Daniel and Manton continue discussing financial sustainability of the App Stores, weigh the advantages of going for top ranking vs. multiple “long tail” products, and catch up with each other on recent project work.

Download (MP3, 57 minutes, 28 MB)

• Overcast Sales Numbers – Marco Arment shares 2014 sales figures for his podcasting app, Overast.
• Manual’s Sales Number – William Wilkson shares sales figures for Manual, his iOS camera app.
• Monument Valley Sales Numbers – Sales figures of a decidedly different magnitude.
• The Shape of the App Store – Charles Perry interprets Marco Arment’s sales figures and draws optimistic conclusions.
• _David Smith’s Apps – The developer and host of Developing Perspective sells a large number of apps.
• Clarion – Daniel’s music interval training tool for OS X.
• Vintage About Boxes – Riccardo Mori collects and shares a ton of old Mac about boxes from popular titles.
• Sunlit – Manton’s (and Jon Hays’s) photo-based storytelling app for iOS.
• Overshare Kit – Jared Sinclair’s open source library for sharing to a variety of social services.

Sponsored by Fabric, Twitter’s mobile SDK: Leverage the power of Crashlytics, Twitter and MoPub to help you build the best mobile apps.

Manton and Daniel get back into the swing of work after the New Year, discuss Marco Arment’s “Functional High Ground,” dig into the general challenge of balancing stability with feature growth, and gripe about the missed opportunities of Apple’s App Stores.

Download (MP3, 65 minutes, 31 MB)

• Apple Has Lost the Functional High Ground – Marco Arment laments the state of Apple software reliability.
• Adiós a las Computadoras Dell – Daniel’s over-the-top 2005 post predicting the end of Dell.
• Bitsplitting: The Functional High Ground – Daniel’s response to Marco’s post.
• Balance – Federico Viticci’s response to Marco’s post.
• Chromebook – Google’s portable, minimal computer.
• Tweet Library – Manton’s iOS Twitter client.
• Complete My Bundle Pricing – Rundown from Apple on how the iTunes Apple’s bundle pricing works.
• 2014 Panic Report – End of the year rundown from Cabel Sasser of Panic.
• Selling Outside the Mac App Store – Dan Counsell on Realmac’s success selling outside the App Store.
• RapidWeaver – Popular web authoring tool from Realmac.
• FeedWrangler – (Underscore) David Smith’s web-based RSS app and syncing service.
• TextExpander for Mac – Mac keyboard typing accelerator that had to leave the Mac App Store.

Sponsored by PDFpen 2: Professional PDF Editing for your iPad & iPhone.

Daniel and Manton talk about Daniel’s first open-source Swift code, whether Daniel will give up the Git vs. Mercurial fight, and answer listener Q&A about whether and when to adopt Swift.

Download (MP3, 48 minutes, 23 MB)

• Blockpass – Daniel’s GitHub-hosted Swift-inclusive project.
• Mercurial – A fine version control system that not enough people appreciate.
• Tower – OS X client app for managing Git repositories.
• Gitbox – Another OS X client app for Git.

Sponsored by Core Intuition Jobs: Connecting iOS and Mac Cocoa developers with their next dream job.

Manton and Daniel talk about the Hour of Code campaign, reflect upon talking to kids about code, and answer listener questions about selling directly to customers on the web, and managing source code for multiple platform and OS targets.

Download (MP3, 53 minutes, 25 MB)

• Hour of Code – Global campaign to encourage non-coders to take a swing at coding.
• Code.org – Organizers of Hour of Code.
• iTunes Hour of Code – Feature from Apple listing apps, books, and podcasts pertinent to coding.
• First Coding President – Wired claims Obama became the first President of the United States to write a computer program.
• National Novel Writing Month – Organization for encouraging budding authors.
• Aquatic Prime – Cryptographic license code software, originally by Lucas Newman.
• Kagi – Venerable payment processing company.
• Stripe – Modern, developer-friendly payment processing company.
• FastSpring – Payment processing plus hosting infrastructure in one product.
• PotionStore – Andy Kim’s Ruby-based web software sales package.

Sponsored by Smile’s PDFpen Scan+: Powerful Mobile Scanning & OCR.

Daniel and Manton talk about growing complexity of Apple’s various Xcode project targets, Daniel’s fledgling iOS share extension, Manton’s winding-down Twitter apps, and the ironies of Twitter’s great developer support for platforms other than Twitter.

Download (MP3, 38 minutes, 18 MB)

• MarsEdit – Daniel’s blog editing app for Mac OS X.
• Winding Down My Twitter Apps – Manton explains that he’ll stop selling Tweet Library and Watermark.
• A Complete Tweet Index – Twitter’s announcement that the entire public tweet history can now be searched.
• The Most Earnest Developer – Daniel reacts to Manton’s app wind-down.
• Killing Third-Party Apps – Marco Arment reacts by reasserting that 3rd party Twitter apps are going away.
• Twitter Fabric – The new suite of developer tools comprising Crashlytics and others.
• It’s All Too Much – Clutter-control book by Peter Walsh.
• Manton’s New Product – Opportunity to sign up for the mailing list.

Sponsored by Core Intuition Jobs: Connecting iOS and Mac Cocoa developers with their next dream job.

Manton and Daniel discuss WatchKit, poor conference planning, podcasting anxiety, and the difference between a $0 Billion and $1 Billion web service.

