Is this the end?
The indie business is cyclical, a sin wave of quiet and busy times. The peaks are high and the troughs are low. When an indie is busy, there is nothing better, no higher high. They are working with great clients, creating amazing products, solving the unsolvable, slaying dragons and earning enough money to pay the bills. But when an indie is quiet, there is nothing worse, no lower low. No clients to please, no products to create, no problems to solve, no dragons to slay and no income coming in.
Sharing nvAlt Notes with Ulysses III
I’m testing out Ulysses III for writing and so far I am finding it postively interesting for a 1.0 rewrite. One thing I wanted to try was to use it for notes alongside nvAlt. Here’s how to share notes between Ulysses III and nvAlt. In Ulysses III, click the plus icon on the bottom left (1) and choose Add External Source... (2). Choose the folder in Dropbox where you store your nvAlt plain text notes, then click Open.
Go Home
I was talking with a friend the other night about their number one concern with their new job, in that they expect to have to work until 11PM every night and would therefore give up yoga, movies and dating. I almost dropped my drink (which is a horrifying thought for an Aussie). WTF! NO! Go Home! You work to live, not live to work. I was that person, the one who worked all hours.
Direct Marketing your App to Tip Lines
In TimeToCall - After One Month, I stated that my next marketing experiment would be to send a PR style email to popular press site tip lines to see if they worked. In parallel, and unbeknownst to me, Christian Tietze was doing the same thing, just paying for it (See Sales and AppLaunch.us experience for Calendar Paste, worth a read and reminding me to post this). The results are: 12 PR messages sent (see the actual message sent at the bottom of this post) 1 delivery failure (so I used a backup address) 2 robo-responders indicating that the emails were received, thank you 0 reviews 0 posts about the product 0 requests for promo codes 0 responses 0 sales To be clear, I do not blame any of these folks for the lack of response (and I did not really expect any).
$60 million to aquihire me
So this week, Yahoo paid $30 million to acquire Summly and it’s 17 year old founder Nick D’Aloisio (just Google it). The way I read the deal: Summly and its product is going to be shut down. So it’s not the product they wanted. Nick only has to hang around for 18 months to get all his money. So it’s not the founder they wanted. Summly licensed its technology from someone else, so Yahoo is not getting any IP in the deal either.
Oldest Trace of You on the Internet
For a lark, and in response to this tweet: what's the oldest trace of yourself you can find on the internet? — Kyle McDonald (@kcimc) March 24, 2013 I started on the Internet in the late 1980’s when it was still called Arpanet. I connected our University of Cape Town UNIX boxes via UUCP to Rhodes University in South Africa which in turn used UUCP to talk to Oxford University in the UK, which in turn connected to one of the Ivy Leagues in the USA.
Bjango's Photoshop Actions
I’ve already pointed out that you must have Slicy when working in Photoshop to create and manage iOS artwork or when creating assets for web sites. The other must have not-so-secret weapon for iOS art is Bjango’s iOS and Android Photoshop Actions & Workflows. These are a set of Photoshop actions that speed up the creation and scaling of iOS artwork. I start all iOS screen designs using the blue actions that create the necessary blank screen files (they even create a nice status bar).
Mixing Legacy and Modern Web Development on OS X Mountain Lion
Over the past few years I have been developing modern web applications like Kifu on my laptop using Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Octopress, and Node.js powered by Pow. But over the next few weeks I’ll be helping a friend upgrade a bunch of older legacy static (plain HTML), PHP and Wordpress sites.
I do want to keep using the same smooth workflow processes as I have now. But I do not want to clutter up my pristine OS X installation to do it. So this is how I have my modern web development environment set up, and how I have added almost seamless legacy development capability to it.
RSS Address Change
Update: This post has been updated with a new feed URL that will become the standard in future releases of Octopress. If you re-subscribed, I’d ask if you could please do it one more time. Thanks. It looks like Google is about to kill off Feedburner, so its best if we get started on the transition. Going forward, I’ll be using Octopress’ built-in RSS feed. Please re-subscribe to The Hiltmon RSS Feed at:
Someone Else Did It Better
Over the past year I have been working on a stealth iPad app to scratch an itch of mine. Today, following a tweeted link, I found the product I was working on, just done better by someone else. The Product As a developer, I have a bunch of old iPhones and iPads. As a writer, I have a blog. The idea was simple: create a dashboard app to run on the old iPad 1 as a second screen to display my site’s Google Analytics using tiles so I could rearrange the view.