I don’t know. There’s going to be some friction there if that happens.

Manton:

And it’s complicated because you say of course you’re going to switch, but most people don’t know about Setapp. And I think most developers are not pushing it prominently even though there’s an advantage to pushing it a little bit because there’s some some complicated math there with referral numbers but RapidWeaver as an example, it’s a $90 app. I know they have regular paid upgrades that are probably half that or less. So, pretty expensive app. But I know they have tons of users that love the app, really well respected app. When you go to RapidWeaver — RealMacSoftware.com — you buy it directly or from the Mac App Store, it’s $90. It doesn’t say, huge button that says Setapp.

Actually if you scroll way down to the bottom there is a referral link to Setapp. Buried way, way at the bottom — in the footer of the page — but I think most people are going to buy direct from the developer or through the Mac App Store and Setapp is not going to hurt the general sales. If it does, it’ll be a real small percentage of people I think.

It gets complicated though. There’s certainly the thing that we’ve talked about before which is if your competitor is in Setapp, and a potential user knows about a Setapp, they may just use your competitor’s app because it’s Setapp without having to pay extra, versus going to your site. There’s a lot of ramifications for these different models competing.

Daniel:

I wonder if there’s a rule on being in Setapp if you have to link to them. I’m looking now on Edovia’s Screens for Mac, and it’s a similar type of deal. It says download trial, buy now, and then as part of the little text underneath it says Screens is also available on the Mac App Store and Setapp. Does the Ulysses app have a link?

Manton:

That’s a good question. Let’s check. And even if it’s not a rule because of the referral money, there’s an incentive to just put a link anywhere, somewhere, even if it’s not super prominent.

Daniel:

Yeah. I don’t see anything about it on the Ulysses page, so maybe it’s not a requirement. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that both of those had it.

I think Setapp, back when they were first coming out, we had this discussion. I don’t think this is exactly the right solution what they have right now, but I think they are set up to be in a position to provide what could be the right solution. And I think it’s going to be when that friction — you know, let’s assume they get successful enough that that friction occurs, where enough people know about Setapp to know that they can go to Setapp and then that doesn’t work out as well for the developers. I think what Setapp could do is be in the business of providing basically the equivalent of cable mini-packages. If you could put together your a la carte list of apps and say, “Okay, I want these five apps let’s say, and I’m willing to pay for these five apps for $10 a month.” Obviously at that point it would have to be apps that are included in the main Setapp bundle. They would be in a really strong position then because they can capitalize on that problem we were talking about, hich is I don’t want to pay for each show separately. But at the same time they can also give their developers a more substantial cut because you’d be selling a smaller number of apps that it’s obvious the customer really wants those apps.

Manton:

Right. I think you’re right that they’re well positioned to do something and to fill whatever this hole ends up looking like in the market. The key to me is they shouldn’t give up. Developers shouldn’t give up like just see this through. Even if a developer is not making very much money, it’s probably mostly free money. It’s probably not hurting your direct sales too much, so just see it through and then six months later, 12 months later, re-evaluate and we’ll re-evaluate on the show too how we think it’s going. But this feels like it’s something, but it needs time to develop and mature.

Daniel:

Yes, I think so. I think we’re going to see a lot of stuff happening over the next year, especially. Seems like the subscription idea is percolating. Setapp is there as an example of something different that somebody is trying. Maybe we’ll see something new yet still.

I kind of wish I wasn’t due for a major upgrade, because I wish I could sit back and watch and see what works. But I think I’m just going to have to push forward and get my get my app out. Probably sell it the old-fashioned way.

A few years ago, Daniel and I launched Core Intuition Jobs, a site for companies to post job listings for Mac and iOS developers. It was a really nice success. At one point I thought we might even focus more time on it, and expand it with a companion site of resources to help developers.

Fast forward a year or two, though, and it became clear that without that attention, the site couldn’t just coast along. New listings were becoming more infrequent. The site needed marketing and regular improvements, just like any product.

And worse, while the whole point was to build something just for Cocoa developers, the site would still sometimes receive job listings for Java or Python developers, for example, and we’d need to refund the listing and remove it from the site. It wasn’t a lot of maintenance, but it was enough that we had to decide whether to put more work into the site or focus on our main podcast and other projects.

This week we decided it was time to move on. Existing job listings will continue to run until they expire. No new jobs are being accepted.

Thanks to all the companies who used Core Intuition Jobs. Now when we are asked about other places to post jobs, we’re pointing people to the email newsletters iOS Dev Weekly and This Week in Swift, as well as Core Intuition podcast sponsorships. Good luck to everyone looking for a new job!

We just posted Core Intuition episode 287, following up on Chris Lattner, WWDC, and Uber. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton react to Chris Lattner's early departure from Tesla, and segue into speculation about his job prospects, and the challenges of effective technical interviews. They talk about the new frameworks announced at WWDC, and overcoming fear of incompetence when learning new things. Finally, they react to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's resignation, and think about what’s next for the company.

Thanks for listening. If you’re new to the show, you can subscribe in iTunes or Overcast.

We just posted a new episode of Core Intuition. From the show notes:

Manton and Daniel compare notes on recent MacBook Pro repairs and the relative merit of purchasing AppleCare. They react to Tim Cook’s admissions that an Apple “car” project exists and is still underway. Manton looks on the bright side of “Planet of the Apps,” and Daniel looks on the dark side. Finally, they talk briefly about the controversy around an excerpt from “One Device,” by Brian Merchant.

There’s still a lot to cover from WWDC. It’s a good time to be a Mac or iOS developer.

On Core Intuition last week, I said San Jose was “more confined” than San Francisco. I meant that mostly as a good thing, although I do miss the open spaces in San Francisco: the parks and incredible views near the water. Gus Mueller has a post about how San Jose felt closer together and less crowded:

In San Jose you had a clear view of the sidewalks and you generally knew who was a developer and who was a local. And because it wasn't so crowded, you ran into people all the time. You didn't have to organize meetups, you just kind of went out and you knew you'd run into someone to hang with.

Gus was also a guest with Marco Arment on The Run Loop podcast. They talked a lot about the different feel of WWDC in San Jose. Seems a universal opinion that San Jose is a good fit.

We posted a new Core Intuition this week about WWDC. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton catch upon WWDC, and Manton’s ailing MacBook Pro. They talk about new hardware announcements and react to highlights from the Keynote. Manton laments Apple’s continued, slow progress with SiriKit, and Daniel is frustrated that HomePod is not a Wifi hub. Finally, they talk about iOS Drag and Drop and compare it with Apple’s traditional tendency to move slowly but surely into the future.

After we recorded, I watched the first episode of Planet of the Apps, and started to get into more of the conference session videos. We’ll be following up next week on more from WWDC.

We just posted episode 283 of Core Intuition, with thoughts on last week’s JSON Feed announcement and more. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton discuss the new JSON Feed format and initial public reaction to it. They talk about Panic’s source code being stolen, and Daniel celebrates/laments his new MacBook Pro.

Brent Simmons was also interviewed on Collin Donnell’s new podcast, The Run Loop. Brent talks about some of his previous apps like NetNewsWire and Glassboard. Then they cover what JSON Feed is and where it could go.

After a couple months away from Timetable, because I’ve been focusing so much of my time working on Micro.blog, I’ve finally returned to the microcast for a sort of second season. Timetable will be published daily now, Monday through Friday, to chronicle the actual release of Micro.blog and the Indie Microblogging book.

Episodes 38 and 39 are out now. You can subscribe in Overcast or iTunes.

We published Core Int 277 today with thoughts on the Mac Pro and more. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton react to Apple’s surprisingly transparent “roundtable” meeting with several members of the press, and celebrate the many positive signals coming out of the event. They engage in a friendly debate about the likelihood that Mac users will defect to Windows. Finally, they talk about the merits of professional software, and the negative impacts that a poor market for such software may be having on iOS as a platform.

As I say on the episode, I wouldn’t have been disappointed if Apple had officially discontinued the Mac Pro, as long as that meant a greater focus on other things for pro users. I’d like for Apple to have a Mac-based answer for Microsoft’s tablets and Surface Studio, for example.

Last Friday we published Core Intuition 275. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton talk about Manton’s decision to hire Jean MacDonald as Micro.blog’s Community Manager, and the psychological effects of transitioning from a single to multi-person company. They also react to this week’s Apple announcements, focusing mainly on Apple’s new Clips app and how it relates to Apple’s historic focus on facilitating user creativity.

This episode captures the biggest shift for my business since I left my regular job a couple years ago. I’m also hoping to resume my Timetable podcast soon, since there’s more I’d like to talk about that won’t always fit into Core Intuition.

Earlier this month I flew up to Portland for a few days. It was a great trip. I posted about attending the Blazers game and meeting the IndieWeb group at the DreamHost office. I also sat down with Jean MacDonald to talk about what she has been up to and show her what I’ve been building for Micro.blog.

Today I sent an update to Kickstarter backers about the stretch goal promise I made to hire a community manager. I couldn’t be happier to announce that Jean MacDonald will be helping me in the next steps for Micro.blog.

It became clear as I’ve been talking with Jean that she will add so much to the project. Making the announcement today has inspired me even more to finish rolling out Micro.blog and to see where the community takes it.

On last week’s Core Intuition, I told Daniel that the approach for Micro.blog has to be different than for my previous apps. It’s such a big opportunity that if I don’t focus everything on it, then it will not work. I covered the same theme in a post last month:

I’ve realized as I work toward launching Micro.blog that this product is different. It has a much greater scope than anything I’ve built by myself. To be successful, it needs a team.

No single decision will guarantee success. But today’s announcement is a big milestone for Micro.blog because it’s more than a promise or hope for things to come. Jean’s experience will be essential to guiding the community and moving the platform forward.

Back in July, I posted this to my microblog, which was cross-posted to Twitter for some additional discussion:

Not shocked that Swift classes won’t be subclassable by default. But it underscores Swift’s priorities. And for that reason, I’m out.

The “I’m out” was meant as a Shark Tank reference, and not to be taken too seriously. But I was serious about taking a break from Swift until version 4, when it would at least be more stable. Daniel and I followed up that week with a more in-depth discussion on Core Intuition 242.

A few days ago Craig Hockenberry posted about how the rapid pace of improvements to Swift can get in the way of learning the language and using example code:

It’s gotten to the point where every time I come across some information written in Swift, especially on Stack Overflow, I cringe. I know that I’m going to have to not only figure out the code, but also which version was used for the answer.

I have absolutely no regrets sticking to Objective-C. As Swift 3 was wrapping up, it seemed that the churn around syntax changes was even worse than I feared. From an Apple dev forums thread at the time:

For the expected quality of software in a third-generation project in late Beta, Swift 3 has become a trainwreck of Microsoftian proportions--at least in terms of process and expectation. Many of us devs are spending 90% of our time not developing our app, but babysitting Swift and trying to understand so many unvetted changes.

That settled down with the final Swift 3 release, but I expect many developers won’t upgrade from Swift 2.3 until Xcode forces them to. There’s even a whole book by Erica Sadun on migrating code.

I still consider Swift a beta language. I just hope that the Swift team and community recognize that this level of instability isn’t acceptable forever. A programming language is not an iOS or macOS release. There shouldn’t be a new major version of Swift every year.

I’m taking some time to resume Timetable recording. From the latest episode:

Now that the Kickstarter campaign has wrapped up, I move to the next phase of getting Micro.blog ready, planning for invites, and focusing on the Slack community.

I started Timetable over a year ago to document what it was like to build Micro.blog and figure out how to launch it. Each episode is about 4-5 minutes long. Reaching this point with the Kickstarter finished is a huge milestone, but there is plenty of work still to do and talk about.

We posted this week’s Core Intuition today, with the latest Apple developer news and a debate on Alexa vs. Siri:

Manton closes in on the last week of his Kickstarter, and Daniel catches up on his progress. They discuss new beta updates from Apple for both Mac and iOS. They react to Apple’s forthcoming review prompting system for iOS, and the ability for developers to respond to reviews on both Mac and iOS. Finally, they debate the merits of Siri vs. Alexa on grounds of reliability and viability as an international, long-term success.

I haven’t kept up with Timetable recordings lately, but hope to do another one before the Kickstarter campaign wraps up too. Thanks for listening.

This week on Core Intuition, Daniel and I talk about the halfway point to my Kickstarter campaign, running ads, and more:

Manton talks about marketing for the Kickstarter, how many people watch the video, and how to transition from marketing the passionate philosophical backers, to making a case for the sheer utility of the product. They talk about modern advertising technology that allows hyper-focused delivery, and follow up on Chris Lattner's departure from Apple, and the exciting opportunities he will likely have at Tesla.

The last segment of the show is about Chris Lattner going to Tesla. We recorded before we listened to the latest ATP, but our conversation still holds up as pretty relevant. Hope you enjoy it.

This isn’t the first time that David Smith has built something that I kind of wanted to build myself, too. Today he announced a cool side project for searching podcast audio:

You can easily search for a term or keyword and then play the actual audio back to find if it was the section you were thinking about. I even tag the sections with timecoded Overcast links for easy sharing.

I’d love to see David spin this into either a commercial product or set of free tools. He could host more shows, or let podcasters run their shows through PodSearch and export the results. For example, I’d want this for Core Intuition, along with edited transcripts eventually.

I started my microcast Timetable a little over one year ago. I’ve recorded 35 episodes, so fewer than 1 a week. My goal is still 2-3 a week, so hopefully I’ll work up to that for 2017.

This podcast is one of my favorite things to do right now. It’s so much easier to record and publish a 5-minute podcast than a 1-hour podcast. All I need is something to talk about.

Here are the feed descriptions for each episode over the last year, starting with the earliest. Reviewing these provides a neat snapshot into the journey of building Micro.blog. You can subscribe at timetable.fm.

1: On the first episode, I introduce the idea behind the show and the topics I hope to cover.

2: On this episode, I talk about trying tea instead of coffee, how I named this podcast, and my work schedule as I wrap up the week.

3: On this episode, I talk about finishing some work and the new iPhone microphone I bought.

4: This morning I was downtown to work at a coffee shop for a few hours before lunch. I talk about getting out of the house and last night’s icon sketches.

5: Today I stopped at the post office to pick up some stamps to mail stickers for the new microblogging app and platform I’m working on.

6: I start with some thoughts on basketball, my potential Kickstarter campaign, and whether it’s better to start strong or finish strong. (Go Spurs Go!)

7: This morning I was distracted a little with backups, ordering a new hard drive, and thinking about my iOS app, which was just rejected by Apple.

8: Recorded in 3 segments, I set my alarm early this morning to get some coding done before the day starts slipping away.

9: Today I mention the iPhone app rejection, talk about why the iPhone app itself is secondary to the web version, and reveal more about the Kickstarter.

10: I take the iPad Pro and my microphone out to the front porch, to think through what work I need to focus on for today.

11: Back from a sick day or two, I talk today about Twitter’s algorithmic timeline change and why it would be nice to launch a product when your competitor has some bad news.

12: Back from a quick trip to Portland, today I’m thinking about the music for my Kickstarter project.

13: I finally drop the stickers in the mailbox at our neighborhood post office. Thinking this episode about what it means to be lucky.

14: At my 10th new coffee shop in as many days, I write a few blog posts. And on this episode I talk about it.

15: I reflect on 6 months as an indie, think about stealing time for projects, and plan how I can use working from a coffee shop in the morning to provide a better structure to my day.

16: This week I’m thinking back on how Staple! Expo went over the weekend, and why it never helps to panic when something isn’t going perfectly to plan.

