TimeToCall - First Updates Coming Soon
I’ve received some great feedback and a few bug reports on TimeToCall and spent some time trying to make it a better product. The next decision is when to pull the trigger and put the first update through the App Store review process. Changes The two big changes I have made so far are a more accurate slider and the time now toggle. In the original release, I set the time slider to jump to 15 minute increments to make it easier to hit a ‘zero’ time.
Have a Better Agenda
Many, many years ago I went on one of those corporate week-long training courses to learn how to negotiate. Back then I was too young and too green to learn anything from it except I remember this mantra: The only way to win against someone with an agenda is to have a better agenda. At the time, I never quite understood what that meant. I think I have a better handle on it now.
BuyReply: Email, Text, Tweet, Click to Buy
Prior to online purchases, the only innovation in purchasing was credit cards. The move to online electronic purchasing has seen only one more real innovation, 1-click by Amazon. The current online purchasing experience really just replicates the same onerous manual purchasing process that’s been around since money was invented. Until now. With BuyReply, purchasing is as far away as an email, text or tweet. Completely frictionless. Completely effortless. Available everywhere.
Using Twitter ADN and #xpost
I think I have finally figured out how I want to use App.Net and Twitter . Given my low follower counts on both, and the different follower groups I have on each, I should get away with it. TL;DR: Follow me on both, no more cross-posting anything except blog post announcements, mute #xpost on one service to prevent duplicates. (Really? A TL;DR here! For an article this short? Where the “Too Long; Don’t Read” is about the same length as the post.
Gist TextMate Bundle and Command Line
I was having a conversation on Twitter with Shawn Hansen (@geekles) this weekend and he mentioned that Sublime Text 2 has a great plugin for Github Gists, and TextMate 2 was missing this awesomeness. Not anymore (the Oscars were on). Announcing the first release of my TextMate 2 bundle and a separate command line tool for retrieving, creating and updating GitHub Gists. The main difference between this and other implementations is that this one caches gist mappings (gist id to file names in ~/.
Multiple Themes in TextMate 2
One thing I like to do is to have different themes for different file types in my text editor. That way, at a glance, I can guess what kind of file a text-filled window contains, especially when zoomed out using Mission Control. I’ve been using Custom Language Preferences in BBEdit preferences to set up the color scheme for each file type there, and I have set up Multiple Themes in Sublime Text 2 previously.
Glui - a better Skitch
Ever since Evernote purchased and then ruined Skitch (See my Bye bye Skitch, Hello LittleSnapper post), I’ve been looking for a replacement product. A lightweight snap, annotate and save to PNG or share the image app. And I think Glui may be it. I just wanted an app that just does the following like the original Skitch betas: Snap Quick Annotate Save as image, or Share the image Go away Glui, by Sebastian Razola (@razola), does exactly that.
CriticMarkup Bundle for TextMate 2
Update: Christian Tietze (@DivineDominion) has created a bundle that’s included in the official toolkit, so I contributed my bundle’s commands to that, and will be using and contributing to that one from now on. Get the full toolkit at CriticMarkup-toolkit or just the TextMate bundle at criticmarkup.tmbundle. I’ve already taken my repo down to prevent confusion. Recently, @macdrifter and @themindfulbit announced CriticMarkup, a way for authors and editors to track changes to documents in plain text.
Common Misconceptions about the App Store
Over the past few days, new and old friends have been popping up to mention they purchased TimeToCall and were surprised that I did not know that they had done so. It turns out that this is but one of several misconceptions about the Apple App Store. So let me clarify some for you: TL;DR No access to buyer’s information No access to reviews No Trials and Upgrades We do not get buyers information from the Apple When you purchase an app from the App Store, Apple handles all the licensing, payment and download for us.
TimeToCall - After One Week
TimeToCall is a simple, universal iOS application I developed to help people choose the best time to call when calling internationally. This is a follow-on to a 10 part (and growing) series I wrote about the thinking and work done. My goal is to share just how much effort it really does take to craft an iPhone app and ship it. I hope this series helps you to understand why it costs so much and takes so long to create beautiful software.