Episode 248: We’ve Had A Strange Summer

Daniel and Manton react to the European Union’s €13B retroactive tax demand to Apple, talk about the impact of tax laws on indies and small companies, and weigh in on Apple’s purported AI and machine learning triumphs. Finally they catch up on their ambitions to be more productive as the busy summer transitions to fall.

Many thanks to our sponsors this week:

  • Zendesk: Bring native, in-app support to your app.
  • Fabric, Twitter’s mobile SDK: Leverage the power of Crashlytics, Twitter and MoPub to help you build the best mobile apps.

Links:

August 31, 2016 at 11:12 pm.

Episode 247: Maybe There Is Hope

Manton and Daniel talk about so-called lifestyle businesses, and how they afford both unlimited and always-limited vacations. They also talk about the merit of unlimited or mandatory vacation in workplaces, and go on a deep dive about the challenge of making a living as an indie software developer.

Many thanks to our sponsor this week:

Links:

August 26, 2016 at 10:22 am.

Episode 246: The World’s Shortest Infomercial

Daniel and Manton look towards the end of summer as they continue to discuss the challenge of balancing summer family time, vacations, and work commitments. They appreciate Apple’s becoming a well-oiled machine for beta releases, and speculate about the possibility of new Mac hardware to coincide with Sierra. Finally, they touch base with Manton’s Kickstarter progress, and talk about the value of setting up a VPN or “Back to my Mac” configuration for accessing home computers while traveling.

Many thanks to our sponsors this week:

  • Linode: Cloud Hosting for You.
  • Hired: The world’s most intelligent talent matching platform.

Links:

  • Apple Beta Program – Apple’s beta releases are running like clockwork.
  • The New Glif – Example of a Kickstarter page from repeat successes Studio Neat.
  • OS X Server – Soon to be macOS Server: a bag of many tricks for home servers.
  • Arq – Cloud-platform-agnostic backup app for macOS.
August 17, 2016 at 8:38 pm.

Episode 245: Flying On Faith And Hope

Manton and Daniel talk briefly about Xcode 8 Extensions, and reflect on the fragility of poorly designed plugin systems. They talk about vacationing as an indie developer, and share tricks for coping with the overwhelming aspects of a large software project. Finally, they come to term with financial realities and the value of using a spreadsheet to account for cash flow.

Many thanks to our sponsors this week:

  • Bugsee: Free crash and bug reporting for iOS, with synchronized video, network and logs.
  • Linode: Cloud Hosting for You.

Links:

  • Xcode 8 Extensions – WWDC 2016 video from Apple on Xcode 8’s extensibility.
  • NSCoding – Protocol reference for Apple’s traditional object serialization strategy.
  • Under the Radar #39 – David Smith and Marco Arment talk about the merits of using autolayout inside and out of Interface Builder.
  • @macdevnet – Twitter account of Steve Scott (Scotty) of NSConference fame.
  • Alykhan Jetha – Çingleton 2011 – Our friend AJ’s talk from the first Çingleton conference.
  • The Magic Spreadsheet – Episode of Release Notes featuring Charles Perry’s endorsement of spreadsheet accounting.
  • Baremetrics – A financial analysis service that Manton uses.
August 11, 2016 at 10:01 pm.

Episode 244: You Didn’t Do Nothing

Daniel gets verified on Twitter, and has mixed feelings. Manton thinks out loud about quality filtering for content-based services. The two discuss Erik Person’s response to Marco’s “10 year challenge”, and the commitment it takes to go from nothing to successful as an indie.

Many thanks to our sponsor this week:

Links:

August 4, 2016 at 5:14 pm.