17: It’s spring break week, which means the kids are out of school and SXSW is taking over downtown.

18: I’m playing Nintendo’s new iPhone app Miitomo, watching my Mii character pace around the room as he (and I) wait for our iPhone SE delivery. Also talk about the library routine and Rails 5.

19: I finally record a video for my Kickstarter project. Now I just need to edit it and do everything else.

20: I talk about receiving the Loish art book and my current thoughts on Kickstarter goals and rewards.

21: Today I take stock of the last few weeks of client work and recovering from 2 months of focusing so heavily on my personal blog.

22: Last week was stressful. This episode is about being mad at nothing and everything, and why fireflies are magical.

23: I play a clip from the Upgrade podcast and then talk about my struggle to wind down a product correctly.

24: I summarize my week in San Francisco from the perspective of not just the WWDC technical news and events, but also of using the trip to refocus on my priorities for Riverfold Software.

25: Back after a summer break, on this episode I talk through what we can learn from Tim Duncan’s incredible 19-year career.

26: I talk about getting derailed with home repairs, the U.S. presidential election, and writing about the Dash controversy.

27: One week after the election, I react to Apple’s design book announcement and talk about why social networks may be broken.

28: Not enough sleep yet still focused on getting work done. I review today’s blog post and play a clip from the Moana soundtrack.

29: I got a new domain! I talk about the .blog registration process and my evolving plans.

30: From a listener question, I talk about steps in November to wrap up old projects and finish new ones.

31: I try the new WeWork location at the Domain, listen to a singer at the car dealership, and remember that I need to get out to talk to real people about my work.

32: I share some thoughts on the first day of Super Mario Run and how my work week is wrapping up.

33: The morning after Christmas, I give a quick update on Micro.blog plans and Kickstarter’s Launch Now review feature.

34: Happy New Year! I talk about the first day of the year, and the final day to finish my Kickstarter project for Micro.blog.

35: A week after launching the Kickstarter, I talk about its success so far and why I believe I can build Micro.blog, with a clip about optimism from Gary Vaynerchuk.

Yesterday morning I woke up early, after not enough sleep, and flipped the switch to launch my Kickstarter project. I’ve been amazed at the response, seeing it funded on the first day. If you backed it or shared a link with friends, thank you. It meant a lot to see so many people embracing the idea.

I’ve backed 18 projects on Kickstarter but never created one myself, so I didn’t know what to expect. Was the funding goal too high? Too low? Even at the last minute I was noticing problems with the video and wished I had more time to improve it.

But I really wanted to launch something new at the beginning of 2017. I settled on January 2nd a couple of weeks ago and decided to stick with it. I announced the date on Core Intuition. I booked a sponsorship slot on 512 Pixels to lock myself into the date. I gave my mailing list an early heads-up that it was coming. I even set a promoted tweet to run, for some reason. (And I quietly deleted some other advertising ideas from my OmniFocus list, because I just ran out of time to pursue them.)

Today, I took a few minutes to re-listen to episode 34 of my short podcast Timetable, which I had published on Sunday, the day before launching on Kickstarter. It’s fascinating to me in the context of the success of the project so far, and in general people’s positive reaction to the video, because I think you can hear the doubt in my voice about it. I was not confident.

And I felt the same way yesterday morning, staring at the “0 backers” text on Kickstarter for a little while, wondering if maybe I had rushed it out without enough planning. That’s a really bizarre feeling. It’s much different than selling traditional Mac or iOS software.

Right now I’m feeling incredibly lucky to have the chance to launch this project — to see it spread and to hear everyone’s feedback and ideas. I have a bunch of work to do. And I have new features that I wanted to build for Micro.blog which I haven’t announced yet, which now it looks like I’ll be able to prioritize.

I’ll have more thoughts soon. In the meantime, I’ve been answering questions on Kickstarter and email, and I’ll be sending a project update later today to all backers with details on what comes next. Thanks again for your support!

My content is all on this blog or linked from it, but if you’re following RSS feeds or Twitter it’s not as obvious where everything is posted. Here’s a summary to clear things up.

Microblog posts: Posted here and in a special RSS feed. Also automatically cross-posted to Twitter and App.net, with some occasional truncation.

Longer posts: Posted here and in the default RSS feed. Also automatically cross-posted to Twitter and App.net with the title and link. Twitter cross-posting is handled by my upcoming Micro.blog platform.

Photos: Posted to Instagram and then copied here using this workflow. They don’t show up in either of the RSS feeds above. They’re not cross-posted to Twitter.

Timetable: Posted to timetable.fm which has its own feed. Discoverable in your favorite podcast client.

Core Intuition: Posted to coreint.org. I’ll usually post a link here on the blog for each new episode.

All posts: Switching to WordPress brought a new global RSS feed, but I redirect it to the longer posts for now. There’s a new everything RSS feed which contains all posts: microblog, full posts, and photos. Enjoy!

We published episode 262 of Core Intuition today. It’s December already, so we’ve inevitably been thinking about unfinished projects as the year wraps up. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton talk about coping with disappointment of failing to achieve goals in an expected length of time, recognize the differing demands of building software for different markets, and talk about tricks for managing lack of enthusiasm for finishing projects. Finally, they answer a listener question about how to get started with consulting, and planning for maintaining a suitable income when you “quit your day job.”

Thanks as always for listening to the show.

As I talked about on Timetable, now that I have the micro.blog domain I get to figure out what to do with it. And what I’m hearing from friends and listeners is clear: throw out my jumble of Snippets-related names and use Micro.blog as the brand for the platform. It’s obvious now.

Renaming a product before its official launch may not seem like a big deal, but in this case it gives the app a new importance. Just by renaming it, the app feels more ambitious. It forces me to devote more attention to it, which means saying goodbye to some of my other web apps that I can no longer focus on.

I have a difficult time shutting down failing products. Over the weekend, I took some much-needed steps to finish winding down Watermark and Searchpath. I’ll be sending an email this week to everyone who has used Searchpath with the details.

For Searchpath, I had procrastinated making a decision because even simple steps like closing new account registrations requires actually writing code and deploying changes. The index on my Elasticsearch server had grown to 90 GB, including Watermark as well. I needed a clean way to reset it and migrate the small number of active paid accounts somewhere else, to give customers time to find a new solution.

I’ve tried a few technologies for search over the years. The first version of Watermark used Sphinx, which I loved but became a scaling issue with its default need to completely reindex MySQL data. Eventually I moved to self-hosted Elasticsearch, but I had to keep feeding it RAM as the index grew. It was never stable enough with my limited skills.

As I noted in my post about Talkshow.im, there’s no perfect way to admit defeat and clean up the mess left by a web app. It’s always a balance of responsibilities — to your own business and to your customers.

But again, the way forward is clear. I should put everything into launching and growing my new microblog platform. It’s too much to maintain other web apps at the same time.

Yesterday we published episode 260 of Core Intuition. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton discuss Sal Soghoian’s sudden departure from Apple, and what it may mean for Apple’s future ambitions with automation. Then they react to Apple’s alleged decision to abandon their line of AirPort branded routers, and bemoan the loss of yet another “just buy the Apple one” peripheral option

I liked the topics for our show this week because it allowed us to not just talk about AppleScript as it exists today, but also to reflect on what life developing scriptable apps was like in the early days of AppleScript. It’s always fun to think back on 1990s Mac development.

Many of our listeners are celebrating Thanksgiving today. To all of our listeners, whether you’ve listened since the beginning in 2008 or just recently discovered the podcast, thank you so much for giving our show a chance and for being part of the community. Daniel and I still feel incredibly lucky that we get to chat every week about Apple news and our work as indie developers.

Daniel and I covered a few topics on Core Intuition 259 yesterday, but the closing segment about the Apple design book — and indirectly, the election — was particularly interesting to me. I decided to transcribe part of the conversation. Here it is, lightly edited.

Daniel:

Alright Manton, I know what a fan you are of lavish Apple products designed for the rich. [laughter] I know therefore you have probably already placed a pre-order for the Apple Book Edition.

Manton:

Is the Edition the $300 one?

Daniel:

Yeah, the $300 one is the Edition. The $200 one is the Edition Lite. [more laughter]

Manton:

So Apple announced this book yesterday, and I believe orders are being accepted today. It’s just this very beautiful, well-produced “we worked 8 years on this” book of essentially product photos.

And I think there’s an introduction with Jony Ive. There’s a video from him that is a classic Jony Ive video about a product.

I’ve blogged about this a little bit, and actually talked about this on my microcast, Timetable. Red flags are going off for me with this product for a few reasons.

The first is, we’re a week out from the election. A lot of us are bummed out and trying to make sense of the world, and Apple releases a book of product photos. It seems out of touch. I don’t understand why they did this right now.

And the other thing, I just hit on something that bothered me about this book. I have a lot of books in this house. Bookshelves and bookshelves full of books. My wife hates the fact that I have every book that I’ve ever bought. I have a lot of books and I have a lot of art books. In a previous life I wanted to an artist, an animator. I have a lot of art books.

And so this is right up my alley, right? I love old stuff. I love art books. Why don’t I want to buy this?

And I think the reason is, unlike most art books, which are about… They’re about the artist as much as the art. And this book is just photos of iMacs.

This isn’t about the designers. And maybe there’s something in the book that I’m missing. That when I hold it I’ll say, “Oh, this book is amazing.” But I feel like this book is not quite right. It’s not about the designers.

I want to know about the designers at Apple, and why they made their choices. I don’t need this well-lit photo of the inside of a Mac Mini. There’s something missing with what they’ve done here.

Daniel:

You know, I agree with you. What you said just now is interesting to me in a few different ways. One of them is — and I know people are going to think I’m crazy for even imagining that this could possibly happen in the wake of a U.S. presidential election — but one of my instincts the day after the election, believe it or not, was actually going to Apple.com to see if Apple had some kind of commemoration or acknowledgement.

And I realized… That’s my passionate, emotional side. Because Apple has been that company on so many issues of national or global importance.

And I get it. Even if I see it as a catastrophic thing for the country and for the world, I get it that it is seen as a partisan issue, and that a lot of people would agree it would be not only poor business, but maybe poor taste to take a stand on Apple.com.

But that’s the kind of feeling I’ve had from this company over the years. I wasn’t surprised not to see something there, but that sensitivity to the current state of affairs in the world, while maybe not driving them to put something on their home page overtly in support of one direction or another… I can see how they could maybe have made an effort to come up with something that somehow spoke to the issue without taking a side. They could have done that.

And I’m not faulting them for not doing that. But your comment about the possible poor timing of releasing this right after the election, it drives it home for me that doing something like that with the home page would have reflected a level of consciousness about what’s going on — their being sympathetic or even empathic to the situation.

Releasing a self-gratifying, expensive art book certainly does not speak to sensitivity about the national and global implications of the election. Nor should it have to. But by doing it the very week of the election, it does sort of tip the sales toward insensitivity.

Manton:

Right. So we had the election. A lot of people are trying to make sense of it. Like you said, you went to Apple. “Is Apple going to say anything?” Reload, reload. No, they’re not going to say anything. “Is Apple going to say anything next week?”

The first thing they said, not about the election but the first thing they publicly said was, “We have this beautiful book.”

Yes, they didn’t mean it that way. They didn’t mean it as a reaction to the election. They’ve had this thing planned for years. But it doesn’t feel right.

I don’t want to take away anything from the designers at Apple and the people that worked on this book, because they do great work. The products in this book are amazing. They do deserve to be celebrated and talked about. But the timing does not feel right.

And like I said before, I think the substance of this book is also wrong. I want to be careful not to criticize too much, because I’m sensitive to this. I don’t want to just bash this book. It doesn’t feel like the book we need about design at Apple. Because there’s no text in it!

It celebrates objects and machines but it doesn’t celebrate people. The people are one of the most important things about design at Apple. It doesn’t seem right.

I had never thought after the election, “What would Apple say? Would they put something on their web site?” I hadn’t thought of that until you just mentioned it.

Tim Cook did send a letter to Apple employees, an email. It wasn’t really partisan, but it was kind of saying, “We know some of y’all are having trouble.”

I don’t know how he phrased it. But the sense of it was, “We’re moving forward together. We’re going to be together. That’s how we get through everything as a company.”

That was private to Apple employees. They didn’t say anything publicly. To say something publicly would have been difficult. This is kind of a cheat, but I’m just going to say it: it would have taken courage to say something about the election publicly. I’m using that word very deliberately.

Come on, Apple. Forget about the stupid headphone jack. If you want to be courageous, take a stand on something you believe in. Do it.

Today I published a new episode of Timetable. It’s about Apple’s new design book but also about how social networks are broken, with a hint of what I think we can do about it. It’s just 3 and a half minutes long.

As I’ve written about before, Apple no longer needs us to defend the company. On the other hand, many good people work on Apple’s products and so criticizing the company can easily come across as criticizing those people. That’s not my intention, but I sometimes get that balance wrong.

I own dozens and dozens of art books, but I won’t be ordering this new Apple design book. It looks overconfident instead of nostalgic. It looks like it celebrates objects instead of people. It looks like a beautiful book for the wrong time.

I couldn’t sleep. I woke up early the day after the election, thinking about my daughters, and cried. I had been so excited to celebrate our new president with them. I had been so excited to watch the returns with my kids, to share a moment of pride and optimism.

This wasn’t a normal election. This wasn’t just a debate over policy. It was much deeper. The world is already worse and darker for many people because of what happened.

There will be arguments over why the election went so wrong, but it’s more complicated than just one thing. There was the overplayed story about private emails. There was the FBI letter. There was the media treating Trump like a reality TV star instead of a threat.

Hillary did her job. She destroyed Trump in all 3 debates. She ran a solid campaign. But she has always been held to a different standard than everyone else. I’ll never get over that.

I’m proud to have voted for Hillary in the primary and in the general election, and I’d do both again. This election was very close. It was winnable. If we had ignored the polls and fought for every state, it was winnable.

Friday night, I went with a friend to see Trevor Noah’s standup show. It was great to laugh for a couple hours, about the election and everyday life. But then the night fades and we’re still in a nightmare.

After Hillary has had some time to rest, and reflect, and be her own person again, I hope she can find another cause worth fighting for. Let’s not forget that she did make history as the first woman to be nominated by a major party. She paved the way and reminded us how hard this is. That matters.

Daniel and I recorded an episode of Core Intuition the day after the election. We tried to capture that feeling of loss, and anger, but also of hope that we can have a renewed passion for our apps and ideas. Maybe some of our products have a place in the work to do before 2018.

Hillary said in her speech, the day after the election:

Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.

On this, I disagree with Hillary. Trump has already shown us who he is — someone who mistreats women, lashes out at his critics, and disrespects immigrants — and nothing he does in office will change that. The only thing we owe him is a short presidency.

On Friday, Daniel and I recorded and published episode 254 of Core Intuition:

Daniel and Manton dive into Apple’s controversial suspension of Dash developer Kapeli’s App Store account, and respond to listener Q&A about whether non-sandboxed apps are at risk of removal from the Mac App Store.

Covering sensitive subjects like Kapeli’a suspension is difficult in a podcast format where you can’t perfectly prepare your thoughts. Did I go too far defending Bogdan Popescu? Did I not go far enough?

Maybe we’ll know with some distance from this topic whether we reacted fairly. But I don’t think I overstated how important a moment this was for the App Store — both Apple’s influence over the narrative and as a test for their power in the store. Unfortunately the story still has a very unsatisfying ending.

