Rob Fahrni

As a long time Windows user I’d love to see Microsoft spend some time on a visual refresh of the entire OS. There are some places that just look super dated.

Brent Simmons “Somebody on Twitter will tell me that I should add that IAP right now so I can pay Apple for the privilege of being on the App Store. Fuck you in advance.”

Brent is obviously fired up and rightfully so. Look, WordPress has been selling domains and services for years. They know how to do it and they know how to do it safely. This isn’t Apple being the gatekeeper of secure transactions. It’s about greed. Apple needs to have a cut of everything, even if it doesn’t make sense.

Unlike Jobs, Tim Cook isn’t driven by making the best product he’s driven by money.

Apple knows they have developers right where they want them.

“So, kid, you want to develop for our platform? Sure, give it a go. You’ll like it.”

Then they put the squeeze on you.

Sure, my next product will have IAP. Sure I’ll give Apple 30%. I have no choice but to. It’s ok. I’m personally fine with it for the little apps I do on the side. If I were trying to survive off my apps I might feel otherwise.

Day three: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to Knoxville, Tennessee.

13-hours, 868 miles. 🚙

Day two: Gallup, New Mexico to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

11-hours, 680 miles. 🚙

I found a great little coffee shop in Gallup. Strangely enough it’s called Gallup Coffee Company.

They roast their own coffee and it really good. I love finding places like this while on the road. It’s a true gem.

On the return trip to Virginia.

Day one: Visalia, California to Gallup, New Mexico.

12-hours, 749 miles. 🚙

I love road trips. Last Saturday our youngest daughter and I started a cross country trip to move her back to California, from Virginia. It’s the second trip we’ve made across the country in less than a year.

Today I’m resting up, visiting with some family, properly distanced of course, then I’m back on the road tomorrow.

The time alone, without social media, is really good for me, especially now.

It makes me think of a simpler time. A time we didn’t have the internet or smartphones. A time when it took a while to get the news.

For four days I was mostly detached from the world. It made me want to find a remote place on some land and forget technology. Of course that feeling was fleeting. I’m obviously on my phone now, typing out this post.

We made it to our destination, Visalia, California, around 3PM.

I rest tonight and tomorrow. Back on the road Thursday for the return trip home.

Welcome to California.

We’re in the homestretch today: Kingman, Arizona to Visalia, California.

Stopping for gas and some chow in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I love the desert.

Amarillo, Texas, bound for Kingman, Arizona today.

We’ve arrived in Amarillo, Texas.

Today’s journey started in Memphis, Tennessee.

Time for some much needed sleep.

Stopped in Ozark, Arkansas, for lunch. Getting really fancy chow. Taco Bell!

Just west of Little Rock. Moving our youngest daughter back to California.

Welcome to the modern definition of a “mobile developer.”

If you know JavaScript you’re golden. It’s no longer about native apps, it’s about leveraging web tech, and getting the most bang for your buck.

Learn the JavaScript if you want to have a job moving forward. Personally, if I were to use a cross platform development platform I’d probably choose Flutter.

Scripting News: “MLB should shut down, as should the NBA and NFL.”

I agree with Dave. This virus is just too dangerous to flirt with.

We should also shut down schools until this this mess is over. All that’s ever mentioned is how resilient kids are to the virus. What about their parents and teachers? Think of the wild fire that would turn into? We’d have to shut down schools anyway.

I bet a lot of modern day developers would look at my code and say “You should find another like of work.”

“We have great agreements where when Biden and Obama used to bring killers out, they would say don’t bring them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well, we have to, we don’t want them. They wouldn’t take them. Now with us, they take them. Someday, I’ll tell you why. Someday, I’ll tell you why. But they take them and they take them very gladly. They used to bring them out and they wouldn’t even let the airplanes land if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t let the buses into their country. They said we don’t want them. Said no, but they entered our country illegally and they’re murderers, they’re killers in some cases.” – Donald J. Trump, July 14, 2020

That is a direct quote from the sitting President of the United States.

He opened his mouth and words came out. I recognized all the words as English words but there is no structure. Can anyone follow along? I certainly can’t.

Republicans, you’ve had your stooge in office for three plus years. You got your tax cuts for the rich. You didn’t convict in the Senate. A virus is raging across our wonderful country killing thousands every day.

How much death and destruction is enough?

Get it while you can, chredge.xyz (short for Chromium Edge) is expiring.

Perfect for a blog that tracks privacy violations of the two browsers.

