Please Let Me Pay For My App→

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Carley Knobloch makes a case for paying for apps:

Here’s how I see it: You know where you stand with a company that makes a paid app. It’s an honest exchange: Company creates a product or service, and I pay you for it, much like I would someone who washes my car or makes me a smoothie. It’s how things have always been done. It just makes sense.

When Company creates a product or service that it gives to me for free, I have to do a lot of thinking about why Company is choosing to do that.

[…]

Companies like Google, Facebook, Snapchat and Apple aren’t altruistic, of course: They’ve built genius services we use every day for free, and while we don’t pay with money, we pay with a major invasion on our privacy. One that we signed up for (go back and read the Terms & Conditions). So, in essence, the business model is you.

Side note: I disagree with her inclusion of Apple there. Apple has proven time & again they are very privacy focused. And they make their money from hardware. Their software and services are something that are value-adds to drive hardware sales.

Beyond privacy reasons alone, is the fact real human beings make software. A developer making an app you love and asking for money is trying to make a living. Paying them supports their lifestyle, and also, frankly, enables further development of the app you love.

If you are unwilling to pay for that app, don't be surprised when it disappears because the developer can't afford to keep working on it.

Now, linking to Carly's article is slightly self-serving in that she uses 1Password as an example, and I make my living from 1Password's success. So yeah, I'm very biased on the paid software front. But please, support your favorite apps and their developers by paying for apps.

On blogs→

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Matt Gemmell:

Instead of a blog, let your site be a site. Or a journal. An online anthology. Your collected works. Your essays, to date. Your body of writing. A blog is a non-thing; it’s the refusal to categorise what you produce, and an implicit opt-in to the disappointing default.

Instead of posts, you have articles. Pieces. Essays. Stories. Poems. Briefs. Tutorials. White papers. Analyses. Even thoughts, if you like. Actual works, crafted and presented for the reader, instead of just being punctured by a push-pin, and affixed to a bulletin board, beside lost dog, and roommate wanted.

Instead of posting, you’re publishing. If you were a blogger, maybe you’re a journalist.

Instead of blogging, you’re writing.

Try those words on for size. See how they feel.

Matt's article on his disdain of the terminology surrounding blogging is an absolute must-read. I know I needed it. As I've alluded to recently, I've been wallowing in a lot of doubt as a writer. Matt's words were a great reminder to keep writing.

I remember very distinctly a few years ago when I decided I wanted this site to be more than a blog. When I traded blog in the navigation for articles. When I started calling myself a writer.

My readership is not fantastically large. But it isn't insignificant, either. But the number of eyeballs reading these words does not detract from the value of my words. I greatly value the time you take to read this site, dear reader, but to be frank, I'm not necessarily writing for you. I'm mostly writing for me.

I encourage you to read all of Matt's article. It is excellent. He is a very gifted writer. And finally, I want to leave you today with a final quote from his passage, one you should jot down in a notebook, or Evernote, or wherever you keep quotes to look back and reflect upon.

Language is a surgical tool in the right hands, and a blunt instrument otherwise.

Exclusive Apple Watch Sport band colors→

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When it comes to the Sport band for Apple Watch, there's only a few color to choose from. The standard white and black, and then very bright pink, blue, and green. That's it. None are ugly, but the three bright colors are very sporty.

My wife is a navy blue kind of girl, and she frowned when she saw there wasn't a navy blue sport band. And then Jony Ive goes and shows off some exclusive Sport band colors in Milan, and there it is…navy blue.

I showed the photo to my wife and she said, "I hope that's available for version 2."

Your move, Apple.

Paper by FiftyThree makes tools free→

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Paper by FiftyThree is a lovely drawing and sketching app for the iPad. I like to dabble in it now and then, and my son loves it (when he remembers anything besides Minion Rush exists on an iPad).

For a good long while, Paper has had basic tools for free, and an expanded toolset for an in-app purchase. Now this free app has made its tools completely free, as well. I immediately wondered how they are making money, but then I remembered Studio Neat's little experiement.

Studio Neat took an app that wasn't seeing much for sales, made it free, and put an ad in it for their own smartphone tripod mount, the Glif. Let software sell hardware. It's what Apple itself does, right?