We posted Core Intuition episode 253 this morning. From the show notes:

Manton and Daniel discuss Manton's experience at the Release Notes conference, talk about the rationale for supporting what might be considered edge-case behaviors in apps, and dig deeper into questions of freemium pricing, reflecting on the Omni Group's pertinent announcements. Finally they talk briefly about Google's latest announcements and what their competition means to Apple.

Google must be doing something right with their announcements, because yesterday my son told me he wants to get a Pixel when it’s time to replace his iPhone 5S. And as much as I love our Amazon Echo, I can see Google Home taking off if it’s well-integrated with existing Google services.

The hardest transition for fans of Apple Computer from the 1990s is realizing that Apple no longer needs us to defend the company. If I’m sometimes critical of Apple, both here and on Core Intuition, it’s because they’re the largest tech company in the world.

I will always hold Apple to a very high standard of excellence. They’ve earned it. When airline flight attendants tell passengers to turn their Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones off along with the usual warnings about oxygen masks and life vests, we shrug and laugh because it’s Samsung. From Apple, we expect higher quality and attention to detail, not shortcuts.

Steve Jobs has been gone for 5 years, but the spirit of building insanely great products is well-rooted at Apple. Apple employees are doing incredible, passionate work.

And yet the company itself hardly resembles the struggling computer maker of 20 years ago. Apple is a giant corporation now. Unlike its employees, who have the best intentions, giant corporations are by default selfish, arrogant, and rarely courageous.

Apple does a lot of good for the world. I doubt there’s another company even approaching Apple’s size that does as much, from renewable energy to safer materials to workplace diversity. But that good doesn’t absolve them of criticism.

I only took iOS devices with me to Indianapolis last week for Release Notes. My iPad Pro with smart keyboard, for writing and podcasting; an older iPad Mini, for reading on the plane; and of course my iPhone SE.

A couple of months ago, Dan Counsell wrote about the iPad as a poor choice for everyday work:

I know a lot of journalists use the iPad full time, and that's fine. The reason they can use it full time is that typing text has very low system requirements. However as soon as you need to move files from one app to another or unzip a document the iPad starts to make your life more complicated.

Part of the issue is that out of the box, the iPad can’t do everything that a Mac can do. The iPad needs apps. As Ben Brooks wrote about Dan’s ZIP file example:

It would be great if iOS expanded zip extraction as a built in tool, but it doesn’t, and yet a tool to do unzip is easily found, safe, and free.

iOS doesn’t have the Mac’s Finder. I could actually see a third-party iOS app centered on file management first, instead of just as an extra feature on top of text documents or photos — an app that blended a little of document providers, iCloud Drive, and app launching. Kind of in the spirit of the Finder-replacement PathFinder.

There are iOS apps to do pretty much anything. What often makes iOS slower to use is there’s less glue between apps and documents than on the Mac. No drag and drop between apps on iOS. Fewer keyboard shortcuts.

I love how Workflow sidestepped these issues with automation. I use a workflow for posting Instagram photos to my own blog. And Federico Viticci uses Workflow extensively. In a recent Club MacStories newsletter he shared how he used Scrivener and Workflow to write and prepare his iOS 10 review.

Another simple workflow I’ve used is to convert a podcast to MP3 from Ferrite. Every episode of Timetable was recorded on the iPhone or iPad. At WWDC, I edited Core Intuition on the iPad with the help of Ferrite and the web app Auphonic, which Jason Snell has also written about:

I was able to export and upload The Incomparable while sitting at a comfortable table in an Ashland pub, drinking their beer and using their free Wi-Fi. Auphonic did the rest, re-encoding the file as an MP3, tagging it properly, and uploading the result to both my Libsyn account and to The Incomparable’s FTP server.

When I was visiting a new coffee shop every day for 30 days, I loved taking the iPad with me because it was a lightweight, focused writing environment. With the right apps and workflows, it’s a fun computer to work on. I didn’t miss my Mac while traveling last week, and I expect iOS to serve me well on future trips.

This week on Core Intuition, Daniel and I talked about recent Apple news:

Daniel and Manton react to the European Union’s €13B retroactive tax demand to Apple, talk about the impact of tax laws on indies and small companies, and weigh in on Apple’s purported AI and machine learning triumphs. Finally they catch up on their ambitions to be more productive as the busy summer transitions to fall.

I wondered whether Apple is so obsessed with privacy that they are blinded to what is possible with more computation and extensibility in the cloud. I judge their efforts not only by the remarkable work the Siri team has done, and by what Google and Amazon are building, but also by Apple’s own gold standard: the Knowledge Navigator video from 1987. That vision is too ambitious for one company to develop all the pieces for. We eventually need a more open Siri platform to get us there.

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:

Pádraig and Oisín are joined by Brent Simmons to discuss indie app development in the wake of Vesper shutting down.

One subject I’m glad they touched on is the special challenge for a company that needs to support multiple salaries, but isn’t 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. It’s not easy.

One year ago, I celebrated my first day without a boss. I had just written 2 weeks of daily blog posts about wrapping up work after 14 years at the same company. Today, I’m wearing the same Mac t-shirt and working from Whole Foods again to mark the anniversary.

So how has it gone, a full year as an independent developer? It depends who you ask. While I was leaving the best day job I’ll ever have, there’s still no substitute for the flexibility and freedom to work on my own projects. From that perspective, the last year has been amazing, with some great success on new revenue from Core Intuition and contracting too.

And I made a few decisions early on with how to manage the business that have proven useful to smooth over the bumps. For example, I pay myself a fixed salary on the 1st day of each month, and for 12 months straight I’ve always met that goal. This month, I gave myself a small raise.

On the other hand, I’m still bringing in less money than when I had a real job, and my wife might say that there’s a fine line between being self-employed and unemployed. We’ve let our credit card debt go unchecked. There’s been no slack in the high monthly expenses of the house, car payments, business costs like hosting, and everything else. My income from Riverfold has grown significantly, but not significantly enough.

Yet, I’m upbeat. I’m upbeat because of the potential for what I set out to do a year ago: ship Snippets.today and help revolutionize independent microblogging. That’s still the plan. That’s still why this experiment of working for myself is in its very early stages, even a year later.

From the show notes for today’s episode:

Manton reacts to negatively to the Swift 3 decision to disallows subclassing by default, while Daniel tries to see the bright side. The two discuss Twitter’s new invitation to apply for @verified status, and Daniel’s attempt to do so. And they quickly touch base on the upcoming Apple-sponsored reality show, “Planet of the Apps.”

Believe it or not, I was kind of holding back a little in my Swift ranting. But it was the most critical I’ve been on the show. And it’s totally okay for you to disagree! Maybe even good for the platform if you do.

Dave Winer has a good comment for anyone questioning the web:

So when they tell you they know for sure that the web is dead, or that everyone wants to host their blogs in locked-up silos, or that you can't build a great open social net on RSS, you might want to lower your glasses down your nose and look out over the top and ask Reallly? Are you sure?? ;-)

Nothing is certain in business. For every success, there are many “sure thing” failures.

I posed a question on this week’s Core Intuition as we were talking about Automattic’s upcoming .blog domain name registration. The gist of it was: what is more likely to survive for the next 50 years, Twitter or .blog? Twitter is huge, dominating the news and seemingly unstoppable, but social networks don’t have a great track record. I’d put my money on a new top-level domain, both because of the vision of empowering users to control their own content and also because domains were designed to last.

Companies aren’t exactly designed to fail. But that is their default outcome.

Earlier this week I sent an email to subscribers of the announce list for my microblogging project. These are people who signed up, wanting to hear more about what the project was and when the beta would be available.

I talked about this on Core Intuition 241 today. Some people signed up a year ago, and the longer I went without sending an email, the more nervous I became that I was missing an opportunity to sustain interest in the project. I was stuck on the idea that the first email to the list had to be when there was a product to either test or pay for.

These decisions of when to release a product, what to write about, how to communicate new ideas without overwhelming potential customers — they seem so monumental, but the truth is it just doesn’t matter that much. When the feedback started rolling in over email, I quickly realized that I was worried for nothing. People were excited and supportive.

I have a lot of work to do over the next couple of weeks before it’s ready to open up to real users. As I’ve talked about a few times on my Timetable podcast, I’m planning a Kickstarter project to complement the web app. I’ll be sharing more soon.

I’m back from San Francisco, catching up on everything I missed while traveling. I recorded a few podcast episodes during WWDC week, both my own and an interview.

On Core Intuition, Daniel and I talked right after the keynote about the morning’s announcements. From the show notes:

Manton and Daniel react to the 2016 WWDC keynote. [...] iMessage and Siri extensibility, Continuity improvements, Apple Pay for the web, Apple’s keynote diversity, and more.

In the middle of the week, I talked with John Voorhees of MacStories about WWDC news but also a lot about microblogging. It may be the most I’ve shared about my latest project, all in one place.

Yesterday, I recorded a short episode of Timetable. I wanted to capture what the trip to San Francisco each year means to me, outside of the conference itself. I find the week a good opportunity to reset and think about where my focus should be across my projects.

We published Core Intuition episode 236 today, discussing the recent App Store announcements and a listener question about offices. We wrap up with plans for WWDC.

There has been a lot of great blog posts and podcast episodes already on the App Store subscription change. I listened to Under the Radar 31 and the Release Notes special edition today and recommend both. The most confusion seems to be around what kind of apps are appropriate for subscriptions, where by “appropriate” I mean “what Apple will approve”.

John Gruber also follows up at Daring Fireball on this question:

Professional apps that require “a lot of maintenance of new features and versions” don’t fit either of those categories. Would Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific qualify for subscription pricing? After talking to Schiller yesterday, I thought so. Now, I don’t know.

As I mention on Core Intuition, apps that have a backend service with obvious hosting and maintenance costs — a music streaming service, an invoicing web app, or a blogging platform, for example — are easier for users to understand as needing to be subscriptions. Twitter apps are an interesting example because some are pure clients to Twitter’s backend, but many increasingly have their own app-specific services like timeline syncing or push notifications.

For years Apple has allowed apps to use auto-renewing subscriptions. I had an iPhone app and companion web service that was approved by Apple for auto-renewing subscriptions, after I made the case for the service as a “cloud” archive. From section 11.15 of the App Store review guidelines:

Apps may only use auto-renewing subscriptions for periodicals (newspapers, magazines), business Apps (enterprise, productivity, professional creative, cloud storage), and media Apps (video, audio, voice), or the App will be rejected

From my experience and listening to other developers, I’ve had the impression for a while that Apple would essentially reject most auto-renewing app submissions by default. While we still don’t know what “all categories” means in the new announcement, I expect it means that there will no longer be a kind of blanket rejection. Apple will still reject many apps as poorly suited for subscriptions, though, and maybe that’s okay for now.

(I’m conflicted on this point. John Gruber’s suggestion to approve everything and let the market decide is compelling and fits better with my instinct that the control should be in developers' hands.)

“Subscription fatigue” is a real thing that I’ll occasionally hear from customers about. No one wants to pay $1/month to 40 different apps and services; it feels like a burden in a way that paying the same total price to just two apps at $20/month does not. Nevertheless, subscriptions are very powerful. Everything I’ve done over the last few years is to position myself to eventually have a recurring-revenue success.

It’s 2 weeks before WWDC, which means it was also 8 years ago that we published the first episode of Core Intuition. At WWDC that year, Apple showed off iPhone OS 2.0, MobileMe, and the iPhone 3G. The yearly cycle of improvements to the OS and hardware don’t look much different today, but Apple keeps rolling, and so the total changes since 2008 are massive.

For as many years as I’ve been out to San Francisco for WWDC (and to San Jose before then), each year I have fewer expectations for the conference itself. Some years I don’t even bother guessing or dreaming about new features — I have no pressing needs, no critical missing APIs, no questions to ask Apple engineers in the labs — and I’m happily surprised by whatever Apple gives us.

This year is a little different. It’s the first year that I can remember since the Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 releases where an Apple platform needed significant performance improvements to be usable for anyone except early adopters. The first couple versions of Apple Watch were ambitious on features, but now it’s time to do the less glamorous work of making the platform fast. I hope watchOS 3.0 will be the same kind of milestone that Mac OS X 10.2 was in that regard. (And like Mac OS X, I hope it can be done mostly in new software.)

Back to WWDC the conference. I’m still thinking about the interesting venue change for Monday to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.

In the discussion on Core Intuition 229 last month, I kept coming back to the idea that this change has to be about growing the conference to allow more developers. Since more people show up on Monday (press and business folks, for example, who have less interest in the technical sessions or labs), you could have a bigger space on Monday and then oversell the conference as a whole, knowing that some ticket holders wouldn’t be around later in the week back at Moscone West.

Maybe that creates more problems than it solves because of packed rooms and long lines to get into sessions, though. Now that I’ve had a while to think about it, it seems unlikely that Apple would risk making the conference worse just to squeeze in another 500 developers.

Could there be some creative layouts in Moscone West that Apple hasn’t tried yet? There are so many downsides to changing the venue that I want to believe it’s part of addressing the biggest issue with the conference: most people don’t win the ticket lottery.

There’s still the problem of hotels. Linking to my post about not giving up on WWDC, John Gruber singled out Airbnb as a bad solution, since there just aren’t that many rooms available. That’s true. And even worse, potential last-minute cancellations make Airbnb less reliable. Where I said Airbnb, I should have just said “cheaper hotel”.

(Alex Cash also has tips for saving money at WWDC. Casey Liss has a good post about rising hotel prices.)

Nevertheless, I know some developers are using Airbnb this year, and I’d like to try it next year for a change of pace and scenery away from the conference. With the convenience of Uber, the risk of settling for a place farther away seems low.

And finally, I’ve enjoyed many recent podcasts about WWDC. Two highlights: Under the Radar episode 24, where Marco Arment and David Smith share their thoughts on whether to attend the conference; and Thoroughly Considered 12, about not just WWDC but the value of attending or exhibiting at conferences as a company.

We published Core Intuition 234 today, with a follow-up discussion on Swift, working toward software releases, and more. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton talk about the question of Swift’s dependence on Objective-C’s dynamism, how it should or will evolve, and their differences in philosophy about Swift and Objective-C. They also take stock of release discipline and managing customer disappointment with an app’s progress. Finally, they talk about the importance and difficulty of winding down old products.

One of the points I brought up on the show — and which I’ve hinted at here on the blog before — is that web developers will push Swift to become more dynamic. There’s a long history of building web server frameworks like Ruby on Rails that depend on dynamically routing requests to controllers and views, and flexible models that automatically adapt from your database schema. These features tend to get messy when faced with a more static, strongly-typed language.

There is good work being done in the Swift web community already, though. Today I spent some time building a sample app with Vapor, which is probably the closest I’ve seen someone get to the usability of existing web frameworks. I’m a little more optimistic now that we might eventually have a single language for server code and native apps.

Because episodes of Timetable are short (usually just 5 minutes) and because they aren’t published on a consistent schedule (sometimes once a week, sometimes 3 times a week), I’ve wondered if it may be difficult for some people to fit the podcast into their routine of listening to longer, hour-long podcasts. If you only listen to podcasts while in the car, for example, a 5-minute show isn’t going to fill your commute.

Luckily there are easy solutions to this. The first is: they are so short, just listen whenever you want, while you’re at your desk or walking somewhere or having lunch. Another option: gather up a few episodes and listen altogether, as if it’s 3 parts of a 15-minute podcast.

If you’re an Overcast user, you can create a playlist that will play multiple Timetable episodes in sequence without requiring any tapping in the app to queue up the next one. Here are some screenshots showing one way to set this up after subscribing to Timetable in Overcast.

