Month: January 2015

The great thing about blogging vs a shorter medium like Twitter, is you can have actual, in-depth conversations. There’s nothing better than someone replying to a post you wrote with one of their own. So here’s one… Last week I wrote about External Triggers in OmniFocus. Sven Fechner of SimplicityBliss picked up my post add added his own thoughts. He agreed with the need for a designated place to park these types of tasks, but he disagreed with where I recommended putting them. He writes: Rather than adding a new bucket, these type of external triggers I cannot control or …

Read more

But I will call it marketing. It’s always something that I’ve been interested in, but it’s also something I’ve always put off until “I have more time”. Well, that time is now. I spent two days in December and did a thorough review of my little software business. The obvious take away is that 90% of my revenue comes from one app – VirtualHostX. I’m thrilled that it’s doing so well, but that’s a scary place to be in. If the app ever fails, I’m done for. The non-obvious realization I came to is that I believe I’ve reached a …

Read more

I’ve long felt that the two most important aspects of following GTD are having an inbox where you can quickly record any task that occurs to you and then the regularly scheduled review that keeps your system on track and up to date with your priorities. For me, the weekly review has always been the key component. It’s what keeps me sane and prevents me from becoming overwhelmed. I know that at the beginning of every week I’ll have a full hour dedicated to reviewing each project, killing off anything that no longer needs doing, and identifying any tasks that …

Read more

In OmniFocus, and in other GTD systems I’m sure, there is the concept of a sequential project. A sequential project is any task with two or more steps that have to happen in a specific order. You can’t move on to the next step until you’ve completed the first step. An example that’s currently on my plate is a project called “Return Remote Control to Amazon”. I can’t “Drop-off package at UPS Store” until I “Print off and affix shipping label”. This is a very powerful productivity weapon because it allows you to fill up all of your sequential projects …

Read more

One part of GTD and OmniFocus that I’ve always struggled with is the idea that any action that requires more than one step is actually a project. It sounds simple, and I agree with that definition in theory, but I’ve never followed through in practice. My OmniFocus project list has always been relatively sparse – really just containing my three areas of focus each with 5-10 medium-to-big-sized projects plus a catch-all single action list for miscellaneous tasks. The problem with this approach is that it’s stopped me from adding piddly, little multi-step tasks to OmniFocus because I don’t believe they …

Read more

(I hope the title of this post doesn’t misrepresent what Cabel wrote.) The 2014 Panic Report is a wonderfully candid look into Panic’s successes and struggles throughout 2014. Continuing in line with the trend of small developers finding it difficult to make money on iOS is this nugget… Wow! 51% of our unit sales came from iOS apps! That’s great! But now look at this revenue chart for the same month… Despite selling more than half of our total units, iOS represents just 17% of our total revenue. I love, love, love developing for iOS. But this is exactly why, …

Read more

Dan Counsell, founder of Realmac Software with an up-front and insightful post about the benefits of selling your software outside the Mac App Store. Imagine if your app made $30,000 in the first month it launched. That’s great, apart from the fact that you have to give Apple $9,000 of that. Is the service they provide really worth that much? I’m not so sure it is. My little company wouldn’t be able to survive if I had to give 30% of my revenue to Apple. While I hope to change that, Click On Tyler simply doesn’t operate at a scale …

Read more