Episode 97: Some Little Achilles Heel Thing

Daniel and Manton talk about Tweet Marker’s new developer plan, dealing with deprecated APIs, WWDC videos on YouTube, and the futility of Apple’s NDA.

Download (MP3, 49 minutes, 24 MB)

Sponsored by Crashlytics: The most powerful and lightweight crash reporting service.

July 18, 2013 at 6:30 pm.

Episode 96: An Exhilarating Refresh

Manton and Daniel talk about the loss of RSS feeds for Twitter searches, the joys of starting on a new app, and sweating the details of all the non-programming indie software-business work.

Download (MP3, 31 minutes, 15 MB)

  • RSS Feeds For Twitter – Advice from Amit Agarwal on hacking together an RSS feed for Twitter search results.
  • Yahoo Pipes – Yahoo’s visual programming toolkit for web-based data.
  • T Command Line Tool – Ruby-based command-line interface to Twitter’s API.
  • NetNewsWire 4 Beta – Beta-release of the next version of the popular Mac-based news reader.
  • Ship Everything – Manton’s year-old blog post on the credo to only start projects you will finish.
  • iOS Text Editors – Brett Terpstra’s extensive catalog of iOS-based text editors.

Sponsored by Windows Azure: a scalable and secure backend for your iOS app.

July 10, 2013 at 4:47 pm.

Episode 94: You Just Messed With The Wrong Forstall

Manton and Daniel speculate about Scott Forstall’s future, talk more about WWDC, and discuss the pros and cons of Apple’s major iOS 7 changes.

Download (MP3, 36 minutes, 18 MB)

Sponsored by Tokens for Mac. App Store promo codes without the hassle.

June 27, 2013 at 10:09 am.

Episode 92: Find Other Nerds And Talk To Them

Manton and Daniel weigh the pros and cons of entering a popular app market, discuss finding a suitable acquirer for one’s product, and offer WWDC party-selection advice.

Download (MP3, 45 minutes, 22 MB)

  • WWDC 2013 – Apple’s upcoming developer conference.
  • Byword 2 – The popular minimalist text editor, now with blog publishing features.
  • Fantastical – Popular alternative Calendar app for Mac OS X
  • Cheddar – Example of a product whose acquisition price might be out of most indies’ reach.

Sponsored by Windows Azure: a scalable and secure backend for your iOS app.

June 7, 2013 at 2:21 pm.

Episode 91: Anyone Can Do Something Great

Daniel and Manton talk about Manton’s switch to Linode, the pragmatism and insanity of running your own server, and the old-timer/newbie mix at WWDC.

Download (MP3, 34 minutes, 16 MB)

  • Heroku – The cloud platform that Manton is moving away from.
  • Linode – The VPS hosting service Manton switched to.
  • Redis – Open-source key value storage system.
  • Heroku’s Ugly Secret – Criticism from James Somers of Heroku’s usage accounting tactics.
  • Rackspace – The VPS hosting service Daniel uses.
  • nginx – Alternative HTTP server to Apache.
  • Copland – Wikipedia page on Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system.
  • Pay Attention – Mike Lee’s App.net post reminding folks to pay attention when people are speaking.
  • mur.mu.rs – Mike Lee’s blog.

Sponsored by Crashlytics: The most powerful and lightweight crash reporting service. Coming to WWDC? Sign up for the Crashlytics party. We’ll see you there!

May 29, 2013 at 2:48 pm.

Episode 90: The Level To Which Your Laziness Will Rise

Manton and Daniel talk about Flickr’s redesign, Yahoo! as a potential strategic partner for Apple, and techniques for branching and refactoring older code.

Download (MP3, 38 minutes, 18 MB)

  • Dropbox Camera Upload – Instructions from Dropbox on enabling the automatic photo uploads Manton described.
  • Apple Photo Stream FAQ – Q&A from Apple about their Photo Stream feature.
  • One Momento – iOS app that allows customers to upload just one image — ever.
  • The One-Person Product – Marco Arment reminisces about the early days of Tumblr.
  • Yahoo Mail reset – Manton’s blog post from 2002 about deleted email (his temper has cooled in the intervening 11 years).
  • Mr. Wilhelm’s Flickr Photos – Story from 2011 about a Flickr user’s lost photos and — phew! — their ultimate recovery.
  • Clipstart – Manton’s movie-management app for the Mac.
  • A Successful Git Branching Model – Description of branching approach that is referred to often as “Git Flow.”
  • HG Flow – Mercurial adaptation of the branching approach described by Git Flow.