First, tap the new playlist button in Overcast. Then tap Add Podcasts and select Timetable.

The playlist should automatically show any unplayed episodes. Finally, tap the Playback button while an episode is playing and make sure to highlight Play Next for the When Episode Ends option. This will make sure that you have continuous playback from one episode to the next.

I’ve recorded 23 episodes of Timetable so far, equal to about 2 hours of audio. While consistency is the most important thing for my other podcasts, Core Intuition and Technical Foul, for Timetable I’ve liked the flexibility to experiment with different styles and show formats. Enjoy!

I somehow recorded 4 podcast episodes this week. We just published episode 233 of Core Intuition, where Daniel Jalkut and I talk about the announcements from Google I/O and compare the latest Swift 3 news to our experience going through previous Apple transitions. From the show notes:

"Manton and Daniel react to Google’s I/O keynote, and weigh the threat of Allo to iMessage. They celebrate Apple’s WWDC promotion of 3rd party events, and the increasing speed of App Store reviews. Finally, they reflect on the announced delay in Swift 3’s planned ABI stability, and Daniel’s sudden FUD about embracing Swift."

It was a big week for the NBA, too, with the first couple games of the east and west conference finals. On the latest Technical Foul, Ben Thompson and I recap round 2, especially the Spurs loss in 6 games to the Thunder:

Ben and Manton are back geeking out about the NBA. This week we talk Manton through the Spurs loss, discuss OKC versus the Warriors, and whether the Cavs are good enough.

And finally, I published 2 episodes of my microcast Timetable earlier in the week. Episode 22 was about dealing with recent stress — trying to see the bigger picture and focus on the good things. Episode 23 was about how to tell when it’s time to move on from a failed product.

I let myself go off into a bit of a Swift rant on the latest Core Intuition. I’ve been doing a lot of Swift development recently. The more I use it, the more conflicted I am. I really love some parts of the language, but it’s not what I would have asked for as a successor to Objective-C 2.0.

Remember when Steve Jobs came back to Apple and compared NeXTSTEP to constructing a building by starting out on the 20th floor, with so much of the foundation and common patterns already taken care of for you? Cocoa allowed apps to be built significantly faster than before. Steve said at Macworld Expo in 1997 that the goal was to “eliminate 80% of the code that every developer has to write for their app.”

Swift is not like that. Swift’s priorities are correctness and stability. These have more indirect benefits to developer productivity than we saw going from Carbon to Cocoa.

When Marco Arment wrote about Swift last month, he mentioned wanting a language designed for high-level apps:

Objective-C wasn’t much better for this, but I think we could’ve done better than Swift if the most important goal in Swift was maximizing real-world developer productivity when writing modern Mac and iOS apps. Swift does a little of that, but gives up a lot to also serve lower-level, more clever, language-geekier goals.

This weekend, Brent Simmons has a new post about the loss of dynamic features in “pure” Swift:

What makes me nervous is Swift’s emphasis on type safety and on compile-time resolution. As long as we also have what we need from Objective-C, then that’s fine — then we still get xibs and storyboards, the Responder Chain, and so on.

I hope Brent’s right that this will be a core part of Swift 4. Leaning on the Objective-C runtime feels like a temporary solution because it only exists on the Mac and iOS. Great web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, for example, can’t be built without relying on a more dynamic language. (And to me a great promise for Swift is being able to use it everywhere.)

Daniel Jalkut followed up with a more optimistic post. He thinks Apple is on top of this, even as he acknowledges the clash between existing frameworks and the new language:

Some major design priorities of the Swift language, namely type safety and compile time dependency binding, are at odds with the design priorities of 20 years of evolution in Apple’s frameworks. How and if that disparity will be reckoned by Apple remains to be seen.

I think it’s telling that the “dynamic” keyword isn’t even mentioned in the main language guide. Anything related to Objective-C is off in a separate set of documentation, which includes discouraging statements such as “Requiring dynamic dispatch is rarely necessary” and “use of the performSelector APIs is discouraged”. For Swift to thrive in the future, as a great language for newcomers and long-time Mac developers, Apple will have to compromise on that mindset.

When my family was visiting New York City a couple of years ago, we took a train out of Pennsylvania Station on the way up to Montreal for the second half of our vacation. It was raining a little as we walked from the hotel, but I thought we’d still have no trouble finding the station. After a few minutes we gave up and had to ask someone where the entrance was.

We couldn’t find it because it looked like every other street corner in Manhattan. But it wasn’t always like that. It used to look like this:

In the 1960s, facing declining train usage and financial problems, the Pennsylvania Railroad sold the rights to everything above ground and the incredible station pictured above was demolished. It was only afterwards, when it actually happened, that everyone fully realized what they had lost. Determined to not let other beautiful architectural landmarks get destroyed, the city passed a law to restrict similar demolition. Grand Central Terminal was preserved because of the lesson learned from letting Pennsylvania Station go.

I was thinking about this story — failing to do the right thing, but applying that knowledge to the next thing — while re-reading Marco’s excellent post on the future of podcasting. In it, he lays out the technical details for how podcasting works today, and makes the case for leaving it alone. I especially like this part, on his determination to keep Overcast a sort of pure MP3 client:

By the way, while I often get pitched on garbage podcast-listening-behavioral-data integrations, I’m never adding such tracking to Overcast. Never. The biggest reason I made a free, mass-market podcast app was so I could take stands like this.

I should have realized it earlier, but I don’t think I really connected all of Marco’s goals with Overcast until Daniel Jalkut and I had him on Core Intuition episode 200. We talked about many of these same themes as Marco was finishing up Overcast 2.0.

There’s also a great discussion on Upgrade about this. It starts about halfway through.

In a response to Marco on MacStories, Federico Viticci writes about the parallel trend in the web industry toward centralized services like Facebook and Medium that allow “content professionals” to monetize their writing. In doing so, those writers give up many of the benefits of the open web:

But the great thing about the free and decentralized web is that the aforementioned web platforms are optional and they're alternatives to an existing open field where independent makers can do whatever they want. I can own my content, offer my RSS feed to anyone, and resist the temptation of slowing down my website with 10 different JavaScript plugins to monitor what my users do. No one is forcing me to agree to the terms of a platform.

While the open web still exists, we really dropped the ball protecting and strengthening it. Fewer people’s first choice for publishing is to start a web site hosted at their own domain. Like the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, sometimes you only know in hindsight that you’ve made a mistake. We were so caught up in Twitter and Facebook that we let the open web crumble. I’m not giving up — I think we can get people excited about blogging and owning their own content again — but it would have been easier if we had realized what we lost earlier.

Reading posts like Marco’s and Federico’s, and listening to Jason and Myke on Upgrade, I’m convinced that podcasting will remain open because we know better now. As a community we can learn from the mistakes with the web and the threats of closed platforms, making sure that podcasting is preserved as a simple technology that no one controls.

As I mentioned in my wrap-up post about working from libraries, spending so much time commuting all over the city (and outside the city) had really burned me out. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve overcompensated a little and have been working from home almost exclusively. I’ve also been catching up on client work.

I recorded a new episode of Timetable this morning to try to capture this change in work focus. Talking into the microphone for 5 minutes actually helped me assess where I’m at with my projects, and what I need to adjust to continue to make this blog and my podcasts a priority.

And speaking of podcasts, Ben Thompson and I published episode 3 of Technical Foul last night. We talk a lot about the wild last minute of Spurs/Thunder game 2, which I’m still thinking about even a couple days later.

We posted episode 228 of Core Intuition this week. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton discuss the iPhone SE’s evident popularity, touch on the challenges of designing for extremes in screen size, and bemoan some of Siri’s shortcomings when compared to competitors. The two also discuss tax time as an indie software developer, weigh the merits of heading to SF for WWDC, and finally delve into some deep reflections about the psychology of not shipping in too long.

We talked a lot about Siri and the Amazon Echo — the problems with both and where voice software may be headed. After we recorded, Daniel wrote a great post with additional ideas for using Siri with distance-based reminders, for example the ability to ask Siri while driving “remind me in 15 miles to get gas”:

How would this be solved? By introducing a notion of distance-relative reminders in iOS and by extension in Siri. In the same way that Siri allows you set a reminder for a specific time or for a relative time from now, it should offer the same functionality for distance.

I hope you enjoy the podcast. I’ve been thinking lately that maybe the secret with Core Intuition is that it’s not actually a developer podcast. It’s a tech podcast with major tangents into software development and business.

I published 2 new Timetable episodes this week, with a shared theme around Kickstarter projects. They’re both just 5-6 minutes long.

Episode 19 is about how I finally sat down to record a video for my upcoming Kickstarter project. I still have editing to do, but I’m already feeling a lot better about actually launching this.

Episode 20 continues the discussion of Kickstarter, starting with my reaction after receiving the art book from Loish yesterday. I was really impressed with how well it was produced. Anytime I see something of such high quality I’m inspired to do a better job with my own work.

On episode 18 of my Timetable podcast, which I just published this morning, I mention the new Nintendo game Miitomo. Federico Viticci also wrote about it today:

I’ve been keeping an eye on Miitomo – I still don't completely understand it, but I'm intrigued by the premise of a friend-based network with mini-games and the ability to collect coins. Those coins can then be used to claim rewards and redeem other Nintendo-related content such as games and customizations. I'm curious to see how Miitomo will perform outside of Japan.

For a several years between 2006 and 2010, I sold and actively worked on a little Mac app called Wii Transfer. It was the first time I realized that I could make a living selling Mac software, even though it didn’t always have great sales consistently by itself. To this day, one of the features I’m most proud to have ever written is the Mii export, which could sync Mii data over Bluetooth from the Wii remotes and render it to let you save your Miis as PNG files on your Mac.

I’ve often mused on Core Intuition that I stopped selling the app too soon. At one point I worked on a companion app to the Nintendo DS with similar themes, but didn’t ship it. And I considered building a version for iOS just with the Mii functionality.

From a blog post in 2012, announcing that Wii Transfer would no longer be available:

I’m retiring Wii Transfer to focus on my other apps. It’s not that it doesn’t sell; it still does. It’s just that it’s not an app I actually use anymore. By officially shelving the whole project, I hope to remove a psychological burden of sorts — to no longer worry that I’m ignoring an active product.

I’ll never know if it was a missed opportunity — a mistake for the direction of my indie business to stop selling something that people liked — or the right call to refocus around what I actually cared about. In any case, I’m glad Nintendo is doing something new with Miis. As I play with Miitomo, there’s a part of me that regrets not doing more with Nintendo-compatible software while I had a competitive head start.

When I went to Open Coffee Club during SXSW week, I met several company founders and investors in Austin, and one was also an iOS developer. I usually do a poor job of promoting my own work in person, but I somehow managed to plug my Core Intuition podcast.

He hadn’t heard of the show before, and when he pulled it up to subscribe his comment was something like: “wow, you’ve been doing this for a long time”. It’s true. Daniel and I started the podcast in 2008. We only have 225 episodes, because we published episodes less frequently back in the old days, but I’ve always been proud of our consistency with the show format going back to the very beginning.

And it made me wonder: is there another Mac or iOS developer-focused tech podcast that has such a long history? Or really, many tech podcasts at all? The ones that come to mind are The Talk Show, which started in 2007, and This Week in Tech, which started in 2005.

It’s another reminder to me that a big part of success is consistently showing up to work. If you’re always starting over, you can’t build on anything and take it further. The secret with the “version 2.0” of most apps isn’t that it has new features; it’s just that it exists at all.

In a couple months, just as WWDC is about to roll around, we’ll celebrate our 8th anniversary of recording Core Intuition. Our audience keeps growing, which is amazing, but there are still a lot of people who have never heard of the show. If you like what we’ve been doing, consider telling a friend, or posting a tweet or blog post about the show.

We expanded to 2 sponsors per episode this year because we wanted to grow the podcast — to commit more time and resources to both recording and to companion web sites like the jobs site. I think 2016 will be a great year and I’m happy that Core Intuition is a key part of helping me stay independent. Thanks for your support!

After wrapping up 30 days of new coffee shops, last week I started visiting a library every day to work. Libraries and coffee shops don’t have that much in common, but they do share a couple basic traits that are necessary for working on a laptop or iPad: wi-fi and tables. In fact, I’ve found that it’s even easier to find an open table or couch in a library than in a busy coffee shop.

So far, so good. In the first week, I’ve visited Cedar Park Public Library, Wells Branch Community Library, Little Walnut Creek Branch, North Village Branch, Old Quarry Branch, Howson Branch, Westbank Community Library, and Yarborough Branch.

I also heard from readers who wanted to see more than the text microblog posts I did for coffee shops, so I’ve been trying to take more photos. These photos are tagged with #newlibraries too, so they’ll show up together with the library text posts. (Photos can be browsed over the web, but they don’t show up in the default RSS feed. The microblog posts also have their own feed.)

As I mention on episode 15 of Timetable, working out of the house in the morning helped provide some structure to the work day. I’d use the morning for writing blog posts and catching up on email, and the afternoon to focus on code. For libraries, I’m going one step further and only bringing the iPad Pro with me. This means that I’m using a small range of apps — Editorial, Mail, Safari, Slack — and reinforces the idea that I’m supposed to be writing.

Episode 225 of Core Intuition is out now. We talk about the new iPhone and iPad news from Monday’s Apple event, plus Swift. From the show notes:

Manton orders his dream phone, the iPhone SE. Daniel reflects on the growing allure of Swift, and the two discuss the risks of either adopting new technologies too soon, or holding on to the past for too long.

Also there’s this line from Daniel in the podcast that I like:

We have to be tuned into the future and tuned into the past to really do great work.

We pull in some history from Daniel’s time at Apple, and from our experience building Mac apps in the 1990s and early 2000s, and how it relates to the current Swift transition. Hope you enjoy it.

We posted episode 224 of Core Intuition today. From the show notes:

"Manton and Daniel discuss Apple’s revelation that Cookie Monster uses an iPhone, consider the Amazon Echo as the next big technology platform, and catch up with Manton’s successful 30 days of Austin coffee challenge."

I like this episode because it touches a little on tech industry and business themes that we weren’t planning to talk about, so it captures whatever our gut feelings were on those topics. And as we talk about at the end of the show, I did end up wrapping up the coffee shop visits today. I’ve updated the coffee shop page on this site with the final list.

As I mention on the latest episode of Timetable, I haven’t attended SXSW in several years. I still think it’s right for me to skip it, but then sometimes I’ll hear about UX and iOS panels going on at SXSW, and I’ll remember some of the great parts of the conference that I do miss.

Conrad Stoll spoke on a panel at SXSW this year about his experience building Apple Watch apps. He’s had a few great blog posts recently, about both Apple Watch user interface design and also one on designing in Swift. For planning what features to include in your watch app:

“When it's time to gather around a whiteboard and start designing your Apple Watch app, draw all of your features and start discussing some of your least obvious ones. It’s very likely that one of them represents a better use case for the watch. If you start with the secondary features you might realize that focusing there can actually improve the utility of your overall product.”

Blogs like Conrad’s are a great reason to keep using RSS. He’s not posting every day so you may forget to check the site, or miss the links on Twitter if they aren’t tweeted or retweeted when you happen to be paying attention. The best way to guarantee you won’t miss it is to subscribe in an RSS reader.

There’s a related side discussion on the Bill Simmons podcast about reading headlines instead of full articles. There’s too much information out there, and it moves too quickly, so we’ve trained ourselves to just scan headlines and comment on Twitter without going deep. That leads to increasingly ridiculous click-bait titles as publishers try to grab our attention. The only way to fight back against that trend is to slow down and read a few thoughtful essays in RSS, or work through the queue in Instapaper.

