Rockwell – Sort of like a private Foursquare meets Fire Eagle

Back in 2008, when I worked for Yahoo!, I had the good fortune of chatting with Tom Coates a few times about the now defunct Fire Eagle location brokerage service. Fire Eagle was my absolute favorite product to come out of Yahoo! during my time there. I’ve always been fascinated by real-time location data and … Read more

Minion for Mac

In case you missed it, I’ve been working on a new Mac app for the past month or so. I spent the last few days polishing things and getting it into an MVP state – not quite as full featured as I’d like, but complete enough that I felt comfortable sharing with the world. So, … Read more

The Thrill

Yesterday, Daniel Jalkut tweeted The only things better than shipping an app are the thankless months of hard work that go into making it halfway presentable. Yep, it’s fun. — Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) April 4, 2014 That’s an apt way of describing the strange mix of joy and awe programmers feel when, after hours, days, … Read more

Pricing a New Mac App Without Competition

A few weeks ago, I started working on a new Mac app called Minion. It’s nothing too big or complicated – just a quick project that I hope will be useful to Mac power users. My goal was to build the app and the accompanying web service in under six weeks. With two weeks until … Read more

One Concrete Action

Never underestimate how crazy busy your life will become when you have kids. Our first son, born this past New Year’s Eve, hit us like a ton of bricks. Taking care of him, on top of a day job, has meant my side business has taken a backseat at times. Nonetheless, since he’s been born … Read more

iCloud Doesn’t Backup Your Photos

I had a conversation yesterday with two friends. Neither one is technical at a developer level, but both are long-time Mac and iPhone users. They know their way around the platform. My first friend, we’ll call him Ted, said he was having trouble with his iPhone. His photos and videos had grown to take up … Read more

Printing and Mailing Photos to Your Grandparents

We have a three month old kid. That means we take a lot of photos. I’ve done the math, and in the last three months we’ve taken 1,202 photos of him. As I’ll write about in my upcoming book on Dropbox photography, all of those photos are stored and sorted in a shared Dropbox folder … Read more

Dealing with Asshole Customers

I’ve always taken great pains to be exceedingly fair, responsive, and back-bending in the way I interact with my customers. I firmly believe it’s best for business long-term if you always give your customer the benefit of the doubt and treat them as you’d want to be treated. But recently, for reasons I don’t understand, … Read more

My Favorite Chair

I’m a bit of a snob. I don’t just like nice things, I like the best things. That’s not to say I spend extravagantly or throw my money around, it’s just that when presented with buying a good product or saving my money a little longer and buying a better constructed, great product, I’ll usually … Read more

Importing Jekyll Posts into WordPress

Nearly four years ago I switched my main site over to Jekyll. It’s been great. But late last year I decided to make that site and its blog purely about my software business and move all of my non-work posts over to my tyler.io domain so I could have a personal site again. To encourage … Read more