Leaving IBM Behind

This week, I’m starting a new job (more about that later, I’m sure), and I’m ending my relationship with IBM. I enjoyed quite a few things about working on Server-Side Swift, but IBM is a really big company, and I tend not to enjoy the internals of big companies. From what I’ve seen, the bigger the company, the more disconnected I feel from what’s going on. After a couple of reorganizations at IBM, I felt I’d completely lost the thread of how the goals of the company were connected to my contributions.

Transmit: Don’t Panic on Pro iPad Apps

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Panic Ceasing Development on Transmit. It’s once again lead to a bunch of gloom and doom about making a living on the App Store and the future of pro apps on the iPad. Personally, I think this isn’t about the iPad business model - I think it’s about market fit. I bought Transmit for iOS. I don’t remember the last time I used it.

New Jekyll Blog, New Resolutions

As 2018 draws to a close, I’ve revamped my blog again, this time using straight Jekyll and my own fork of Artem Sheludko’s Flexible Jekyll theme. My old blog was on Octopress, and it seems to be abandonware, and with GitHub doing Jekyll natively now, it seemed to make sense. So now that I have a new blog, I’m resolving to write more, spend more time reading long-form text (books and articles written with expertise and thought), and spend less time on short-form text (hot takes, social media and the 24-hour news cycle).

Anchored to the Bottom: Hypothesizing the Root Cause of Low App Store Pricing

There’s a race to the bottom for prices on the App Store, and many developers (myself included) don’t like it. Some developers wonder if Apple could have stopped it. Others think the free and paid apps are different markets. Despite my respect for Charles, Daniel and Joe (with whom I’ve been arguing about this on twitter) I don’t think so.

The cause (I believe) of the race to the bottom is the existence of so many popular, quality, free apps, built largely with VC money. When users are given, free of charge, quality apps that took hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars to develop, it skews their perceptions of what apps should cost, and that in turn pushes down the price the market will bear.

App Accomplshed is a Best-Reviewed Addison-Wesley Book of 2014

As 2014 draws to a close, my publisher has released their list of the best reviewed books they published in 2014. I’m honored to be able to say that my book, App Accomplished was one of them. To celebrate this, they’re offering 40% off the eBook until January 22, 2015. And if you’re still on the fence, you can read one very thorough review here and the rest here on Amazon.

WatchKit Resources—Week 1

HULK BASH! - The Internet is Broken, But My Part is Fine

Well, the Internet is broken again. It sucks to be us (and by “us” I mean “people whose income depends on a working Internet”). I’ve been hacked a lot over the years. The first Unix machine I ever had root on was hacked within a week of me becoming responsible for it — because it was one of the few unmetered machines at the university where I was working my way through school.

Fragmented Capital - It Just Got Harder to Be an iOS Indie Developer

With Apple’s announcements yesterday, it just got a lot more expensive to develop for Apple’s ecosystem. I’ve written before about why it’s important to test your code on as many different devices as you can before you ship. That’s been getting harder and harder over time, but it just got a whole lot worse. Up until now, Apple pretty much only released one new iPhone a year. Yes, they released two last year, but the 5C wasn’t all that different from the 5 for programming purposes, so many of the devs I know skipped it.