We posted episode 223 of Core Intuition today. From the show notes:

"Daniel and Manton discuss strategies for filing and organizing bugs. They talk about the expected iPad and iPhone announcements at Apple’s March 21 event, and they follow up on discussion about apps that delight and take their own problem domains seriously."

I also posted episode 16 of Timetable. On this quick 3-minute show, I talk about trying not to panic when things go wrong, with a couple examples from this week.

When I tell people that I’ve started going to a new coffee shop every day for a month — and importantly, one which I’ve never been to before after living my whole life in Austin, with no duplicates or separate locations from a coffee chain — they usually ask: are you going to run out of places to go? At the beginning I didn’t know. And that has made it a particularly fun challenge, because doing something that you know is possible is boring.

I’ve never been interested in building an iOS app that someone else has already done. I’ve never been excited to write a blog post that is just a rephrasing of someone else’s idea. Starting a new project with a unique twist, even a minor one, is what makes our job as developers and writers fun.

And it’s easy to take a simple idea and build it into a more advanced project. On the latest Core Intuition, Daniel continues to suggest ways to add layers to my coffee trips, from adding photos, to publishing future locations ahead of time so that anyone can stop by and join me for a coffee. (I’m going to be doing this.)

Now at day 10, I can more easily answer the original question, though. I have 16 suggested coffee shops in the queue, so if I visit all of those, I’ll only need 4 more places to hit 30 new coffee shops in 30 days. A few of these might seem like borderline cheats — a donut shop, or a food truck to pick up a Thai iced coffee — but being exposed to new places I would never otherwise go is the whole point.

On this week’s Core Int:

"Daniel orders a Brother, Apple defies the FBI, Manton continues to struggle with his Kickstarter, and the two discuss using structure and constraints to encourage tackling new goals."

I like this episode because it has a mix of serious and fun topics. Toward the end of the episode we talk about my new goal of trying a new coffee shop once a day for a month.

Last night, Federico Viticci tweeted that he lost a draft blog post he was working on because of an iCloud problem:

"Just lost 1.5k words I had prepared for tomorrow because I wanted to try iCloud sync instead of Dropbox this week."

The story has a happy ending because he was able to manually recover the document from the app’s database, but that is well beyond the complexity that most users could handle. iCloud is usually so opaque that we just can’t see what is going on behind the scenes with our data.

Everything I write on this blog (and notes for all my projects) goes into simple text files on Dropbox. I can edit from multiple apps on different platforms, the files are synced everywhere, and Dropbox tracks the revisions of each file so that I can restore a previous version at any time. I could take the text file I’m currently typing in, drag it to the Finder’s trash and empty it, and restore from the web in 30 seconds even without any kind of traditional backup solution.

That’s why all my photos are on Dropbox too. Instead of being opaque like iCloud, with no easy way to troubleshoot or recover files when things go wrong, with Dropbox it’s all there in the local file system or over the web.

Dropbox has had a few side projects and distractions, but their foundation is obvious and accessible, so they can keep coming back to that. Here’s Stephen Hackett writing in December about documents and photos after Dropbox shut down Mailbox and Carousel:

"As much as these apps were loved by their users, it's clear that the company is moving in another direction. While things like Paper don't make much of a difference to me, knowing that Dropbox will reliably sync my files, be easy to use on iOS and continue to be around is important to me. If Mailbox and Carousel had to go to make that possible, then so be it."

I really like the clean UI in Dropbox’s Paper, but because it doesn’t yet sync with regular files like the rest of Dropbox, Paper isn’t building on Dropbox’s core strengths. Daniel and I use it for planning Core Intuition, but I wouldn’t use it for critical writing any more than I would use the new Apple Notes.

I hear that people love iCloud Photo Library and Notes, and that the quality of these apps and companion services has significantly improved. That’s great. (I also think that CloudKit is clearly the best thing Apple has built for syncing yet.)

But to me, it doesn’t matter if it’s reliable or fast, or even if it “always” works. It only matters if I trust it when something goes wrong. Conceptually I’m not sure iCloud will ever get there for me.

Charles Perry has started a microblog. On the balance of what he should post to Twitter and what he should post to his own site first, he writes:

"Most of the things I write on Twitter are snippets of conversations or other thoughts that I don’t necessarily want to preserve. Those will stay on Twitter. But some microposts—is that a thing?—I think are of interest on their own. These I plan to post to the DazeEnd.org microblog and mirror to Twitter. That should allow me to preserve and archive my thoughts on my own website and use Twitter just for distribution."

I was really happy to see these posts show up in my RSS reader. There’s some momentum around indie microblogging right now. You should start one too.

Here are some more of my posts on the topic:

• How to start a microblog. Overview of the basics, with a few suggestions for where to start.
• Microblogging with WordPress. Still mostly accurate, although I don't use IFTTT anymore. I've written my own cross-posting code and baked it into my new app.
• Embrace cross-posting. My early thoughts on cross-posting. Also see the post about returning to Twitter.
• RSS for microblogs. Suggestions for simplifying our RSS feeds, and a proposal for JSON.
• Weblogs category from my blog. All the posts primarily about weblogs or microblogging.

Listeners of my new Timetable podcast also know that I’m writing a short book about independent microblogging. You can hear a little about this on episode 9.

On this week’s Core Intuition:

“Manton and Daniel talk about Apple’s current and future stock price, and their potential to branch out into other technologies such as virtual reality. They discuss Facebook’s shuttering of Parse and the implications for iOS developers and Facebook’s PR. Finally, they respond to listener Q&A about getting up to speed on using and implementing your own web services.”

Toward the end of the show, I also discuss my approach to password-less accounts for Searchpath and my not-quite-released latest web app. While still far from perfect, I think getting away from passwords is an important next step for apps. Passwords are just too annoying for users to keep track of and enter, and a potential security issue and headache for system administrators.

Nice observation by Jason Snell from the Apple quarterly report conference call:

“It probably means nothing, but when Maestri listed off Apple’s four major product platforms, he said this: ‘We’ve built a huge installed base around four platforms: iOS, Mac OS, watchOS, and tvOS.’”

Like Jason, I’ve long wanted a return to “Mac” as the most important part of the OS name, and have suggested it a couple times on Core Intuition. It was a missed opportunity to do this transition after 10.9, when it could have cleanly gone to Mac OS 11 without the .10 and .11 silliness.

The new tvOS and watchOS branding — combined with Apple’s quote above — makes an official rebranding to “macOS” at WWDC this year seem almost likely. The next major version should be macOS 11, without the “X” and “10.x”. That would still look a little wrong compared to simply “Mac OS”, but it would be much better than “OS X”, and the lowercase would be consistent with the rest of the platforms.

Over the holidays, or while on any vacation, I usually use iOS more often than my Mac. It’s easier to quickly catch up on email or fun stuff like Instagram without getting too pulled away from what matters: spending time with family and friends. So as I use iOS, I’ve been thinking about what might make the iPad better.

Last year Jared Sinclair blogged about some of the problems with the iPad, with ideas for “saving” it. The most interesting of these was his suggestion of a “Gatekeeper for iOS”, where iOS apps could easily be side-loaded onto iOS without Apple’s approval:

“These apps would be just as secure as apps published on the App Store. I recommend that Gatekeeper iOS apps be subject to the same API restrictions, privacy permissions, and sandboxing as apps distributed on the iOS App Store”

Daniel and I discussed this on Core Intuition episode 207. We acknowledged that as great as it would be, this compromise of Gatekeeper apps being subject to API restrictions might not be possible. The whole point of Gatekeeper is to leave Apple out of the distribution process, so there would be no place to impose such restrictions except at the API level. Still, I’d welcome any kind of side-loading.

Most Mac developers have wanted a Gatekeeper-like solution for iOS since the very beginning of the iPhone. Back in 2011, I wrote a post about Apple’s 30% cut and the lack of side-loading for iOS:

"Apple’s tight control over iOS has always been troubling. If there’s no way to install an app on the device without Apple’s approval, then Apple can make or break any business that builds for the platform. It’s an added risk for the thousands of tiny development shops for which the iPhone and iPad are otherwise perfect."

But side-loading isn’t really holding back the iPad. What’s holding it back is the slow pace of progress in UI improvements. For example, the home screen remains virtually unchanged since iOS 3, and on the iPad Pro the classic grid of large app icons looks more like the Simple Finder than a way to manage and launch productivity apps.

More key areas of the UI need to take inspiration from iPad multitasking. While split-view and slide-over aren’t perfect, they’re something. Likewise for iOS extensions, which were such a step forward that we were willing to overlook the UI clunkiness. These new features helped Fraser Speirs switch to an iPad Pro full time:

"The introduction of multitasking in iOS 9 has made a significant difference to the way I work on iOS. I don’t need to rehearse the actual features here but suffice to say that I now find iOS extremely easy to get almost any task done."

I’d like to see Apple experiment more. To not be afraid to try something new with the UI and ship it, as long as they still follow up and refine it.

Here’s a great feature idea to take multitasking further, from Stephen Hackett’s iOS wishlist:

"I'd like Apple to work on some way to share text and images between apps that are side-by-side. If I'm working in a text editor, I'd like to send a selected portion right into Slack, without having to worry about a share extension or dropping back to copy and paste to get the job done."

Nilay Patel, in a 2015 wrap-up for The Verge, wrote that Apple has been setting the groundwork for new platforms, and that this year they will have to iterate and improve on what they’ve started. He sees the iPad Pro in particular as a step forward without a clear defining feature:

"There's a chance we'll all be using huge iPads as our primary computers one day, but to get there the iPad Pro has to do something so much better than a MacBook that all the things it does worse seem irrelevant. What is that thing?"

That missing “thing” is clear to me: the Apple Pencil is the best stylus that has ever been made for a device — tablet, desktop, or standalone display. It’s so good that I assumed I would sell my retina iPad Mini and use the iPad Pro exclusively.

That hasn’t happened. I realized when making the choice of which iPad to take downtown the other week that the Mini is still my favorite size. I hope as part of the next phase to Apple’s iPad platform that the Pencil makes it down to the rest of the iPads. It’s important that developers can count on the common availability of the stylus, just as we can count on multitasking and app extensions to set the pace of UI progress for the platform.

On this week’s Core Intuition, Daniel and I start with a recap of Daniel’s time at the tvOS Tech Talk in New York City. More from the show notes:

"Daniel and Manton reflect on their experience at the Apple TV tech talks, brainstorm app category ideas for Apple TV, and discuss the use of Twitter for customer support and how a 10K text limit might impact that. They also talk about Apple’s iOS 9.3 preview, rumors of a new iPhone 4-inch model, and speculate whether WWDC would ever move from Moscone in SF."

It’s not too early to start planning for WWDC. Hotel pricing is a major issue this year, and I have a feeling people will be more scattered around the city than usual.

Federico Viticci covers the news that Twitter will expand from 140 characters to 10,000, nicknaming the feature Twitter Notes. His nickname is appropriate given this latest transformation to become more like Facebook, since Facebook’s Medium-like capability for long posts is also called Facebook Notes.

The tweets and blog commentary on this have really missed a key aspect and cause for concern, though. Many posts – including even my own first attempt – have focused on whether Twitter Notes would water down Twitter’s unique strength. They then conclude that it’s better to include a long-form text feature rather than the compromise hack of screenshot text and tweetstorms. Federico sums up this endorsement with the following:

“Unlike other recent additions to the service, I want to believe that third-party developers will be able to support the feature in their clients (Jack seems to suggest as much) and that the iPad won’t be left behind again. I may be disappointed when the day comes, but if done right (see Matthew’s points here) and as long as Twitter Notes are intended as attachments for regular tweets with real text, I don’t see why I would be against them.”

Here’s why this matters, and it gets back to my post last week about the hyperlink. Closed platforms want to trap all activity, not send it out. The danger in Twitter Notes isn’t that they will replace textshots, it’s that they will replace external blogs.

For all of Twitter’s problems, at least right now most of the good writing we see on Twitter is actually linked out to external blogs (and yes, increasingly Medium posts). To shift that to be stored more on Twitter itself would be a setback for the open web. It would slowly train a new generation of timeline surfers to prefer Twitter-hosted content instead of blogs.

I wrote the above in draft form, and then later saw Ben Thompson’s daily update about the Twitter news. His take is the first I had seen that directly covered the issues of linking, even suggesting that no one really clicks on links anymore. But while he’s worried about Twitter from a business standpoint, I’m more worried about the attack on the web.

Ben also mentioned the clever trick Jack Dorsey used in writing his response as a textshot. Daniel Jalkut pointed out the same thing in the latest Core Intuition. Jack could have posted it to a blog, or to Medium, but he deliberately picked the worst way to work around Twitter’s current 140-character limit, to underscore his point.

Now, Will Oremus writes for Slate about the potential new Twitter walled garden:

"What’s really changing here, then, is not the length of the tweet. It’s where that link at the bottom takes you when you click on it—or, rather, where it doesn’t take you. Instead of funneling traffic to blogs, news sites, and other sites around the Web, the 'read more' button will keep you playing in Twitter’s own garden."

I know we can’t rewind the clock to the heyday of the blogosphere. But we can still do more. More to encourage bloggers, more to spread awareness about how the web is supposed to work, and more to value open APIs. I think it starts with 2 things:

• Build tools for independent microblogging, to make blogging just as easy as tweeting. I'm trying to do this.
• Make the web faster, so the cost of clicking on a link goes down. Google's helping this with AMP.

I was encouraged when I saw that Known had added support for AMP. They have their doubts about AMP, but at least they were quick to try it. From the Known blog:

"We've shipped support for AMP because we see potential here, and recognize that something should be done to improve the experience of loading independently-published content on the web. But attempting to bake certain businesses into a web standard is a malformed idea that is doomed to fail. If this is not corrected in future versions of the specification, we will withdraw support."

Maybe AMP ends up being too ad-friendly to become a good standard. I don’t know. But if so, we’ll move to the next idea, because the web has to be faster. Slow pages are like a disease for links.

Anyone with a blog should be concerned about what could happen with Twitter’s 10,000-character push. We won’t feel the effects right away, but years from now it will matter. We should do more not just to promote blogs and writing on the open web, but to also make it easier for Twitter alternatives to exist through independent microblogging.

I’ve talked about my hope for a new 4-inch iPhone several times on Core Intuition, and a few times on this weblog, like here and here. The rumors keep growing, and Stephen Hackett has written out his thoughts on a potential iPhone 6C:

“The easy assumption is that the 6C would replace the aging 5S as the free-or-very-cheap option, but the recurring rumor of the 6C being powered by the A9 makes me think this may slide in roughly where the iPhone 6/6 Plus currently sits in the lineup.”

I’d love to see an A9, but I’m not counting on it. I think an A8 is fine too, mostly matching the internals of the latest iPod Touch. This wouldn’t be competitive with the iPhone 6S but it would still be a great upgrade from the iPhone 5S, which is the primary phone for anyone (like me) who still clings to the 4-inch design.

The larger 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch designs will remain the top of the line iPhones for years to come. The 6C doesn’t need to change that; it’s not a peer to the larger phones. It just needs to clean up all the money Apple’s left on the table from customers who want a smaller phone. I’ll buy one right away.

I just published episode 5 of my new short-format podcast, Timetable. I’m having a lot of fun with this. Producing an episode that’s only 5 minutes long means I can experiment without investing too much time.

