31
Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists
At the bottom of my recent post on App Store pricing , I ended a three-paragraph footnote 1 with this:
Marco Arment
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.
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Visit marco.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2009 – Jun 2021
Tech Industry & Business 70Web & Frontend 30Hardware & Electronics 16Society, Policy & Culture 12Tools & Productivity 9Software Engineering 9
32
Apple Developer Center still down
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.
33
Underscore Price Dynamics
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).
34
App Rot
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?
35
64 GB Surface Pro will only have 23 GB free
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.
36
Bag of hurt
In 2008, Steve Jobs was asked 1 if and when Macs would play Blu-ray movies. He responded candidly :
37
A human review of the Kindle Fire
I expected the Kindle Fire to be good for books, great for magazines and newspapers, great for video, and good for apps and games.
38
What Safari’s Reading List means for Instapaper
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.
39
Twitter cuts off “find friends” access to Tumblr
As with Instagram, the change does not seem to have affected sharing outwards, but will impede users’ ability to follow friends that they may know from Twitter. This is part of Twitter turning the screws on sharing information about the users of its network out to other services like Instagram (and by extension…
40
Patent Troll Forced To Settle Frivolous Lawsuit Against One-Man Business
This story will circulate a lot today. I’d like to suggest a more informative and accurate headline than the likely “Lodsys dismisses a lawsuit and donates to charity”.
41
Readability's new service
I’ve always been a huge fan of Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet, which performs an article-text parse of any web page and displays the results in a highly readable, adjustable format. (It’s like Instapaper’s text view, but nicer and applied in place, instantly, to the web page you’re viewing.)
42
The curious pricing of the 27" iMac
The more I think and learn about the curious pricing of the 27” iMac , the more bizarre and incredible it seems.
43
Ode to the App Review team
I wasn’t always a fan of Apple’s requirement that all App Store submissions be reviewed by a fairly opaque process before release, which often led to confusing or unfair rejections.
44
Why is it so hard to be a good domain registrar?
I recently moved all of my domains away from GoDaddy, because they’re terrible. 1
45
The relationship between Readability and Instapaper
I know it’s bad form to mention your competitors, but I’ve been asked about Readability’s announcement enough today that it’s more of a charade not to talk about it, especially since a lot of people are under the wrong impression.
46
The Mac App Store isn’t for today’s Mac developers
Apple’s recently announced App Store for the Mac is a Really Big Deal™, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. But a lot of existing Mac developers have pointed out major issues or unknowns that need to be addressed:
47
Instapaper for Retina iPad
This is slightly embarrassing: Instapaper doesn’t show Retina-resolution graphics on the new iPad yet.
48
Most common words unique to 1-star and 5-star App Store reviews
I wrote a script to crawl U.S. App Store customer reviews for the top 100 apps from every category (minus duplicates) and compute the most common words in 1-star and 5-star reviews, excluding words that were also common in 3-star reviews.
49
A Business Insider retrospective
After reading Ryan McCarthy’s post at Reuters about Business Insider, I wanted to run some numbers.
50
App.net’s new direction
Today, App.net launched free accounts . Previously, everyone had to pay — originally $50/year, then reduced to $36/year.
51
Introducing Instapaper 4.1 for iPhone, iPad
With so many Retina iPad updates, it looks like the App Review team is working overtime to approve apps quickly. In a very pleasant surprise, my 4.1 update was approved much more quickly than I expected. Thanks, App Review team!
52
Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes
Twitter has posted some of their upcoming API-policy lockdowns and restrictions in this post from Michael Sippey , euphemistically titled “Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API”.
53
Serious doubts about the App Store
Update: Thanks, Fake Steve Jobs ! I’ve always wanted to be yelled at and berated by the real Steve Jobs, but this is probably as close as I’m going to get. On with the original post:
54
Let us pay for this service so it won't go down
Google, please set a price — any price — that you determine is necessary to keep anyone’s account running smoothly at all times. I’ll gladly pay it. I don’t care if it’s $100 a year or $1,000 a year. It would be worth it.
55
Why software patents are not fixable
I’m not a patent lawyer. I’m not even a lawyer. I’m just a software developer, and like every software developer, I’ve probably unknowingly infringed upon hundreds of patents while routinely doing my job.
56
Tumblr CTO Marco Arment Steps Down
After four years of my serving as Tumblr’s lead developer, Tumblr’s technical management needs have evolved to require types of experience that I don’t have, and my independent career has offered a lot of opportunities that I haven’t had the time to take full advantage of.
57
Standing Up For Android
Shifty Jelly’s counterargument to some of my Android opinions, which provides a concrete data point showing that money can be made on Android, concludes with this:
58
Subscriptions and the new In-App Purchase requirement
Apple’s new subscription-billing requirement has generated a lot of bad press and debate. The new rule, from the App Store Review Guidelines (developer account required):
59
A Rare Disagreement
So why aren’t those who are criticizing Apple for taking a 30 percent cut of subscription revenue criticizing Amazon? My theory: everyone understands, intuitively, that the Kindle is a closed proprietary platform; but many people view iOS (incorrectly) as a platform like the Mac or Windows, where third parties are…
60
Learning from competition
I experimented with custom fonts in Instapaper last year, but my efforts fizzled out. Before iOS 5, rendering custom fonts in a UIWebView on iOS was extremely buggy and slow. And nearly all of my licensing inquiries to font foundries went unanswered, so I couldn’t legally ship any of the fonts I wanted even if I could…