Just riffing here, random thoughts.

Thin, think iPad Pro 12.9in in a 13in form. Full keyboard, similar to today’s. The new design reminiscent of the iPad Pro designs. Edge to edge crisp display. It’s a convertible, which means you can flip the display over the back of the computer and it becomes a tablet. It’ll be about as thick as and weigh as much as the 12in MacBook.

Completely touch aware. Support for Apple Pencil. FaceID will be supported. No fan. As fast as, if not faster than, a modern 16in MacBook Pro. A battery life of 15-hours (10 under heavy load.)

The Mac Mini is an obvious place to make a huge difference in price performance. The question is, will Apple make a screaming fast Mac Mini for a good price? My guess is no. It will continue to be a low end option. It will get a new design and be about the size of the Apple TV. Fast. Quiet.

The iMac and iMac Pro – if the pro continues to be a thing – will not have touch support but will get a new design. Edge to edge display. FaceID. Fast. Quiet.

The Mac Pro design will remain as is for a while. A long while. It was designed to take us into the future. My big question here is, is the design going to work for replacing the CPU with a new Apple Silicon SoC?

The new lineup, with the modern design, will be Apple Silicon only. The price for the 16in and new 13in (14?) will increase. All devices with Apple Silicon will increase in price. Anyone believing Apple will drop the price because they’re in charge of everything, thus costing less to make, is dreaming. Apple only increases prices for new items.

The Intel based lineup will continue for a period of time as the inexpensive option in the lineup and will eventually fade out.

I feel like the Apple Silicon announcement really solidified my thoughts around the lines between iPad and MacBook. I had predicted the announcement of a 12in iOS laptop I’d dubbed iBook. That didn’t happen. But Apple Silicon Macs are so much better than my mythical iBook. True Pro developer hardware and OS. Full access to the computer. Everything we need to make excellent Mac and iOS applications.

Oh, and I really believe we’ll get a version of Windows that runs really well on Apple Silicon. It’s just a matter of time. The NT kernel, and all of Windows for that matter, are very portable and already run on ARM chips.

I wish a movie studio was brave enough to stream a blockbuster movie.

It’s a beautiful day here in Charlottesville. The birds are chirping, the squirrels are foraging and jumping around in the trees, and I’m sitting on our porch with the dogs sipping coffee trying to take it all in, but my brain has other ideas.

I’m thinking about the cross platform application I’ve wanted to write for, geez, 20-years. I’d estimated, based on my skill set and how slowly I code, it would take at least 10-years to complete. (Why am I so obsessed with this idea?)

As I sit here I’m asking myself, why bother? By the time I finish folks probably won’t care about native, high performance, native desktop and mobile applications.

Apple is still pushing native and this app would target iPad and Mac but it will also target Windows. At least that is what I’m thinking. Microsoft gave up on native desktop apps a long time ago. Sure, they’ve introduced WinUI 3 recently but they’re pushing Electron apps fairly hard. Heck, why not, VSCode is Electron and it’s amazing. I couldn’t do that.

I really do not care to be a web developer but at some point I’m going to either become one or do something completely different to earn a living. Owning a coffee shop is something I’ve often considered.

I’m tired. Aging. Tired of working for other people. That, I think, is my biggest frustration. I’d always imagined myself as a successful indie software developer. Just a one person shop, a lifestyle job. Make something, sell something, repeat.

If I happen to find a truckload of cash laying around it could change my math. Until then I’ll continue to fight with my brain.

Here’s hoping I win. 😀

(Please forgive my brain dump. This is but a small taste of what’s going on in my head, daily.)

Wow, my first iOS App was available in the App Store 11 years ago today.

Happy birthday RxCalc. 🎂

I’ve kicked out a beta of Stream with Import/Export and extra icons supported. I’ve already received some very useful feedback and need to make a decision about implementing those requests.

As it stands I understand the feedback I’ve received but I desperately want to ship Stream. The items that seem most requested are bookmarking last position in the timeline and marking an item as read.

I get it. Most feed readers have those features and some folks consider it table stakes. I may skip that for now just to get 1.0 on the store, because I really want to share it.

I can always add these two features as a 1.1 release.

I haven’t decided if that’s what I’m going to do. My beta testers have been downright amazing and I really want folks to be happy with this super simple reader.

If I don’t add these features the only thing left is to add In-App Purchase ( a tip jar) and fix a few bugs, then it’s done.

Here’s to shipping.