Download (MP3, 49 minutes, 23 MB)

• WatchKit – Apple’s new SDK enables 3rd party apps for the watch.
• Wireless Markup Language – Wikipedia page describing WML and WAP mobile development tech.
• Butts – Steve Streza’s first WatchKit app.
• CocoaConf Boston 2014 – The conference that Daniel almost neglected to open for.
• Raizlabs Tweet – The fateful tweet that reminded me I had the dates wrong.
• Mac Power Users – Podcast that will soon be airing an interview with Manton.
• Roderick on the Line – A super podcast featuring Merlin Mann and John Roderick.
• Battledecks SxSW 2008 – Example of the ultimate contest of extemporaneous speaking.
• $1B Slack – TechCrunch’s reporting on Slack’s purported $1B value.
• Searchpath – Manton’s considerably less valuable web search service.
• Campfire – Comparable product to Slack, from Basecamp née 37signals.
• HipChat – Another group-chat solution, from Atlassian.
• Set Your Priorities – Joel Spolsky on the problems with “consultingware”.

Sponsored by DevMountain. Learning on your own sucks. Come to DevMountain and learn how to build and submit iOS apps from scratch.

Daniel and Manton discuss Apple’s growing engineering presence outside of Cupertino, weigh the merits of minimally and maximally viable products, and address Daniel’s persistent fear of public speaking.

Download (MP3, 50 minutes, 24 MB)

• Apple’s Hydroelectric Plant – News report from earlier this year about Apple’s Prineville, OR project.
• Apple’s Seattle Office – News story confirming Apple’s establishment of a permanent engineering office in Seattle.
• Microsoft Azure – Cloud services from the Seattle software giant.
• Maximum Viable Products – Allen Pike’s blog reaction to Cabel Sasser’s video quip.
• CocoaConf Boston – The Dedham, MA conference where Daniel will be speaking.

Sponsored by TextExpander touch 3 from Smile. Save time. Let TextExpander type for you. Now with custom keyboard.

Special request: please take a moment to let Smile know you appreciate their sponsoring the show. It could mean a lot to them, and to us! Thanks.

Manton and Daniel talk about momentum in shipping software, and how arbitrary deadlines, lucky breaks, and the presence of new system features can all get the movement going again. They also revisit Apple’s app review stance in the wake of PCalc’s recent short-lived rejection.

Download (MP3, 42 minutes, 20 MB)

• Black Ink – Daniel’s Mac-based crossword solving app.
• Timed Releases – Facebook’s announcement that it would release an update every month.
• “Just 1068 Days” – Gus Mueller’s classic post about going indie.
• Long and Winding Road – Paul Kim of Noodlesoft on his route to indie success.
• Luck Being Indie – Manton’s short post about taking advantage of opportunities.
• FastScripts – Daniel’s relatively un-profitable script utility that nonetheless had a big windfall.
• Tweet Library – Manton’s Twitter client for iOS.
• Tweet Marker – Manton’s infrastructural place-saving service for Twitter.
• PCalc – Long-lived, well regarded calculator app for iOS and Mac.
• No Longer Rejecting – Good news from TechCrunch for James Thomson, developer of PCalc.

Sponsored by Core Intuition Jobs: Connecting iOS and Mac Cocoa developers with their next dream job.

Daniel and Manton draw premature conclusions about celebrities in tech, take stock of our own product goals, and weigh the costs of adopting Apple’s latest SDKs vs. sticking with a tried-and-true build environment.

Download (MP3, 44 minutes, 29 MB)

• Taylor Swift’s 1989 – Manton reflects upon challenging perceptions of Taylor Swift’s music.
• Hollywood – Kim Kardashian’s iOS game.
• Vector 61 – Christina Warren and the Vector crew talk about Kardashian’s game.
• It started as a joke – The official creation myth for Paul Newman’s salad dressing.
• Technical debt – Wikipedia article for anybody unfamiliar with the (valuable, IMHO) concept.
• Clipstart – Manton’s video-management app for Mac.

Sponsored by CocoaConf: the developer conference for those who think different.

Manton and Daniel are joined by very special guest Brent Simmons to talk about assorted topics including Brent’s podcast, Seattle, the Omni Group, and importantly, the promise of the internet as a guarantee of free speech.

Download (MP3, 75 minutes, 36 MB)

• Inessential – Brent Simmons’s bastion of free speech on the internet.
• What is Frontier? – Description of UserLand’s Frontier, courtesy of Dave Winer.
• Scripting.com – Home page of Dave Winer.
• The Record – Oral history podcast from Brent Simmons and Chris Parrish.
• BusyMac – Seattle-area indie software shop founded by Dave Riggle and John Chaffee.
• Roderick on the Line – Seattle-tinted podcast from John Roderick and Merlin Mann.
• The Omni Group – Long-time Mac developers and new employers of Brent Simmons.
• Vesper – iOS note-taking app from Brent Simmons, John Gruber, and Dave Wiskus.
• Manila – An early blog publishing system.
• Riverfold – Manton’s indie software business.
• Twitpic shutting down – Announcement from the popular photo-hosting service.
• Bitsplitting with Brent Simmons – Daniel’s interview with Brent.

Sponsored by Crashlytics: The most powerful and lightweight crash reporting service. Check out the new Crashlytics Answers analytics service.