Focus

As apps deviate further and further away from the HIG with custom UI, whether for design reasons or in the pursuit of a mythical, cross-platform code base that management thinks will cost less, we lose the benefits of a well reasoned platform that was formerly easy to work with and a joy to use.

Rebudget

If you’ve been following along at home, you might remember that I started building a Mac app for managing my personal finances last April. Think of it as a powerful, privacy-focused, native alternative to Mint.com. Quicken, but not awful. Since then, I’ve helped shipped a huge redesign to the app at my 9-5 job as … Read more

Subscriptions or Bust

For a small software company whose product really is the app – as opposed to a SaaS with a companion app, or some other type of business that can bankroll an app by virtue of their real source of revenue – I don’t see any other sustainable path forward than subscriptions.

Triage Your Email in the Car with Siri

With this script, Siri will speak a summary of your unread emails and then allow you to take action on each individual message. You can listen to the full email body. Or, you can archive, delete, mark as spam, mark as read or unread, and send a reply.

Rebecca Stand and the phone reason

If you saw my tweet from earlier today then you’ll already know the punchline to this particular bug report. But for those of you who don’t follow my every dumb online comment, I present to you the strangest corner case I’ve come across in fifteen years of professional development. The app I work on during … Read more

Gone

So, uhhhh. This isn’t good. I really hope I’m just confused and not sounding a false alarm, but… Back in April I wrote a quick post about how I was backing up the shared iCloud Photo albums that my friends and family all use to send pictures and videos of our kids back and forth. … Read more

Perfectly Cropped

Here’s a fun, personal story about what can go wrong in an otherwise fine UI when things are redesigned. My wife typically only charges her phone when she’s at her desk during the day. She doesn’t leave it plugged in overnight, which means iOS’s software update never happens automatically for her. So, she just recently … Read more

Feels like the future

Nick Heer writes about AirPods at Pixel Envy: It’s also the category of tech products that, I think, comes closest to feeling futuristic today I’ve never managed to phrase it like that in my head, but that’s exactly my feelings, too. For two reasons: One: AirPods are a damn marvel of technology and miniaturization. They’re … Read more