I have released a maintenance update to my app, WordCounter. Check out the release notes.

Some old code went out, some updated components went in. Most notably the date range picker from the statistics:

Since this update is built on modern macOS, I can’t support anything older than macOS 10.13 anymore without hassle, so that’s what’s required now.

I hope to have something fancier in store for the 10-year anniversay next year!

Get the WordCounter app for Mac.

I was adding “tech stacks” to my CV and figured I might as well link the tech to articles or overviews on my page.

The ‘wiki’ pages I added some time ago are the best places to summarize topics and embed a list of related posts. So I added a page about VIPER and briefly had a look at my old posts.

On a side note, it’s funny how this approach looked kind of popular for a while, but never really caught on. Another example that programming is a pop culture. VIPER never made the Top 10. While it’s still an approach that does what it set out to do, the shorter ‘VIP’ tried to supplant it later, but the much less opinionated [view] coordinators really took the stage. (Crazy that Soroush’s post is from January 2015, which is 8 years ago.)

EmacsConf 2022 is this weekend!

It starts 15:00 CET (German Time), aka 9am-5pm Toronto/EST.

There’s a metric crapton of talks and demos and stuff. Recent years have been good to the Emacs web community.

Overview: https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/

The website is great; it includes

• visualization of the tracks,
• iCal format of the schedule,
• a dedicated mailing list,
• and an Etherpad / open notepad for each talk!

Direct links to watch each of the ‘rooms’: https://emacsconf.org/2022/watch/

My Bookmarks for this Weekend

I’ll check out the others, but these I want to make sure I get back to:

• Knowledge management
  • Alfred Zanini: “Emacs journalism (or everything’s a nail if you hit it with Emacs)” – sounds like an intricate writing workflow
  • Daniel Rösel: “Back to school with Emacs”
  • Vidianos Giannitsis: “Writing and organizing literature notes for scientific writing”
• Programming/Technical
  • George Mauer: “Org workflows for developers” – “grab-bag of workflows developed over the years”, I’m in!
  • Abin Simon: “Tree-sitter beyond syntax highlighting”
  • Sid Kasivajhula: “Maintaining the Maintainers: Attribution as an Economic Model for Open Source” – meta talk about Open Source; sounds interesting in the perspective of Emacs and some of its packages that exist for longer than most FOSS projects
• Tools
  • Mohsen BANAN: “Revisiting the anatomy of Emacs mail user agents” – I’m invested in Emacs mailing, so maybe I can learn to fix some stuff :)
  • Timothy: “This Year in Org”
  • Daniel Gopar: “Real estate and Org table formulas” – am using tables sparingly, but would love to
  • Howard Abrams: “Top 10 reasons why you should be using Eshell”
• Zettelkasten
  • Ramin Honary: “Build a Zettelkasten with the Hyperbole Rolodex” – Hyperbole is weird, and I don’t get it, so I’m afraid I might also have to check out this afterwards:
    • Robert Weiner: “Powerful productivity with Hyperbole and Org Mode”
    • Mats Lidell: “Linking personal info with Hyperbole implicit buttons”

I’ve added a new section to this site. Wanted to call it /books, but that’s taken and about my books :)

So I added the new /library index. It shows books added to my personal library sorted by year I read them.

At the moment, there’re only these three, all of which I needed (wanted) for the previous post:

• Christopher Alexanders’ A Pattern Language
• The Gang of Four’s book Design Patterns
• Gio Lodi’s Test-Driven Development in Swift

This collection is bound to grow. I missed something like this for a couple of years. An overview of posts about book would’ve been nice for lots of reasons.

Now the basics are prepared.

I’ve released an update to existing users of TableFlip last week. It works well so far, so now’s the time for the official announcement of the new version, available for direct download.

Most notable changes:

• TableFlip now guesses sophistically determines the delimiter in CSV files, if needed. So you can use ; or \t just fine, which means export from Numbers works out of the box.
• Non-comma-delimiters also “stick” when saving. No auto-replacement to comma anymore.
• The CSV loading and saving is more robust, especially with quoted content. There’s been issued reported in the past, and these should now be fixed. Thanks for your emails and sample files, folks! ❤️

For my nerdy readers, behind the scenes I also upgraded Sparkle from the XPC branch to the actual Sparkle 2.0 stuff. I sincerely hope it will ingest the upcoming updates, too. (It’d not be the first time I broke the update mechanism of one of my apps, heh.)

