Month: November 2014

For whatever reason, Amazon deemed me worthy of receiving an Echo last week. After laying down my $99 and a quick, overnight shipment, it was on my doorstep Friday afternoon. And now, after giving it a whirl for thirty-six hours, I thought I’d write up my initial observations. First of all, it’s bigger than I expected. When I first got it, I initially didn’t like the form factor, thinking I’d instead prefer something shorter and wider more like a speaker. But now that I’ve positioned it in a few different places in my kitchen, the skinnier, taller design makes sense. …

Read more

I hate using the word “quit”. Because it’s not quitting. It’s not even “giving up”. Today, the prolific Manton Reece wrote a blog post announcing that he is sunsetting his Twitter apps. This, after a recent announcement that Twitter’s (amazing!) new fully searchable tweet archives won’t be made available to third-party developers. Twitter’s fully-searchable index is an announcement I’ve been waiting on for years. Back when I worked at Yahoo!, I co-created Sideline, a cross-platform desktop client for searching Twitter. A year later, after Sideline was sunsetted, I rebuilt it as a native Mac desktop app called Incoming!. Both Sideline …

Read more

Back in July, for reasons outlined in these two posts, I wrote about the financials of my indie Mac software business. With the year coming to a close, and with the prodding of a few friends, I thought I’d share where the money from my total yearly sales actually goes. First, the big numbers. If you read my original post on the topic, you’ll know that in 2013 my software grossed $58,093 in total sales. Since that’s the last complete year of sales data I have, we’ll start with that number. Where does the money go? Immediately off the top …

Read more

A few months ago I wrote about how I’ve spent my software career constantly building new ideas and putting them out into the world to see what sticks. It’s scary as hell to release a new product into the world – never knowing how it will be received. But that’s the modus operandi for how I’ve built up the moderate amount of indie success I’ve had. A short while after that blog post, I wrote about how I use constraints – particularly time constraints – to keep myself motivated and moving forward. Boxing yourself into a fixed amount of time …

Read more

After reading my last post about my OmniFocus setup, Evan Lovely asked Could you talk more about your Routines? What’s in there? Does anything repeat? Do you set defer or due dates on them? He’s referring to a Single-Action List I have inside my “Personal” folder called “Routines”. Inside this project are actions and checklists that repeat on a regular basis. Here’s a list of the current actions in the project… Weekly Review – Every Monday morning I’m prompted to do a standard GTD review of all my ongoing projects in OmniFocus. Reconcile credit card – We have a credit …

Read more

I should probably explicitly say that much of my OmniFocus setup is due in part to techniques I’ve learned from SimplicityBliss.

In my previous post about how I use OmniFocus, I made reference to an on-hold project template called “New App Release”. Anytime I release an update to one of my Mac apps, I follow this checklist. In case it’s useful to other developers, here’s what it contains… Verify build with Deploymate – this scans my Xcode project and compares all of my API calls against my build target warning me about any deprecated, missing, or private API calls. Increment version number in Info.plist. Tag the release in git. Publish the git tag. Archive the project in Xcode and export a …

Read more

The best Evernote realization I ever had was to create an Evernote notebook called “@Inbox” and make it your Default Notebook. (The @ in front of the name ensures it will be sorted to the top of your notebook list.) From then on, you can quickly save notes and web pages into your Inbox notebook and move on with your work without interrupting your flow. Then, when and only when you have time, you can review everything in your @Inbox and sort each note into a more appropriate notebook. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a catch-all “My Notebook”, it …

Read more