Being an Indie is Hard

Zach Waugh of Giant Comet and Flint fame writes: But even after I released Flint for iOS in late 2013, I was only making about half of what I would need to go full-time comfortably. Building apps by yourself is a grind, and I was starting to wear thin, so I decided to leave Giant … Read more

36 Hours With Amazon Echo

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 … Read more

Knowing When to Quit

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 … Read more

An Indie Mac Business – Breaking Down the Year

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 … Read more

Twelve Hours

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 … Read more

Handling Repeating Tasks and Routines in OmniFocus

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 … Read more

My Checklist For Releasing a New Mac App

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… Thanks to Tony Arnold for prompting me to … Read more

My Evernote @Inbox

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 … Read more

My OmniFocus Habits – Four Years Later

I’ve been using OmniFocus since the Kinkless days. Over those many years, my life has changed in countless ways, and with it, so has the way I use OmniFocus. Perhaps the best compliment I can give the app, is that it’s always managed to be exactly what I needed it to be at any given … Read more

Delegating Tasks and Outsourcing Your Indie Business

A few weeks ago there was some discussion online about hiring virtual personal assistants to help offload non-essential business tasks. Around that same time a Twitter user messaged me (and quite a few other indie devs) asking what sort of business tasks we would consider outsourcing. I’m pretty sure this industrious @replier was just looking … Read more