As I was listening to some other podcasts this week talk about the Twitter news, it occurred to me how important it is to have a good mix of podcasts, just as it is with blogging. Many of the most popular Apple-related podcasts hit the same news stories each week and have nearly the same opinion. Don’t get me wrong; I listen to a bunch of them and they’re great. But it’s a reminder to me that for Timetable, and especially for Core Intuition, not to be afraid of having a more contrarian role when it’s appropriate.

There’s nothing controversial in the latest episode of Timetable, though. Just me talking about getting some stamps to finally send out stickers.

I’m launching a new podcast today. For a while I’ve felt like there could be something interesting in a very short podcast, where I talk a little about what I’m working on or thinking about throughout the week. Each episode is going to be just 3-5 minutes.

It’s called Timetable. I’ve published 3 episodes, and have a 4th that will go out later today. I think of it as a “microcast”, complementing the informal nature of my microblog posts. And just as I have longer essays on my weblog, of course I’ll continue to explore larger topics for indie Mac and iOS developers on Core Intuition with Daniel Jalkut.

If you check it out, let me know what you think at manton@manton.org. Thanks!

The first Core Intuition episode of 2016 is out. We talk about Twitter’s potential 10k-character change and much more. From the show notes:

"Manton and Daniel react to Twitter’s rumored plan to support 10K of text in tweets, answer listener Q&A about product versioning and milestone strategies, and check with thoughts on Swift upon Daniel’s completion of 'reading the fine manual.'"

For 2016, we’ve decided to expand the length of the show a little. Most episodes will be around 45 minutes to an hour. This gives us more room for topics, and allows us to accommodate 2 sponsors per show.

I’ve also cleaned up the logo a little for the podcast feed, including adding the “Core Int” text to the graphic itself. It should look much better in your favorite podcast client. Thanks for listening!

Today on Core Intuition, Daniel and I talk about my time at the tvOS Tech Talk and the recent executive changes at Apple. From the show notes:

"Manton and Daniel discuss Apple TV development challenges, Apple’s executive team shakeup and its impact on the App Stores, and keeping a good attitude about successes and shortcomings as an ambitious indie developer."

We wrap up the show with a conversation about taking risks and setting the right priorities for an indie business. Along the way I mention this tweet from Kazu Kibuishi, which I misquoted slightly. Here’s the actual text:

"A professor once told me that 'if you have a fallback, you will fall back.' I have found this to be true."

If you enjoy the show, consider letting a friend know about it, or leaving a mini review on Twitter or iTunes. Thanks!

Apple announced some leadership changes today, including that Phil Schiller will now lead the App Store on Apple’s various platforms:

"With added responsibility for the App Store, Phil Schiller will focus on strategies to extend the ecosystem Apple customers have come to love when using their iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Phil now leads nearly all developer-related functions at Apple, in addition to his other marketing responsibilities including Worldwide Product Marketing, international marketing, education and business marketing."

You may remember that Phil Schiller has gotten involved in controversial App Store rejections in the past, going back to 2009. See this post from Daring Fireball about Ninjawords, and another article at Techcrunch by MG Siegler.

On recent episodes of Core Intuition, and in a blog post, I’ve argued that Apple can’t just make small improvements to the Mac App Store anymore. The time for slow iteration is over; now they have to make big changes to get developers back. I’d like to believe that putting Phil in charge is exactly that kind of first big step.

Update: Less optimistically, though, there was this post in 2012 from Rogue Amoeba.

On the latest Core Intuition, we talk about open source Swift, it’s potential for web server frameworks, and more about blogging tools. From the show notes:

"Daniel and Manton react to Swift’s open-sourcing, and the extent to which it adds momentum to the language and increases its appeal. They also discuss the open-sourcing of Microsoft’s MarsEdit-esque blog editor, Windows Live Writer."

There were also a few new jobs posted to jobs.coreint.org yesterday. Check them out if you’re considering a change for 2016, or just curious what is out there for Objective-C and Swift jobs.

Like many developers, I’ve spent the morning looking over the Swift open source release. I continue to be intrigued and look forward to working Swift into more of my routine.

On today’s Core Intuition, Daniel and I talked about Swift for about half of the 50-minute episode. We recorded the episode yesterday afternoon, before the open source announcement, so we’ll be following up next week on everything that has changed. I bet there will be some more progress in Swift web server frameworks by then, too.

You’ve probably heard the news about Sketch. I found this section of their announcement the most interesting, because it highlights that this isn’t just about technical and strategic problems with the Mac App Store, but also about having a direct relationship with the customer to provide the best experience:

"Over the last year, as we’ve made great progress with Sketch, the customer experience on the Mac App Store hasn’t evolved like its iOS counterpart. We want to continue to be a responsive, approachable, and easily-reached company, and selling Sketch directly allows us to give you a better experience."

Of course, Sketch joins a growing list of apps unavailable in the store. From John Gruber:

"Sketch isn’t the first big name professional app to be pulled from the Mac App Store (Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit, Panic’s Coda, Quicken, just to name a few). But Sketch is the poster child for Mac App Store era professional Mac software. It’s the sort of app Apple might demo in a keynote — and the winner of an Apple Design Award."

Federico Viticci writes that Apple has to do something:

"The simple reality is that, gradually, developers of the best apps for OS X are finding it increasingly hard to justify doing business on the Mac App Store. I hope Apple also sees this as a problem and starts doing something about it."

Daniel and I talked about this on Core Intuition recently. Developers have been complaining about the Mac App Store for years without seeing any progress. It was over 3 years ago that I pulled my app Clipstart from the Mac App Store to sell direct-only instead, because of my concerns about adapting to sandboxing.

All this time, Apple could have been iterating on the Mac App Store, improving sandboxing entitlements, improving review times, customer interaction, and more. Yet they have not. At this point, Apple can’t just do “something”. They can’t just improve the Mac App Store a little. They have to significantly improve it, addressing many issues at once. And even then, some of these great apps — Sketch, BBEdit, Coda, RapidWeaver — may not come back.

As we talk about on Core Intuition episode 208, I finally got an Apple Pencil. It’s great. My experience matches Gus Mueller’s, about how good the Apple Pencil is after years of using Wacom tablets and third-party iOS styluses:

"I find that when using the HB Pencil in Procreate, I get something that is very, very close to what I feel when I'm drawing in my sketchbooks. But of course now I've got layers and many colors and a perfect eraser to work with. And endless pages. I love it."

On the question of whether it’s a “stylus”, Ben Brooks sums it up this way:

"That’s the question I get asked a lot from people — my wife especially. Apple will tell you it is not a stylus because it is so much better than any other stylus, it clearly is something else. So, instead, I’ll tell you that it is very much a stylus — it just so happens to be the best stylus I have ever encountered on any device."

I’ve also been improving the Apple Pencil support in an iPad app I’m working on. I haven’t completely finished reading Russ Bishop’s article on supporting the Apple Pencil, but looks like it has a bunch of additional tips in it that I’d benefit from. It covers not just the API changes to UITouch, but also gestures, coalescing, and predictive touches.

Yesterday we published episode 206 of Core Intuition. From the show notes:

"Daniel returns from Amsterdam to find Mac App Store issues abound. Manton buys an iPad Pro but has to wait for the Pencil. The two discuss the Mac App Store’s 6-year failure to evolve substantially, and dig into the emotional highs and lows of enjoying and surviving Apple’s platform constraints."

I really love how this episode turned out. It hits on several themes that have run through our show since the very first episode: a little tech news, some high-level coding talk, a bit of business analysis, and wrapped up with just how we feel right now about being indie developers. I hope you enjoy it.

It’s March 2009, the height of SXSW in Austin before the conference gets too big for itself. I’m hanging out downtown with tech folks from a blogging startup, having dinner and beers before we head to the party they’re putting on. The CTO, one of the first employees at the company, is talking about Memcache servers and MySQL scaling, and I’m hanging on every word. I love this stuff.

I’m a Mac and iOS developer, but I often take a break from native app development to work on server software. So I’m asking him about MySQL replication and what it’s like to run a schema migration without the database falling over. The conversation sometimes shifts back to Apple platforms, and he says he’s been thinking about going to WWDC. I had been attending WWDC for a while, so I say sure, it’s expensive but you should consider it. If you’re doing more web stuff, though, maybe it’s not as important that you attend.

We walk over to the party venue. It’s bigger and more crowded than he thought it would be. Their company has really taken off, growing well beyond the early days when it was just him and the founder trying to build something new. And it’s at this point that he turns to me and asks a question that brings us back to iOS development:

"So what do you think of my app, Instapaper?"

In answer to Marco Arment, at that time the CTO of Tumblr, I mutter something about liking it, but I haven’t really gotten it into my workflow yet. Hopefully whatever I said was encouraging. In subsequent years, of course, Instapaper would be one of my favorite apps.

Later, replaying these conversations, I realized that I asked the wrong questions and gave the wrong advice. About WWDC, I should have said “Yes, absolutely!” with an exclamation point. Buy a ticket. If you can’t afford it, go anyway because you need to be there.

But I didn’t say that because I wasn’t listening closely enough. I was so busy asking questions about Tumblr, that I wasn’t listening to the excitement in his voice about Instapaper. I was so busy thinking about server scaling and databases and all this other stuff that I could’ve learned from a book, that I didn’t hear what he was really saying.

I should have asked about iOS pricing, free versions, sales, UI design, who did the icon, what does the private API look like. But I didn’t ask those things because I missed the big picture, how dominant the App Store would become for distribution, and so I missed what mattered. I’d like to think that since then I’ve gotten better at listening.

Daniel Jalkut and I had Marco as a special guest on Core Intuition 200 not just because he’s a friend but also because he so well represents the goal that many of us have and our listeners have — to start our own company, to find success not just one time but again and again, and to have as thoughtful an approach as possible in the craft of software development.

This week I’m in Indianapolis for the Release Notes conference. While I will have some stickers for anyone interested in my new microblogging platform, and I’ll probably ramble about it at some length if asked, I’ll also be listening. I’ll be listening because you never know which random developer you just met will end up doing their best work in the years ahead, and you want to be as encouraging as possible, offer the right kind of feedback, and also learn from their perspective.

There’s a great line in the Pixar movie Ratatouille:

"Not everyone can become a great artist. But a great artist can come from anywhere."

I believe that’s equally true for developers. We often see someone go from nothing to a top app in the App Store. We often see someone start without an audience and then make friends on Twitter and blogs through the quality of their writing alone. And so we welcome new voices all the time if they’re respectful.

There’s been some debate about Overcast 2.0’s patronage model. Some of the discussion is healthy — how does a successful business model for one developer apply to other apps? — and some of the discussion is divisive. Instead of asking the right questions, it’s easy to jump straight to a conclusion with the dismissive statement: “that’s fine for Marco, but his approach would never work for other developers”.

The “that’s fine for Marco” attitude is poison for our community because it takes the opposite approach as that Ratatouille quote above. It implies that some developers have such an advantage that the rest of us shouldn’t even bother, because it’s not a level playing field. It’s true that some developers today have an advantage, whether through good timing or just a long history of shipping apps, but the lesson isn’t to give up; it’s to instead learn from it, and look at our own strengths. What small head start do we have that could grow into a great success tomorrow, too?

Rewind a handful of years, back to that day at SXSW when I could name plenty of developers who had more attention and success in our community than Marco Arment. You can be damn sure that didn’t discourage him from taking Instapaper from an “in my spare time” niche app to the top of the News section on the App Store.

I’ll never accept the implied negativity in the “that’s fine for Marco” argument. I’ll never accept that we should be jealous of another developer’s success instead of inspired by it to do our best work.

We posted episode 202 of Core Intuition yesterday. This was a fun episode because we didn’t plan for it; we just started talking. From the show notes:

"Manton and Daniel discuss the paralysis of choosing what to work on as an indie, Manton’s mysterious Kickstarter campaign, and the allure of company stickers and other marketing stuff."

Make sure to listen through the end for why I ordered stickers for my new app. If you want one, you can email me or send us podcast feedback.

As I said on the show, I highly recommend checking out Thoroughly Considered, the companion podcast for Studio Neat’s Kickstarter project. While you’re there, also consider backing the project, at the podcast level or the full Obi product if you have a pet that would love it. Even if it doesn’t successfully fund, I really enjoyed the first couple episodes of their podcast and hope it continues.

Today we published episode 201 of Core Intuition. From the show notes:

"Daniel and Manton discuss Manton’s search for indie development contracts, the market in general for iOS and Mac contracts, and the range of options for obtaining free and low-cost SSL certificates."

And speaking of podcasts, congrats to Marco Arment on shipping Overcast 2.0. It’s a great update.

Last night we published our 200th episode of Core Intuition. To mark the milestone, Daniel and I welcomed special guest Marco Arment. We talked about the goals behind Overcast, his thoughts leading up to version 2.0, the podcast industry, and supporting our products, with a closing discussion about the new iPhones and proper use of 3D Touch.

Thanks everyone for your support of the show. I hope you enjoy this one.

On this week’s Core Intuition, Daniel and I spend the whole show talking about the Apple TV. The first half is about the Apple TV dev kit lottery, and the second half is about whether we need the web on our TVs.

There’s also a good discussion on the Accidental Tech Podcast about this. Here’s an Overcast link about halfway into the episode.

In a widely-linked post to Medium, Daniel Pasco writes about the problem of not having WebKit available on tvOS:

"Webviews are the duct tape of the mobile world. I’d estimate that 50% to 80% of the major apps out there use webviews somewhere within their apps. Apple’s Mail app uses webviews for your email messages, because webviews can style and render the content very efficiently. NetNewsWire uses them prolifically, particularly in a few features we haven’t enabled in the shipping version yet."

I’ve argued on Core Intuition that even with the Apple Watch — as silly as it might seem to want to browse the web on your wrist — there should still be some basic access to the web. If not a full browser, at least a webview so that developers can style short content.

Daniel Jalkut suggests a related compromise for the Apple TV:

"I propose that Apple could strike a compromise that would serve those ambitions while also supporting the tasteful handling of web content in apps. How? By forbidding network access to web content. Apps themselves could still access the network, but not from within their web views."

This is much better, but I think we should aim higher, since giving up on the web seems to admit early defeat to what Daniel acknowledges is probably WebKit’s politically-motivated omission. The web might not be the most usable medium on all devices, but it is arguably the most important one. Just because we all love native apps doesn’t mean we should trade in the significant value that the web provides, especially for independent writing and a permanence that can outlive silos and platforms.

Apple has 4 major platforms now: iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and the Mac. It’s a dangerous precedent for 2 out of those 4 to not have access to the open web. Web services are only part of the story; HTML and the hyperlink are also both fundamental components of web access. A platform is too shut off from the rest of the world without them.

Marco’s review of his favorite microphones is comprehensive. You can’t go wrong by following his advice. I recorded my first podcast 10 years ago, and Daniel and I are about to hit 200 episodes of Core Intuition, yet I still learned a few new things from reading Marco’s review.

As with most things, though, it’s a personal choice too. Take this part:

If you’re just getting started with podcasting, a USB mic is good enough. If you’re established and looking to upgrade your production quality, or if you just love gear like me, you’ll likely find the jump to XLR worthwhile.

I did the opposite of this. For years I used an XLR mic along with a chain of two additional audio devices: the M-Audio FireWire Solo for getting the audio into the Mac, and the PreSonus TubePRE preamp for boosting the signal. This produced a nice sound and gave me knobs to fiddle with, but the extra complexity was just not worth it. I now use a simple USB mic and prefer it. (It’s the Rode Podcaster, which gets a mediocre endorsement in Marco’s review.)