What is TableFlip, you ask?

TableFlip is a fast tabular data editor – the ideal companion app for Markdown users who want beautiful tables in their documents. Open the file in both TableFlip and your text editor, and you’re set: TableFlip lets you edit all tables it finds inside your document and updates live as you edit your text.

Well, and you can edit CSV files, too, and export to LaTeX.

TableFlip v1.4.0 is available from the website and the Mac App Store.

Our note-taking app for macOS, The Archive, turns 3 years old this week. To celebrate, we wanted to do something nice to all the people who supported us during that time.

The thing we came up with is a giveaway. But every customer of the past 3 years wins automatically. The price is 1 free license to freely gift to someone else.

The only condition is that you purchased the app before I uploaded everything today, and that’s it. And that you enter before April rolls around, because then we’ll take down the Claim-O-Matic.

Go to the give-away page and enter your email, then you get a link you can share with the ultimate recipient!

It was really fun to create the website for this giveaway. I also find myself staring at the confetti because it’s so soothing to see how it travels downward. I hope you enjoy the experience, too, and that you know someone who would benefit from a tasteful note-taking app in 2021 with no strings attached.

I uploaded another episode of the video series where I document how someone might process reading notes from a book after reading it. I don’t have any Range related project, so here I’m just processing the book from start to finish instead of looking for anything in particular.

This episode is shorter, because I didn’t find many useful ideas in Chapter 3. And the ideas I did find interesting were not citable, so I had to look the originals up. That took most of the time, but did ultimately not produce many new notes. It’s interesting that after a couple of session I already begin to form an opinion of the quality of Epstein’s research. There’s lots of endnotes, but the quality is … well, enjoy this episode to find out more!

• Watch, read, and discuss on the Zettelkasten blog
• Watch on YouTube

Episode list:

• Episode 1: Introduction
• Episode 2: Chapter 1, “The Cult of the Head Start”
• Episode 3: Chapter 2, “How the Wicked World Was Made”
• Episode 4: Chapter 3, “When Less of the Same Is More”
• Episode 5: Chapter 4, “Learning, Fast and Slow”
• Episode 6: Chapter 5, “Thinking Outside Experience”

Another episode went live today – earlier than the last weeks, because I’ll be travelling to Frankfurt for the Macoun conference from Thursday to Sunday.

This chapter was harder to process. There seemed to be parts missing in the story. Maybe I’m too sloppy and haven’t noticed the missing pieces? Either way, something’s amiss in Range land. I also notice that the topics from chapter 1 were connected to the topics here somehow, but it’s just a hunch how things will fit together eventually. I’m looking forward to the next episodes, because I hope it “clicks” and I know how to split the sequence of notes in the structure note up into new Zettel notes and then work with the more powerful web of notes instead of this monolithic book overview.

• Watch, read, and discuss on the Zettelkasten blog
• Watch on YouTube

Episode list:

• Episode 1: Introduction
• Episode 2: Chapter 1, “The Cult of the Head Start”
• Episode 3: Chapter 2, “How the Wicked World Was Made”
• Episode 4: Chapter 3, “When Less of the Same Is More”
• Episode 5: Chapter 4, “Learning, Fast and Slow”
• Episode 6: Chapter 5, “Thinking Outside Experience”

I uploaded episode two of the book processing video series on David Epstein’s book Range:

In this episode, I process the few highlights from Chapter 1. I end up with many more links than last time already. I also employ the method of creating a forward-link, i.e. adding a link to a note that does not exist but that I need at a certain location in my structure note, then add the details. The upside: you already have 1 connection!

• Watch, read, and discuss on the Zettelkasten blog
• Watch on YouTube

Episode list:

• Episode 1: Introduction
• Episode 2: Chapter 1, “The Cult of the Head Start”
• Episode 3: Chapter 2, “How the Wicked World Was Made”
• Episode 4: Chapter 3, “When Less of the Same Is More”
• Episode 5: Chapter 4, “Learning, Fast and Slow”
• Episode 6: Chapter 5, “Thinking Outside Experience”

I have just released an update to my very first commercial app, Calendar Paste. It’s now v3.3.0 and sports iOS 13 compatibility, Dark Mode, and overall better layout. So it’s mostly a cosmetic and “minor tweaks” update.