Sponsored by HelpSpot: Customer service is your best marketing. Make every ticket count with HelpSpot.

May 23, 2013 at 12:52 pm.

Episode 89: Quietly Scrambling To Fix The Problem

Manton and Daniel talk about CocoaConf Alt’s cancellation, WWDC’s protracted sell-out, and making time for indie projects with a busy life schedule.

Download (MP3, 39 minutes, 19 MB)

Sponsored by Crashlytics: The most powerful and lightweight crash reporting service.

May 14, 2013 at 6:57 pm.

Episode 88: Bundling A Thousand Features Into It

Manton and Daniel talk about adopting new technologies, choosing system requirements, version numbering (again!) and Adobe’s shift to all-subscription sales for Creative Suite.

Download (MP3, 38 minutes, 18 MB)

  • FMDB – An Objective-C wrapper around SQLite, by Gus Mueller.
  • Tweet Library 2.3 – Manton updates his archival Twitter client.
  • Instacast 3 – Example of a major update that focused more on fit and finish and less on bold new features.
  • Adobe Creative Cloud – Announcement from Adobe that “new product innovation” will be exclusively through cloud subscriptions.
  • NSConference Videos – $149 pack of all the videos from NSConference 5, including Manton’s and Daniel’s.
  • Dead Man’s Switch – Concept mentioned by Daniel in context of guaranteeing product functionality after abandonment.
  • TextMate – The venerable Mac OS X text editor that still works in spite of halted development.
  • Upcoming.org – Wikipedia page about the site Yahoo! summarily dispensed with weeks ago.
  • Save Upcoming – Upcoming founder Andy Baio rallying support for a rogue archival effort for the site’s content.
  • Archive Team – “A loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage.”

Sponsored by Screens by Edovia: Connect back to your computer from wherever you are.

May 7, 2013 at 12:19 pm.

Episode 87: Just Kidding, You Do Have A Ticket

Daniel and Manton talk about WWDC ticket sales, alternative conferences ticketless attendees, and the vibrancy of the Mac software market.

Download (MP3, 46 minutes, 22 MB)

  • WWDC – Apple’s annual developer conference.
  • altWWDC – Free, alternative conference to WWDC during the week of the show.
  • CocoaConf Alt – A paid, single-track alternative to WWDC during the week of the show.
  • App.net Hackathon – Hacking marathon for App.net developers, on the eve of WWDC.
  • Acorn – Light-weight image editing application from Flying Meat.
  • Briefs – iOS-focused app UI-prototyping software from the folks at MartianCraft.
  • Software Indie – New podcast from Scotty of iDeveloper fame, focused on empowering indies.

Sponsored by Windows Azure: a scalable and secure backend for your iOS app.

May 2, 2013 at 5:33 pm.

Episode 86: If They Can’t Make It, Who Am I To Try?

Manton and Daniel talk about WWDC ticket sales, Ambrosia Software’s major layoff, and Google Glass terms of services.

Download (MP3, 42 minutes, 20 MB)

  • WWDC June 10 – News release from Apple about the dates and ticket-sale strategy for WWDC 2013.
  • WWDC 2013 – Detailed information about the conference from Apple.
  • AltWWDC – Alternative gathering for the week of WWDC, put on by folks from Appsterdam.
  • Ambrosia Software – The stalwart Mac software maker that recently issued mass layoffs.
  • Ambrosia Still Alive – Piece by Jeff Garnet of the Mac Observer about Ambrosia’s prospects.
  • Panic – Another Mac software company that seems to be around for the long haul.
  • Google Glass API – Terms of service for the Google Glass API.
  • App.net Developer Incentive Terms – A contrasting API terms agreement.

Sponsored by Crashlytics: The most powerful and lightweight crash reporting service.

April 24, 2013 at 10:02 am.