This kind of “downgrading” is a common pattern with me and computers. I used to run a Mac Pro with 2 external Cinema Displays. Now I exclusively use a 13-inch retina MacBook Pro without a monitor.

In both cases — Macs and microphones — I find the trade-off worth it. If I want to work from a coffee shop, it’s the same resolution display, so I don’t need to change how I use Xcode. If I travel and need to record a podcast, it’s the same as if I was home, so I don’t need to risk messing up my audio settings. You give up some performance and flexibility, but in exchange you get the simplicity of having the same setup no matter where you are. And best of all: no more cables all over my desk.

Casey Liss summarizes the excellent first year of new podcast network Relay FM:

"Last year, I was deeply honored to be invited to be part of the launch shows on Relay. This year, I’m deeply honored to be a part of a network that not only airs some of the best spoken word programming on the internet, but also cares so deeply about being more inclusive."

Congratulations to all the podcast hosts, and of course to Relay founders Myke Hurley and Stephen Hackett. Stephen posted about how his time as an indie is going:

"The hours break down about how I felt they would break down, with Relay FM taking up about half my time and everything else going down from there. I suspect that consulting number will shrink as I wrap up some stuff for my former employer, but for now, I think this balance works. It's a decent reflection of where my income is, which is encouraging."

Rewinding a few weeks, this is what he had to say about the shift to indie work:

"It’s profoundly surreal, but incredibly freeing, to be focused on my writing and podcasting full-time. There’s still lots to work out with budgets and time management and extra things I could take on, but it’s all under the category of my work. That’s what makes it so much fun, despite the unknowns."

It’s fun to watch the rise of podcast networks. It has now been a little over 5 years since I first wrote about the 5by5 launch. Daniel and I will probably keep Core Intuition independent forever, but I hope that the continued success of larger networks means that the overall podcast market is still growing.

“Am I always starting over
In a brand new story?
Am I always back at one
After all I’ve done?”
— Always Starting Over, from the broadway show If/Then

Daniel said on the latest Core Intuition that it’s important to celebrate major work milestones, like shipping a new app or quitting a job. I didn’t think I’d be celebrating right away, but as it turned out, my wife met me for lunch on Friday and we had a beer to mark the occasion. She snapped this photo:

Some things just work out. I couldn’t have picked a better t-shirt to wear if I had planned it.

When 5pm came around I made a final comment on Confluence, replied to a couple emails, and then signed out of HipChat. But I didn’t have time for much reflection. My son and I were busy packing up to head to a campout with Boy Scouts. Then as soon as we arrived back the next day, I turned around again to take my daughter to see Idina Menzel.

The concert was incredible, somehow including both Wicked’s “Defying Gratify” and Radiohead’s “Creep” — and yes, of course Frozen — to make a show with both the occasional explicit lyric and little kids pulled up from the audience to sing. It was only while driving home from the concert that I had a moment to think what I need to do next. Idina’s lines from If/Then at the beginning of this post kept coming back to me.

I’ve worked a long time on a few things, and they were pretty good, but now it’s time to start over. I turn 40 in a few months. It’s time to figure out what the next 10 years of my life should be about.

Continuing from last week’s Core Intuition, today Daniel and I talk more about how things are going with the final days of my job winding down. We then take the second half of the show to catch up on recent news around Twitter’s leadership.

From the show notes:

“Daniel and Manton acknowledge celebration as a survival tactic, discuss the urgency of making ends meet as an indie, and examine changes underway at Twitter with interim CEO Jack Dorsey.”

You can listen or subscribe at the Core Intuition web site. Special thanks to returning sponsor CocoaConf. They’ve got conferences coming up in Boston and San Jose, and then Yosemite National Park next year.

We just published Core Intuition 191, the first episode recorded since I resigned from my regular job. In a way, it feels like this episode was 7 years in the making. Although I clearly wasn’t about to go indie that long ago, the topics that we’ve chosen to discuss on the podcast over the years have always followed that basic narrative: what can we do to improve our apps and business.

And as I hinted about earlier this week, this episode also features the return of our sponsor Twitter to promote their Fabric suite of tools for developers, including Crashlytics and Answers. Great to have them back.

From the show notes:

“Manton and Daniel discuss Manton's big decision to quit his job and go full-time indie. They also discuss the challenges of freeing up one's mind to focus on work, the freedom of indie development, and the psychological benefits of a dedicated workplace.”

This is a milestone episode for me. I hope you enjoy it.

In my first post I framed the situation as pinning my indie hopes on two things: my own apps and client work. But as Daniel points out, I’ve actually lucked into several distinct revenue sources. And one of the most promising continues to be our Core Intuition podcast sponsorships and the companion jobs site.

The podcast got some good news over the weekend as we’re adding another long-term sponsor. We’ve had this company as sponsors in the past, and I’m looking forward to having them back and talking about how I use their products.

Like software, revenue from Core Intuition comes in waves. Sometimes we’ll be booked up for months, other times there will be a drought of sponsors, so we’ll focus on pitching the jobs site instead. Sometimes we’ll get new job listings every day, other times a week will go by with nothing. Since we’re not actively marketing it as if it was a full-time business, we can’t count on any kind of consistency from it.

It’s funny how the podcast worked out, though. We started it just because we thought it would be neat — because we thought we had something to share with the community, back in 2008 when there were very few developer podcasts. We added sponsorships to help justify the time and keep us to a weekly schedule. And now, ironically, the podcast that was about running an indie business will actually help me do just that.

I’m so grateful to listeners new and old who have supported us. I received a bunch of nice “congrats!” emails and mentions on our Slack channels yesterday. We’re approaching 200 episodes now, over 7 years, and I hope we can continue to keep the podcast interesting for some time to come.

I have some big news to share, so obviously I’m going to write a bunch of blog posts about it. This is the first one.

For a while now I’ve been juggling working on my own projects, with my indie company Riverfold Software, and having a regular job at the education e-book software company VitalSource, where I’ve been for over 14 years. As much as I felt like this balance mostly worked, lately it has become clear that the “nights and weekends” approach to Riverfold just isn’t going to be enough time going forward. Last week I resigned from my job at VitalSource to focus on growing Riverfold and shipping new apps this year, some of the most ambitious products I’ve ever tackled.

I thought it would be fun to do a series of blog posts about the early part of this transition. For the next couple weeks, as I wind down one set of projects and ramp up new ones, I’m going to post here with the slightly-catchy title prefix “Two weeks notice”. It will be me thinking out loud about the transition, kind of in the informal spirit of Brent’s syncing diary, or like a more serialized version of the classic indie posts from Gus Mueller and Paul Kafasis.

But unlike the authors of those posts, I can’t claim to have found success yet. If you take Scotty’s definition from the iDeveloper podcast, in fact, I’m not “indie” at all; I expect some percentage of my time will have to be reserved for client projects to help pay the bills. While I used to find that idea distasteful — why give up a consistent salary if you’re not even going to call the shots? — I’ve come to realize that client work can be pretty interesting. The cycle of starting new projects and shipping them is a good way to learn new APIs and iterate on how to build an app from scratch.

While reading all these 2005-era indie blog posts, I was surprised to rediscover that Daniel Jalkut also mentioned mixing in consulting work:

"Consulting makes an excellent back-up plan. You’ve always got a job if you need it, and your destiny is very much in your own hands."

Of course he wanted more than that: to build a great company based around his own apps. I’m sure Daniel and I will be talking about this on Core Intuition later this week.

So it is a little in the vein of “leap and the net will appear” that I’m moving on from a stable job, where I worked with great developers and friends, to something new that is a lot less certain. I thought that would make for a stressful week, but so far, everything seems okay.

There’s paperwork to do and code to write. There’s health insurance to figure out. But there are also some things that have already been wrapped up. My projects at work are in a good place, hopefully not needing constant maintenance. We just refinanced our house, so that’s a monthly savings, and something that I’m told is difficult without a “real” job.

Friday night I started catching up on some late business taxes (whoops). Saturday I finished editing the podcast (which we recorded over a week ago). The rest of the weekend I tried to relax with family (but I worked anyway). It’s Monday now and there’s a busy week ahead. Let’s see how this goes.

Apple Music launched today with iOS 8.4. Christina Warren has an early review for Mashable, in particular mentioning the value of For You:

“The real heart of Apple Music is the For You tab. This is basically your music homescreen. When you open the section for the first time, you're asked to go through a discovery exercise. This was lifted directly from Beats Music and it's one of the best discovery tools I've used over the years.”

If Apple Music can be thought of as Beats Music 2.0, then the Connect tab is probably a little like Ping 2.0, an update on Apple’s first attempt to build a music-only social network. As Daniel and I discussed on Core Intuition 187, any service that demonstrates a network effect — everything from eBay to Twitter — needs some critical mass of users to reach its potential. I was curious whether Apple could achieve this if the Connect feature was locked behind a paid subscription after the initial 3-month trial.

What I missed is that Connect and even Beats 1 will be free. From the Apple Music page:

“Even without a membership, you can listen to Beats 1 radio, see what artists are posting on Connect, and hear our ad‑supported stations.”

Beats 1 is one of the more interesting aspects of Apple Music to me. I just signed up for the trial and plan to continue at the $15/month family subscription.

Dan Moren wrote on Six Colors last month about the Amazon Echo. On the voice recognition working so well:

“The Echo’s hardware deserves a full share of that credit. The microphones on this device are impressive; even when I’m several rooms away, Alexa rarely mishears me. I’ve triggered it from my kitchen and from my hallway, the latter of which doesn’t even have line of sight to the Echo.”

I have one too. I pre-ordered it on a whim and then promptly forgot about it for 2 months. Then seemingly the next thing I knew it had showed up at my house. If I had remembered about the order, I might have cancelled it, but now I’m glad I didn’t. The Amazon Echo is great.

I remarked on Core Intuition that it’s like a task-specific Siri, with better accuracy because there are limited things you want to ask it. Play some music, set a timer, measurement conversions. It can’t do everything, but what it can do is particularly useful in the kitchen or living room. Plus it’s probably the best wireless speaker we’ve ever owned.

Because it’s so effortless to play music now, I’ve uploaded some tracks from iTunes to the Amazon cloud via their music uploader. (Remember when we wanted DRM-free music? This is a concrete reason why.) And since we have an Amazon Prime membership, I’ve discovered that we have a significant amount of good music in the cloud already.

I’m looking forward to Apple Music and will probably subscribe, but I’ve realized after having the Echo for a while that Amazon is quietly sitting on something pretty special. They should do more with music — I didn’t realize until now that they even had a dedicated iOS music app — and more to build and promote their service. Music is in their “DNA” just as much as it’s in Apple’s. After all, Amazon’s 2nd offering after books was music CDs.

We’ve been lucky to see some great job listings appear on Core Intuition Jobs. Companies are getting good résumés and job applicants are finding the kind of job they’ve always wanted.

When we hear from companies who have hired someone, we like to include a brief testimonial on the sidebar of the site. We’re about to add this one from Ken Drew at iRobot:

“Our experience with the Core Intuition Jobs board went beyond our expectations. It provided higher caliber candidates for our recent iOS developer position. After doing code reviews for the candidate we eventually hired, we are more than pleased with who we found.”

Thank you to everyone who listens to the podcast or watches on Twitter for new job listings. The opportunities for iOS and Mac developers have never been better. Get the job you want or find the next great member of your team.

We posted this week’s Core Intuition late last night. This episode is all about WWDC tickets, our plan for San Francisco, and when we’re going to adopt Swift.

We’re also trying something new for listeners, or anyone who wants to talk about programming, WWDC, and other Mac and iOS topics. You can get an automatic invite to our Slack channels for the show by visiting chat.coreint.org. Feel free to join in! I’ve been impressed with how well Slack works for this, and the great discussion that’s already happening there.

I’ve been very happy to see the variety and high quality of jobs listed on our Core Intuition Jobs site. Two in particular have recently caught my attention for being concise, as if they don’t want to waste a potential candidate’s time with too many bullet points.

First up is Betaworks, which you’ve heard of as the company that now develops apps like Instapaper and Digg. Here’s the listing in its entirety:

“We're working on a bunch of brand new products at betaworks and are looking for iOS contractors to help our existing engineers move faster. We're ready to start ASAP and this gig will go through June (with the option to stay on for longer if you'd like to). Email us for more info if you're interested!”

And here’s new startup Honest Dollar, where you’ll be working in downtown Austin with my friend Justin Youens and a team looking to reinvent retirement plans for small businesses. Again, the full text:

“We're a new startup in Austin and are looking for awesome people to help build our iOS apps! We have an amazing team in place, and are looking to extend it.

“If you have at least a few years of impressive iOS experience, we’d love to talk. Relocation assistance available, but onsite desired. Full-time or contract.”

I bet both of these companies would be great places to work.

Yesterday this weblog turned 13 years old. I don’t usually miss the anniversary; it’s a nice time to reflect on what I’m writing about here. But I’ve been incredibly busy this year, working on a range of things from real work to side projects to family stuff.

Over the weekend I also helped out at the annual STAPLE! comics show in Austin. This is always a great time to check out what independent artists are up to, and as usual I came away inspired to get back into drawing.

I’ll have a longer write-up about yesterday’s Apple event soon. I have a very negative opinion about the $10k Apple Watch Edition — not because it’s expensive, but because of what focusing on the super rich says about Apple’s priorities. Daniel and I talked about this at length on Core Intuition episode 174 a couple weeks ago.

Overall the event was great, though. I’m looking forward to pre-ordering a watch and getting into development. Leaning toward the 42mm Sport, with blue band and an extra classic buckle.

On this week’s Core Intuition:

"Daniel and Manton touch again on the subject of killing off apps, assess the effectiveness of protest movements against the App Store, catch up on the state of the art for appealing App Store rejections, and acknowledge the coming end of NSConference."

In this episode we talked about how I was going to need to more formally appeal the Sunlit 1.3 rejection, not just comment in the Resolution Center. But shortly after we recorded, the app magically went live in the store anyway. I was very happy to avoid making further coding changes, though I expect I’ll have to revisit this if the app is ever rejected again.

Last night we published episode 169 of Core Intuition. As we’ve done on a couple recent episodes, we let this one run for an hour with a discussion of App Store revenue, sales charts, and progress on our own projects. Sunlit 1.3, the update I mention in the podcast, is complete now and submitted to Apple for review.

Last year I wrote that I would be removing Tweet Library from the App Store at the end of December, and later said on Core Int and in a tweet that there would be one last update before the app is gone. It’s well into January and the old version is still for sale. I’m over a month behind schedule but still plan to release the updated version and stop selling the app.

On the latest Release Notes podcast there was a great discussion about when to give up on an app that isn’t making money, including a mention of my plan with Tweet Library. Joe and Charles talked about why it’s usually such a bad idea to promise features before you ship, and whether there’s an obligation to give customers any updates at all.

I pretty much agree with everything they said, but the upcoming Tweet Library 2.7 “features” are different. My goal with this release is for the app to be functional and stable for as long possible. I think the app needs better syncing of tweet collections to help future-proof it, to make it easier for customers to move between iOS devices when they upgrade their iPhone or iPad a year from now. For an app that is going away, I should do everything I can to make sure that a customer’s data is accessible and that import and export are as robust as possible.

It’s a reasonable question to ask why I would spend so much time working on something that will essentially bring in no additional revenue. But while it won’t directly make any money, it probably helped convince some new customers to buy the app over the last month, and it will very likely reduce the support burden for the app over the following year.

