Daniel and Manton talk about next week’s Apple event and the expected iOS and iPadOS releases, including Apple’s choice to withhold Stage Manager functionality from non-M1 iPads. Then they talk about 5G wireless and the advantages of Apple’s eSim support for using the second SIM to add data independently from your main plan.
Manton and Daniel catch up on their respectively busy vacation plans over recent weeks, and start looking forward to a more structured September schedule. Daniel shares his early progress on MarsEdit 5 development, while Manton talks about his experience converting a private blog from WordPress to Micro.blog, after first going all-in on the WordPress Block Editor, to understand how it works.
Daniel and Manton talk about Manton’s decision to cancel his Blinksale account, after 16 years of service. They weigh the relative value of the thousands of dollars paid as a fraction of the overall business conducted. They talk about Stripe’s increasing dominance in the world of financial services, and how they even offer a comparable invoicing product as a built-in feature.
Manton tells Daniel more about his experience with Blinksale, how they raised his monthly fee to account for features that he didn’t receive. They talk about our collective tendency as customers to lose track of the amount we are paying for subscription services that raise their prices regularly over time. Daniel explains that he shipped MarsEdit 4.6 but that it doesn’t include all the updates he hoped for, and they elaborate on the challenge of continuing to ship updates while perpetually having to put off certain changes.
Daniel and Manton talk about plans for MarsEdit 5, requiring a later version of macOS, and even employing SwiftUI in the new version. When is it the right time to drop support for older OSes because of the lure of newer features? Then they talk about when a major upgrade is “paid upgrade-worthy” and which platforms Daniel should invest in for MarsEdit’s future.
Manton and Daniel talk about the latest stage of FogBugz’s corporate ownership, the reaction among its few remaining users, and how happy Daniel is to have gotten out when he did. They ponder how important it is for any company to continually update their apps, as long as they continue to fulfill their primary purpose, and Manton makes a discovery about a long-time service he’d assumed was not receiving regular updates.
Daniel and Manton react to Elon Musk’s attempt to back out of acquiring Twitter. They talk about whether Twitter should even try to force him to follow through, or whether that is ultimately worse for the company. Is Twitter still a diamond in the rough, and could a leader with vision and enthusiasm make the company more valuable than Musk’s offer?
Manton and Daniel talk about Panic’s Playdate game system, the audaciousness of building a novel hardware device, and whether or not “What Would Panic Do” should still apply to most of us. They celebrate the thrill and joy of pursuing “weird” ambitions when you want to. Finally, they talk about their own tendencies to work on multiple projects of personal interest, and how much they should strive to avoid spreading themselves too thin.
Daniel talks to Manton about his continuing work to transition MarsEdit away from legacy WebView, the difficulty of doing so, and the thrill of becoming a “tangential expert” in web development. They react to a small rift in the WordPress community involving Matt Mullenweg and Go Daddy, and compare thoughts on what obligations, if any, consumers of open source software have to the creators.
Manton asks Daniel about hints he’s dropped regarding an upcoming MarsEdit 5 release. Daniel talks about how another 5 years has crept up on him and that he now feels another update is overdue. They talk about embracing relatively old Apple frameworks that are nonetheless new to us, and focusing on shipping updates with features that add value, even if they don’t fulfill every “magical” nuance you hoped they might.
