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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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…
In a recent Stack Overflow podcast episode , Joel Spolsky mentioned that he’s probably going to formally end his popular Joel on Software blog next month.
It’s looking increasingly likely that there will never be another Mac Pro. Here’s why that would be a shame.
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…
Much of modern Apple’s design philosophy is to relentlessly strip down most products to the bare minimum in certain areas as technological progress allows, following (and largely defining) the modern design fashion of nearly-unquestioned devotion to minimalism.
Curator’s Code is an attempt to codify and standardize “via” links and attribution from link blogs and aggregators with two new symbols:
A common fallacy is assuming that any new platform in an exciting market — recently, smartphones and tablet computers — will be flooded with developers as soon as it’s released, as if developers are just waiting outside the gates, hungrily waiting to storm in.
The 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro, model MD101LL/A , was launched in 2012 for $1199 . Almost four years later, it’s still for sale , completely unchanged except for a price drop to $1099 in 2013.
I was asked a few times by some very nice people at WWDC this week how I manage my time between Instapaper and Tumblr, and how I write essays here that occasionally make sense. If you’ll forgive my auto-back-patting, here’s the answer I gave, and I think it’s worth sharing with you because you can do the same sort of…
App developers sometimes ask me what they should do when their features, designs, or entire apps are copied by competitors.
We are a leading internet solutions organization in Asia, and we have something urgent to confirm with you. Yesterday we received a formal application from a company called ” Varmer Investment Co., Ltd “. They were trying to apply for ” instapaper ” as Brand Name and following Domain Names through our organization:
The first two are real. Rocket Bird 3D and MY BEST FRIEND are other things (although probably keyword spammers). The other six of the top ten results for this game’s name are pure spam. Judging from the number of customer ratings, a lot of people are downloading them — and, reading the reviews, it looks like they’re…
The truth is that no one really knows why Vista fared so poorly in the market. It defies a simple explanation.
Most news outlets, including TV news shows and networks, newspapers, news websites, and blogs are targeted at news junkies: they never want to miss a story, and they want to be the first to report it to you.
The original iPhone was great on day one. It couldn’t do as much as today’s iPhone, but it performed its feature-set extremely well. There were almost no rough edges or unpolished areas in its hardware or software, and nearly everything seemed justifiable, well conceived, and well executed.
iOS apps display a prerendered, static image when they launch called Default.png . Developers can set it to anything they like. This is Instapaper ’s:
The new MacBook Air was released today, and it’s a hell of an upgrade. It got much better and it’s at an extremely compelling price.
This morning, Apple updated the MacBook Pro line with new internal components, including new processors, new graphics chips, a higher-resolution screen option on the 15” (finally), and bigger batteries.
I’ve seen a lot of people quoting and linking to Jason Calacanis’ recent article, The Case Against Apple—in Five Parts , in a positive light. But I can’t. It’s ridiculous.
Ged Maheux of the Iconfactory recently wrote Losing iReligion , in which he criticizes the business prospects of the App Store. He cites some general concerns, but much of the post is based on the unfortunate commercial failure of their Ramp Champ game.