Month: May 2019

With WWDC fast approaching, it’s the time of year when everyone posts their hopes and dreams and predictions for Apple’s upcoming software release. There’s tons of great ideas out there, and I certainly have my own feature requests both as a developer and as a consumer, but I just want to write today about one that is especially irksome during this (US) holiday weekend. Marketing push notifications. The Memorial Day holiday weekend in the US is a popular time for friends and families to gather and cook a shared meal together. It’s sort of like another Thanksgiving at the beginning …

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Today’s post is a bit more technical than what I’ve been writing about lately, but it’s also partly for my own reference to save me some googling when I forget everything again in the future. I was always a big fan of Apple’s Back to My Mac service. I found it incredibly useful to be able to screen share with my Mac at home and access its files. (So useful, in fact, that I even built an app to extend the service’s functionality.) But Apple shut down the service in Mojave. And besides, with all my data now in the …

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Apple asked for feedback from developers today in an email survey. I try to keep this blog positive and restrict most of my snark to Twitter, but I figured I might as well post it here, too. If you can’t see that image for some reason, here’s what I wrote: I’m a long-time, independent Mac developer. I’ve traditionally sold directly to customers and, now, with the Mac App Store, still push customers to my website first. The value Apple provides with the store is simply not even near worth the 30% cut. When selling directly to customers, after credit card …

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Man, I miss Rdio. I mean, I really miss it. I loved that service. When I was a teenager, I’d spend hours on the weekend and get lost in new and used music stores (CD’s) just digging through stacks of beautiful album artwork and unfamiliar band names. I’d talk with other customers and ask the clerk to let me sample a few tracks when something caught my eye. The joy was in the discovery as much as the actual purchase and listening that came later. Rdio was the first streaming music service I used. It was like walking into an …

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I’m writing this blog post in Drafts.app on my Mac. But before I publish it, I’ll also probably do some light editing of it on my iPad before bed. And I’ve been capturing ideas, short thoughts, and building a basic outline on my phone over the past few days as things occur to me or I find myself with a bit of downtime. I’ve been a heavy Drafts.app user on iOS for years. But this workflow is relatively new for me and came about with the release of its Mac counterpart two months ago. Previously, for going on I don’t …

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I posted this to Twitter earlier today, but thought I’d add it here for posterity… Last week I mentioned that I had been yelling about Apple a lot on here lately and was going to try and be more positive. But allow me one more thought before I shut up… We went on vacation this past week. Before we left I updated my phone to iOS 12.3 – my wife remained on the previous version. (This is where you all collectively go “uh-oh”.) Spent five days at a state park shooting tons of video of the kids swimming, hiking, fishing, …

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I’ve started building something new. I’m about four weeks in and already finding it incredibly useful in my day-to-day. I’ve built many different apps over the years, thrown them against the wall, and excitedly watched which ones developed a following and which ones failed miserably. Most of my apps have fallen into two categories. There are the ones that solve a personal need I face, that I can inform and direct with my own experiences. And there are those where I saw a market opportunity or just thought they might be fun to build. Almost all of the ones in …

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Remember iTunes Match? It's great. But Apple stopped promoting it (probably rightly so) a couple years ago when they realized they could make more money charging $10/month for Apple Music than Match's $25/year. Anyway, I loved it and still do. It uploads all of your digital music to Apple's cloud and makes it streamable on all of your devices. And I mean all of it – especially your ripped mp3s, live albums, or anything else not in the iTunes Store. And if they can "match" any of those unofficial mp3s to a song from the store, they'll "upgrade" you to …

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