It just so happens that FiftyThree makes a stylus named the Pencil. And it was handcrafted for use with Paper. Maybe this is the way to let the software sell the hardware.

As I said, Paper is a wonderful app. If you like to doodle, sketch, or even make artistic masterpeices, and you have an iPad, then I highly recommend grabbing it.

And hey, maybe check out the Pencil, as well. I know I'm thinking about it a little more.

Now you can get your same Verizon data plan cheaper→

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If you have Verizon, you'll want to check and see if you can take advantage of their new data prices today. Many of the pricing tiers dropped by $10.

Verizon isn't automatically giving existing customers the new pricing, but you can go into your account settings and select the same data plan for the cheaper price, and it will start on your next billing cycle.

$10 a month may not seem like much, but that's $120 per year. I can think of a few good uses for $120 to go to.

Twitterrific 5.9 — The Photography Update→

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Twitterrific is an app that is near and dear to my heart, as I have been using since day one of being on Twitter (nearly 7 years!). Over the years I have developed a wonderful friendship with some of the folks at The Iconfactory. As such, I've been a beta tester for a good long while, and the 5.9 update has been particularly difficult to keep quiet as I've just wanted to scream about its awesomeness from the mountains.

Yeah yeah, there aren't mountains in the Great Plains, so maybe just a small hill. I digress.

I love photos. Twitterrific 5.9 is all about photos. You can now add mutliple photos (up to 4) using Twitter's photo service, and you can view photos (even multiple photos) from just about any service you can link to. Best of all, Instagram photos now load in Twitterrific's photo viewer without having to load the mobile site.

Videos also get a nice treatment with an improved viewer with playback controls, as well as animated GIFs. My colleagues at work and I basically live off GIFs, so this is extremely welcome.

Twitterrific 5.9 is a free update in the App Store, and it really is the most delightful Twitter app out there. If you love simplicity without sacrificing features, you need to get acquainted with Twitterrific.

Be sure to check out The Iconfactory's feature overview video for Twitterrific 5.9, and either leave or update a review on the App Store.

Apple's Lost Functional High Ground→

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Marco Arment:

Apple’s hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has taken such a nosedive in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future.

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The problem seems to be quite simple: they’re doing too much, with unrealistic deadlines.

We don’t need major OS releases every year. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features. We need our computers, phones, and tablets to work well first so we can enjoy new features released at a healthy, gradual, sustainable pace.

Apple's (lack of) software quality has been a consistent topic with my team at work, with my techie friends in town, and even with many friends who are not what I would call technology focused. That latter group should scare the crap out of Apple.

Those are the folks where the phrase “it just works” sounded like magic. And they believed the magic because save for a few things, it was magic. But now everyone sees the reality behind the tricks. The mystery is gone.

We're carrying around a drowned magician in the world's most exquisite glass case.

Why NORAD Tracks Santa→

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NPR:

This Christmas Eve people all over the world will log on to the official Santa Tracker to follow his progress through U.S. military radar. This all started in 1955, with a misprint in a Colorado Springs newspaper and a call to Col. Harry Shoup's secret hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command, now known as NORAD.

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The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. "And then there was a small voice that just asked, 'Is this Santa Claus?' "

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

"And Dad realized that it wasn't a joke," her sister says. "So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho'd and asked if he had been a good boy and, 'May I talk to your mother?' And the mother got on and said, 'You haven't seen the paper yet? There's a phone number to call Santa. It's in the Sears ad.' Dad looked it up, and there it was, his ;red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus."

This story brought a flood of memories back from my childhood. I remember my parents and I calling the hotline, and trying again and again after getting busy signals until we finally spoke to an airman to get Santa's location.

These days there's an app for that (and a site), but the past years I have tried to call in with my son because there are still men & women of the armed forces answering these phones on Christmas Eve, talking to countless boys & girls.

Thank you to those who serve in our military daily, but especially to those providing an evening of fun and whimsy to the small voices on the other end of the telephone.

This Christmas Eve, dial up 1-877 HI-NORAD with your children and thank a service man or woman for their efforts in keeping tabs on Santa.