Episode 502: A Fancy Email Client

Manton talks to Daniel about his decision to switch from Zendesk to Help Scout, and gets Daniel excited about the prospect of finally switching away from FogBugz for his own work.

No sponsor this week! Please consider sponsoring us, or asking your employer to do so.

Links:

  • FogBugz: Daniel’s current help desk and issue tracking system.
  • Zendesk: Manton’s current help desk system.
  • Freshdesk: A help desk system considered by Daniel.
  • Help Scout: The help desk system Manton is switching to, and that Daniel is intrigued by.

Enjoy our show? Become a sustaining member!

February 20, 2022 at 6:29 pm.

Episode 501: We Are Going Down With Apple

Daniel and Manton talk about the specifics of Apple’s attempted compliance with the Netherlands’s new dating app requirements. They express their continuing disappointment with Apple’s apparent disdain for developers, and their surprise at the poor management of the situation on the PR front. Daniel talks about finally moving from Mercurial to Git and the advantages of standardizing on technologies that have “clearly won.”

Many thanks to our sponsor this week:

Links:

Enjoy our show? Become a sustaining member!

February 13, 2022 at 8:01 pm.

Episode 500: All The Things We Could Have Done

Manton and Daniel celebrate their 500th episode by looking back at several arbitrarily chosen episodes spanning the history of the show. They remark about the things that have changed, the things that have stayed the same, and their surprise that certain events happened when they did. They wrap up the episode with a discussion about their satisfaction with going full-time as indie developers, and unlikelihood that they will go back to “real jobs” any time soon.

Many thanks to our sponsor this week:

  • TextExpander: Communicate Smarter. Listeners get 20% off their first year.

Links:

Enjoy our show? Become a sustaining member!

February 6, 2022 at 5:01 pm.

Episode 499: The Drill Was A Good Idea

Daniel declares to Manton that he is finally starting to feel comfortable as an iOS developer, and looking forward to shipping Black Ink for iOS. Manton, meanwhile, is getting more interested in ReactNative as a means to possibly porting Epilogue to Android.

They talk about the virtue of venturing into unfamiliar technologies, waiting to get over the learning curve, and adapting what you like about other technologies back to your favorite platforms. Finally, they talk about the value of embracing “essential tools” and about what distinguishes an essential tool from a merely useful one.

Many thanks to our sponsor this week:

Links:

Enjoy our show? Become a sustaining member!

January 27, 2022 at 9:27 pm.

Episode 498: I Agree It’s Preposterous

Manton and Daniel talk about Apple’s response to South Korea’s legal requirement that they support 3rd party payment processing in the App Store, and whether Apple’s insistence that it continue to be paid a cut is realistic. They also talk about what has changed since the early days of the App Store with respect to Apple’s sense of entitlement to a share of all revenue earned on its platforms.

Many thanks to our sponsor this week:

Links:

Enjoy our show? Become a sustaining member!

January 23, 2022 at 12:03 am.

Episode 497: My New Mission In Life

Daniel and Manton talk about the persistent allure of finding a better bank, weighed against the daunting tedium of successfully shutting down an existing account. Then they talk about Apple’s AirTags, the growing controversy about how “bad guys” are using them, and whether Apple should discontinue the product or mitigate the risks of continuing to sell them.

Many thanks to our sponsor this week:

Links:

  • Wise – The international money-changer formally known as TransferWise.
  • Mercury Bank – Banking services for businesses with an emphasis on free wire and ACH transfers.
  • Stripe – Payment processing company with a beloved API.
  • Setapp – Mac and iOS app subscription service which includes MarsEdit.
  • Backblaze – A good remote backup service that nonetheless earned Manton’s wrath.
  • Wordle – The web-based word puzzle game taking the world by storm.
  • Letterle – Parody of Wordle in which you guess one letter.
  • Sweardle – Parody of Wordle based on profane 4-letter words.
  • AirTag – Apple’s general-purpose tracking device.
  • Responsible – Nick Heer writes about Apple’s AirTags and the ways people abuse them.
  • Tile – Predecessor to and ostensible competitor of AirTags.

Enjoy our show? Become a sustaining member!

January 14, 2022 at 10:34 pm.

Episode 496: Settle For More

Manton and Daniel open the new year with more talk about increasing productivity and focusing on the tasks that are most important to us. They talk about the merits of “settling for good enough” as a valuable thing both in life and, more pertinently, in shipping software or completing any creative works.

Many thanks to our sponsor this week:

  • TextExpander: Communicate Smarter. Listeners get 20% off their first year.

Links:

  • 4000 Weeks – The book by Oliver Burkeman that Daniel is reading.
  • Personal Kanban – The methodology evidently at the root of the “three slots” attention management system.
  • Basecamp – Software that prompts Manton weekly to ask what he’s going to work on.
  • Epilogue – Manton’s book tracking app for Micro.blog
  • The Starry Night – Wikipedia page on the famous Van Gogh painting.

Links:

Enjoy our show? Become a sustaining member!

January 8, 2022 at 8:28 pm.

Episode 495: I Can See The Inspiration There

Daniel and Manton take a light look forward to 2022, veer off into a discussion about their respective math skills, and end up talking philosophically about the limits of time and how we need to choose to spend our time on the things that matter most to us.

Many thanks to our sponsor this week:

  • Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.

Links:

  • The Dip – Seth Godin’s book on time management.
  • 4000 weeks – Book that Daniel is reading about time management.
  • Micro.blog – Manton’s microblogging service.
  • Claude Monet – “It should have been a little more green”

Enjoy our show? Become a sustaining member!

December 31, 2021 at 10:36 pm.

Episode 494: No Serious Commitments

Manton follows up with Daniel about his alleged accidental Catalyst port, and how it inspired Manton to look into the possibility of a Catalyst port of his Epilogue app. They take a look at the landscape of Mac and iOS apps for Micro.blog, including some iOS apps that run natively on Apple Silicon Macs. Daniel talks more about KeyboardKit, the inevitable edge cases he’s run into, and how he ended up contributing to the project. Finally, they talk about their never-ending ambition to get better at marketing.

Many thanks to our sponsors this week:

  • RevenueCat: In-app subscriptions made easy. Also check out the Sub Club Podcast!
  • Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.

Links:

  • Did You Just Accidentally Run That? – Simon Ljungberg alerts Daniel to the possibility he was not running a Catalyst app after all.
  • Jon Hays – Manton’s collaborator in many things, and another person who thought Daniel’s Catalyst story sounded funny.
  • Black Ink for iOS – Blog post announcing the iOS TestFlight release of Daniel’s crossword app for iOS.
  • Epilogue – Manton’s book-sharing app for Micro.blog.
  • Humboldt – Maurice Parker’s app to add Shortcuts support to Micro.blog
  • Icro – Martin Hartl’s Micro.blog app for the Mac.
  • KeyboardKit – Open source iOS framework that Daniel recently contributed to.
  • UIInputViewController – Developer documentation about the class that can be used to make custom iOS keyboards OR custom input views.

Enjoy our show? Become a sustaining member!

December 25, 2021 at 9:33 pm.

Episode 493: Someone Did All This Work

Daniel tells Manton about his return to work on Black Ink for iOS, and his experience with accidentally building a version for Catalyst. They talk about the joy of coming upon new framework features when you assume things are as hard as they were “in the old days”. Finally, they talk about deciding when to use a 3rd-party library vs. when it is more likely to be problematic.

Many thanks to our sponsors this week:

  • MacStadium: Leading provider of cloud solutions built on Apple Mac hardware.
  • Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.

Links:

Enjoy our show? Become a sustaining member!

December 19, 2021 at 5:48 pm.