I also view it as a sort of parting “thank you” to my customers. It’s just the right thing to do to wrap up the app. Panic did the same thing when they stopped selling Unison, releasing a major free update at the same time.

If you’re interested in picking up a copy of Tweet Library before it’s too late, you can buy it on the App Store for $4.99. The new version should ship in early February.

We were lagging a little after the Thanksgiving break, so we posted two episodes of Core Intuition last week. On the latest episode we talk about the Hour of Code and welcome new listeners who found our podcast from the App Store feature.

After we recorded, I helped out my son’s elementary school class with the Hour of Code tutorials. I learned a lot and came away even more impressed with the project. The reach is pretty incredible. Even if it only sways the interest of a couple kids here and there, but spread over classrooms all across the world, you can imagine how big a difference it might make.

I’ve been working on something new around microblogging. Some people have guessed at what it is based on discussions Daniel and I have had on Core Intuition, but only a handful of people have seen it. Soon I want to open it up to more beta testers.

If you’re interested in the project, you can now sign up on the announcement mailing list for more information. I’ll send an email when the beta launches, as well as occasional updates for major new features. Hope you like it!

Daniel and I welcomed Brent Simmons on the Core Intuition podcast this week. Here’s Brent on writing and the web as a guarantee of free speech:

"The old web where I feel like more people saw the web as what I was talking about: as a unique and amazing invention in human history, a thing that can bring the 6 billion voices out into the open, to tell their stories and say what they're going to say. That this thing is really something special, and it shouldn't just be treated as a way for monetizing eyeballs and figuring out great new advances in interstitial ads. [...] We can't lose sight of the opportunity this is. And if the story really is that the web exploded in the mid 90s and became a wonderful thing, and then stopped being that wonderful thing a little more than 20 years later... Then I couldn't even bear that heartbreak."

Hope you all enjoy the episode. It was great to have Brent on the show.

Daniel and I just published Core Intuition 159. It’s an episode of endings: the last Çingleton, no more Macworld Expo, and shutting down Glassboard. Along the way we discuss indie development, making a decision in public, and the reward and challenge of taking on something truly big.

Kirby Turner wrote about needing an iPhone 6 Plus as a developer but not really wanting one as a user:

"As a developer what I really want is an iPod touch Plus. If Apple were selling an iPod touch Plus that is the same as the iPhone 6 Plus minus the phone, then I would buy it in an instant. That way I could continue using my iPhone 5 as my primary phone device and the iPod touch Plus as a test device."

I’ve talked about skipping this phone generation on the podcast a few times. I already got out of the yearly updates when I kept the 4S forever and then got the 5C instead of the 5S. After seeing the 6 Plus in person at the Apple Store and with everyone who had one at Çingleton, I’m pretty comfortable with my decision. But I’d strongly consider replacing my iPad Mini with a 5.5-inch iPod Touch.

I’ve received so much feedback about microblogging that I haven’t had a chance to reply or blog about each one yet. This post from Dave Peck is especially interesting:

"For some time now, I’ve wanted a new kind of RSS client: one that reads and writes. Today’s RSS apps artificially separate us from the content we read. If we want to reply — if we want to participate in the conversation — we’ve got to use an entirely unrelated set of tools."

MarsEdit of course was famously spun off from NetNewsWire. Early versions of NetNewsWire did three things: reading blogs, organizing ideas in a notepad outliner, and writing new blog posts. I think Brent was on to something with combining all these features, but I also totally understand wanting to simplify so that each component is as good as it can be. MarsEdit wouldn’t be as full-featured and polished today if it hadn’t been given that room to grow as its own app.

Also, don’t miss the last half of today’s Core Intuition. Daniel and I talk at length about microblogging and owning your own content.

Episode 156 of Core Intuition is out. Daniel and I discuss the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and what they might mean for the future of the iPhone product line.

I’m now convinced that Apple will have something like a 6C next year to maintain the 4-inch design. It will never have the best camera or longest battery life — that will be reserved for the larger phones — but there will be 3 fully supported sizes with some core modern features like Touch ID and Apple Pay.

We also talk about updating your app for the new screen sizes and iOS 8. My update to Tweet Library is still waiting for review, but hopefully will be approved soon.

This week on Core Intuition we follow up on Apple news, then discuss the sale of Unread and all the new activity around RSS apps and services. It makes a good complement to some of my recent posts on microblogging.

Federico Viticci has the exclusive on Transmit coming to iOS:

"Considering the old limitations of iOS for inter-app communication and file management, using the Transmit extension feels like a major breakthrough and exactly the kind of experience that the app was meant to be on an iPhone and iPad."

While traveling this summer, I used Panic’s Prompt to download and rename files on the Core Intuition web server. It’s going to be great to also have Transmit’s UI in my pocket.

We posted episode 152 of Core Intuition today, with discussion of iCloud Drive, iOS 8, and Yosemite, plus mini-rants about distributed version control, why Daniel uses Mercurial, and how I just switched everything to GitHub. I like how this episode turned out. As usual, it’s under 40 minutes, and not a bad place to start if you’re just subscribing for the first time.

The Core Intuition jobs site is still half off for a few more days. $100 to get your job in front of a bunch of great iOS and Mac developers.

(After a decade on Movable Type, I’m migrating this blog to a new system, so I fell into the trap of not posting much until that process is complete. I’ll have much more to write about this soon.)

“This is it,” a friend said to me as we were walking up Market Street with other developers, late at night as WWDC was winding down several years ago. The iPhone had hit. The conference was getting bigger. Apple was on the verge of becoming a giant in the industry and you could feel it in the air — a coming change that was obvious only from a distance because it disappeared as you reached for it, like San Francisco fog rolling over the bay. “This is the height of the conference and it’s never going to be like this again.”

Looking back it perfectly captured what I think of as the second “era” of WWDC. It was a kind of golden age for Mac and iOS developers, with a new generation of successful Mac indies and before the iOS race to the bottom was much past the starting line.

From my perspective, learning Mac development in the mid 90s, there are three distinct eras of Apple’s WWDC. My first WWDCs were at the San Jose Convention Center. The developer base was small enough that you consistently ran into everyone, companies like Metrowerks and even Adobe seemed to have an influence on the conference, and Apple frequently showed off new APIs that might not actually ship soon or ever. It was an exciting time to be a Mac developer but the rest of the world didn’t care. This was the backdrop for the failed Copland project, for Steve Jobs coming back, for the clash between Carbon and Cocoa, and the acceptance of Mac OS X.

The next era was at the move to San Francisco. The conference was getting bigger but Apple attempted to keep the events and themes that made WWDC the same, even for a while busing attendees to the beer bash in Cupertino. This is the time when the iPhone SDK arrived and the conference exploded. I think most developers will always look back at this time as something amazing. It’s the backdrop for that walk up Market Street and a dozen similar conversations.

Now we’re in the third modern era of WWDC, with one undeniable characteristic: a small percentage of developers can get a ticket to the conference. The community, however, is as strong as ever, and there’s still a desire to have WWDC be that “one place” that developers can meet each year. It’s a need that smaller, regional conferences, no matter how important they are, just can’t fill.

I like this post from James Dempsey because it starts with the assumption that not getting a WWDC ticket is the new normal:

Once something changes from being dependably available to rarely available, you begin to form alternate plans and take alternate paths.

He’s right. Since it’s likely that Apple will continue to iterate slowly instead of making major changes to grow the conference, we’re better off adapting. By adapting we can focus on preserving the community aspects of WWDC that are arguably just as important as the technical tracks.

And change comes slowly to WWDC. I realized while watching video from the Tech Talks recently that Apple just doesn’t see a big problem. John Geleynse described a situation where only one person from a team is at WWDC; the rest of the company is back at the office watching videos and sending questions to their coworker at the conference to ask in the labs. Getting videos out the same day makes the conference more useful for both those without a ticket and actual attendees (and their team) too.

(I still have complaints about how WWDC tickets are distributed and why Apple doesn’t attempt to grow the conference a little more, but the lottery is an improvement over last year. See Core Intuition episodes 132 and 133 for a full discussion.)

I’ll be in San Francisco for a few days next week — at AltConf, at the Cartoon Art Museum fundraiser, catching up on session videos, waiting in line for coffee, hiding in my hotel room writing code, and getting some good food and drink with fellow developers. WWDC means something different now, but it matters just as much as it always has. Hope to see you there.

The last half of this week’s Core Intuition serves as a follow-up to my recent blog post on Twitter. Daniel tries to get at the business problems of not being active on Twitter. On the show I say:

“Me trying to make a statement, even if it’s insignificant, by not posting to Twitter... It wouldn’t mean anything if it didn’t cost me anything. If it didn’t have a cost, it would not matter.”

We also talk about Automattic raising money, blog software, and what that sandwich shop that Daniel avoids has to do with customer service.

135 episodes already? Hard to believe. But we’ve been pretty consistently putting out weekly shows for a while now. Funny thing about starting early and just sitting down to do work every day or week: eventually you end up with something big.

On this week’s show, Daniel and I talked about Apple’s stock, rumors of a search engine, and a follow-up on my Twitter ads experiment. I like how this episode turned out.

I forgot to mention a few weeks back that I was a guest on the iPhreaks Show podcast. The format is a panel of regulars and usually one guest, making it feel more like a roundtable discussion. They had me on to talk about subscription pricing: charging every month for your app or service.

Some of what we talked about was covered in 2 talks I gave last year about subscriptions, at NSConference and CocoaConf Dallas. I’ve finally pulled together the slides from these talks and put the latest version from CocoaConf here as a PDF (17 MB). It’s different than the NSConference one, but I think works better standalone. You can still purchase the videos from NSConference 2013 to get my talk and many other great ones.

This week I was also on the Release Notes podcast with Joe Cieplinski and Charles Perry. They do a great job each episode focusing on something from the business side of running an indie software company, and they’ve had some excellent guests as well. From the show notes for episode 41:

“We talk about creating products vs. services, changing products from free to paid, and the advantages and challenges of subscription pricing. Manton also shares his experience in creating apps like Sunlit that build on top of other services like Twitter and App.net, his recent foray into freemium pricing, and the launch of the new Core Intuition Jobs Board.”

If you enjoy Core Intuition, I think you’ll really like Release Notes. Let me know if you have any feedback on the show.

This week we launched the Core Intuition Jobs site on episode 125 of the podcast. The idea was to create a job board focused only around Mac and iOS developers. The 24 jobs already listed there all talk about Objective-C, Cocoa, ARC, or Xcode, so you don’t need to weed through a giant list of thousands of irrelevant jobs. There are some really great companies in the list.

We’ve also added an RSS feed, so you can see when new jobs are posted, and we’ll be rolling out @coreintjobs on Twitter and App.net soon. Even if you’re not actively looking for a new position, subscribing to the feed or following @coreintjobs is a great way to see some of the amazing work being done in the Cocoa community.

On this week’s Core Intuition, we talked a lot about Flappy Bird (and also Threes, and a few other things). One of the points I tried to make is that some of the negativity pointed toward the developer was totally uncalled for. Marco Arment says it well in his post on this topic:

“Flappy Bird’s success was hilarious, but it also appears to be completely earned. I’ve read the posts suggesting he cheated at the ranks or reviews, but I haven’t seen any that supported those claims enough.”

As I read Marco’s full post, and re-listened to what Daniel and I said on the podcast, I do wonder if developer Dong Nguyen had been so overwhelmed by the success that the line blurred for him between the death threats and the joke “this ruined my life” app reviews. You’d have to have a pretty thick skin to not let it get to you, even if I hope that most users had a good sense of humor about the whole thing. It’s true that the game is crazy addicting, but unlike some games — the worst of which are driven by consumable in-app purchases, gimmickly rigged to get users to feed money into the game — Flappy Bird is addicting in kind of the best way, because it’s something we’re all playing and can laugh about together.

And Nguyen cares about more than just money. He’s demonstrated an empathy for customers that seems to be lacking in many corners of the App Store. Where some developers said he was leaving money on the table by not having more ads, and other developers were quick to rush in with rip-offs of his app, Ngugen wasn’t afraid to admit it was out of control and pull the app from the store. Do you think any of the other developers who renamed their app to include the word “flappy” would have pulled their app? Not a chance.

I hope Nguyen can bounce back from this and ship more games. With so much attention now, it’ll be fascinating to see what they look like. Or if he’s stashed away some of that $50k/day and wants to just chill out for a while, that’s fine too.

For over 5 years and 122 episodes, every time we released a new episode of Core Intuition, I manually added the episode to the RSS feed using BBEdit. There was enough tedious XML copy-and-pasting that it was silly not to automate this process, but we kept putting it off. Finally last week, we switched over to an RSS feed generated by WordPress.

What surprised me is that until it was automated, I didn’t realize how much time I had been wasting editing and uploading the file manually. It was a small but very noticeable win last week when I could just upload the MP3 and click Publish, and that was it.

I’m not sure what the lesson is here. I never automate a task too soon, but 5 years was a long time. Maybe it’s just this: it’s never too late to get a better workflow.

I first blogged about 37signals a couple times back in 2002, and I’ve been a fan ever since. They had a huge influence on the way I approach design and the way I like to build products, not to mention a big impact on a whole new class of “software as a service” web apps.

The decision last week to go all-in on Basecamp left me puzzled. Daniel and I discussed this at length on Core Intuition. It’s one thing to focus all your efforts on a single product, but seems quite another to rename the whole company around it. I still feel that once you make that choice, your hands are tied from ever thinking big again, from ever wanting to grow beyond the scope of a single product. It’s like saying “our best product ideas are behind us”, and I know that’s not true for 37signals.

On the other hand, I’m sure 37signals understands their business better than I do. And maybe even big decisions are temporary anyway. I’m excited to see how it plays out in another year or two.

You can listen to Core Intuition episode 123 and let us know if we’re off base or not. Last week’s show also has more about choosing a product lineup, managing time, and thoughts on App.net’s Backer. Thanks to Smile’s PDFpen for sponsoring the podcast.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a very long time, or listening to my podcast, you probably know that in addition to my business Riverfold Software, I also have a “regular” job at VitalSource. As that company has grown, I feel less comfortable blogging about my work there, since I can’t speak for the company or even the smaller group I directly work with.

But this month is my 13th anniversary (!) with VitalSource, so I thought it would be interesting to look back on the times I’ve blogged about my work there, and highlight some of things I’ve helped build.

One of the earlier posts, back in 2005, was about our new store, where I linked to blog posts from James Duncan Davidson, Mike Clark, and Ryan Irelan about the project. But nearly a decade of migrating between blog systems has taken its toll; my post is still there, but the other links are all 404 not found.

Then from 2007, I wrote about syncing highlights and notes in e-books:

“The architecture is based on the Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for RSS and OPML. On top of that we have added a VitalSource namespace and a few extra XML elements and attributes to keep track of Bookshelf-specific data, such as highlighter color and selected text within a book. The goal is to keep it as open as possible, so that in the future we can both consume other sources of user notes, and allow third-parties to also hook into the data in interesting ways.”

We recently updated the API to use a new, faster sync architecture, but the web app is still in use today. I’ve been updating it for Rails 4, a tedious process because of the Rails community’s fascination with deprecation.

Again in 2007, I mentioned updates to two of my favorite apps, MarsEdit 1.2 and NetNewsWire 3.0, along with VitalSource Bookshelf 4.6:

“At VitalSource we also just released Bookshelf 4.6 today, which lays the foundation for media-rich textbooks and adds a highlighter rating UI for any subscribed highlighters you have. This data will bubble up in a few places in the future to allow you to discover people and books, although for now it’s one-way.”