I’ve been taking a break from Mastodon as my social home on the web for about six weeks. It has been more difficult than I’d usually admit.
Visit marco.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2009 – Jun 2021
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I wrote Tumblr, Instapaper, and Second Crack in PHP. I continue to use it because I know it extremely well, it’s very easy to use and deploy, and it’s nearly maintenance-free on servers. When you’re a programmer forced to also be your own sysadmin, that’s very attractive.
Part of it was the lack of surprises, which isn’t Apple’s fault. All of the product upgrades, while nice, were incremental and predictable. None of the pricing was a surprise. In fact, the only unexpected product announcement is the zombie iPad 2 sticking around for another year, shamelessly at the same price as last…
Last fall, I conducted an experiment: I quietly removed Instapaper Free from the App Store 1 for three days, leaving only the full, $4.99 Instapaper app . Not only did sales increase incrementally, but nobody seemed to notice.
They had encountered significant turbulence in the product line over the preceding years, especially Macs. It was a rough time to be a pro Mac user.
With Google Reader’s impending shutdown, lots of new feed-sync services and self-hostable projects will be popping up.
After two years, the Mac Pro was “updated” today, sort of: now we can choose slightly faster two-year-old CPUs at the top end, and the other two-year-old CPU options are cheaper now.
Google Reader’s upcoming shutdown and Mailbox’s rapid acquisition have reignited the discussion of free vs. paid services and whether people should pay for products they love to keep them running sustainably.
Upon first launch, Sunrise invites you to create an account, then asks you to add a calendar. The first option, “iCloud Calendar”, brings you to a screen where the Sunrise app itself, in its native interface and code, solicits your Apple ID (iCloud) email address and password.
This New York Times article gets a lot wrong, and both podcast listeners and podcast producers should be clear on Apple’s actual role in podcasting today and what, exactly, big producers are asking for.
More than fifteen years ago, in response to decreasing ad rates and banner blindness , web advertisers and publishers adopted pop-up ads .
Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot of negative reactions from the recent addition of the Quick Bar, a mandatory trending-topics banner on top of the tweet list. A lot of people really hate it, calling it the “ dickbar ” and often abandoning the…
The Magazine ’s development workload was much more front-loaded than I expected. These days, 99% of the work is done by the authors, illustrators, and especially the Executive Editor, Glenn Fleishman .
On the way to the Apple Store today to buy AppleCare+ for my wife’s new iPhone 5, we passed the new Microsoft Store , coincidentally in the middle of their Surface with Windows RT launch. (That is actually the product’s name. “Surface with Windows RT”.)
Your app must use Apple’s in-app-purchase (IAP) system for all purchases made in the app.
This paragraph in Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Why I’ll Never Redirect my Personal Blog to Google Plus scared me a bit:
At the bottom of my recent post on App Store pricing , I ended a three-paragraph footnote 1 with this:
I didn’t know Steve. I never met him. I never worked for him. I never even got one of his famous one-liner email responses.
It’s now been almost three full days. I don’t know anything about their infrastructure, but for a web service to be down this long with so little communication, most “maintenance” or migration theories become very unlikely.
Every iOS developer needs to listen to _DavidSmith’s most recent podcast episode, Real World Price Dynamics with Lauren Smith (it’s just 22 minutes).
Are they all being actively updated? Are they all built for iOS 7 yet? You never see any non-Retina graphics, iOS 6 keyboards, or old-style controls anymore, right?
Last year, I bought my 87-year-old grandfather an iPad 2 to replace the who-knows-what PC that was frustrating him constantly. He only used the PC for email and playing music, so it was a no-brainer.
AVFoundation, the low-level audio/video framework in iOS and macOS, does not accurately seek within VBR MP3s, making VBR impractical to use for long files such as podcasts. Jumping to a timestamp in an hour-long VBR podcast can result in an error of over a minute, without the listener even knowing because the…
A company spokesperson has confirmed to The Verge that the 64GB edition of Surface Pro will have 23GB of free storage out of the box. The 128GB model will have 83GB of free storage. It appears that the Windows 8 install, built-in apps, and a recovery partition will make up the 41GB total on the base Surface Pro model.
In 2008, Steve Jobs was asked 1 if and when Macs would play Blu-ray movies. He responded candidly :
I’ve been sitting on this idea forever, but the chances that I’ll ever do anything with it are close enough to zero that I’m letting it go. (It’s not original, either, but it has yet to make it into a widespread calendar product.)
After my first day with the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, I’m very optimistic about it.
In my earlier 20s when I knew everything, I was a much bigger evangelist for my technology choices. I’m accused of fanboyism a lot more these days, but only because Hacker News keeps sending huge waves of people here who tell me I’m an idiot. But I used to be much more annoying with pushing my choices onto others.
I expected the Kindle Fire to be good for books, great for magazines and newspapers, great for video, and good for apps and games.
Before today, I knew that a reading-list feature similar to Instapaper’s core bookmark-saving purpose was being added to Safari in Lion, and wrote a big blog post about its potential impact on Instapaper.
Despite my love for the previous Retina MacBook Pro , I won’t be able to use it forever. The best laptop to ever exist should be in the future, not the past.