Calendar Paste 1 was introduced back in late 2012. That’s 7 years ago! So, happy birthday, Calendar Paste!

To celebrate, Calendar Paste 3 will be available for free from Oct 1st until Oct 6th, and then 50% off until the end of October. The App Store listing doesn’t seem to be updated despite it being “Ready for Sale”, for whatever reason, though. Maybe it’s already fixed when you read this. v3.2 will work just fine, but not sport Dark Mode, yet.

The app was my first real app project, sufficiently simple to start with, yet interesting enough to be sold on the store.

Calendar Paste 1 kicked off my indie app developer business. I still don’t make a lot of money and have to freelance to stay afloat, but this is a very cool path to have taken. I’m loving it. In case you wonder: it never was a huge commercial success. For 7 years, it brought in something between $3 and $130 per month, with a guesstimated average of $18.53/month. Unless it didn’t sell at all, that is. So much for the dreams of yours truly in 2012 to get rich quickly, right? But I learned to code in Objective-C, use Core Data, program for iOS 5 (and then iOS 6 before the app was finished). That’s worth a lot.

That’s why I don’t sunset Calendar Paste, even though each year’s iOS update takes away time for maintenance. And I cannot warrant to add all the planned features to the app because the time is better spent on other, larger projects.

I also wrote a diary of the progress, taking extensive notes in a tutorial-like fashion, that I eventually wanted to publish as a $5 ebook – but I never did. It just didn’t seem to be worth the trouble, and shortly after most of the code was already outdated, and the lessons learned not easily applicable to Swift.

Sorry if you’re still waiting for iCloud sync. It’s theroetically possible, but would take about a week or two to implement and test, and that’s just too costly at the moment. One day I’d like to out-source development of features like this, but to do that I’d need to accumulate larger savings – so either me or someone else working on the app depends on the same solution and y’all have to hold out a bit longer.

For the Zettelkasten knowledge project, I’ve recorded and cut my first video. The process was a pain, and I think I’m going to write about it later – but for now, I’m happy with the result and very proud to have finished this mini project.

It’s part of an ongoing series to demonstrate the method we talk about on our blog. Here’s the video:

Comments are very, very welcome. So head over to the forums and tell us what you think of it!

Episode list:

• Episode 1: Introduction
• Episode 2: Chapter 1, “The Cult of the Head Start”
• Episode 3: Chapter 2, “How the Wicked World Was Made”
• Episode 4: Chapter 3, “When Less of the Same Is More”
• Episode 5: Chapter 4, “Learning, Fast and Slow”
• Episode 6: Chapter 5, “Thinking Outside Experience”

I compiled a crash reporter library with CocoaPods support. Check it out:
https://github.com/CleanCocoa/CrashReporter/

The past couple of days, I’ve been working on integration of an automatic crash reporter. Turns out that on some machines The Archive is crashing regularly during search, and I want to track this down. I need data by more than the most courageous users who can venture into the Console to track down crash report files and send them to me.

So I bit the bullet and began work on a server script that would accept crash report files and email them to me. I think that’s better than making users email me crash reports directly. Not everyone has Mail.app set up on her Mac, after all.

Fortunately, Brent Simmons open-sourced NetNewsWire 5 and blogged about his crash reporter. Brent has decades of experience on the Mac, so whenever he publishes a practical tip, I listen.

Just have a look at the code: Collecting .crash files and sending them over? Sounded simple enough! NetNewsWire even sports a very humble crash reporter UI, and automatically sending reports on the user’s behalf if the user choses to do so. The required Swift types are simple enough to integrate once you figure out where Brent put all the helper extensions :)

I cannot stress enough how amazing open source is. All this experience, assembled in publicly available code repositories for everyone to grab and use. This is crazy.

I am now rolling this out for my apps, starting with the WordCounter and The Archive on their respective “beta” update branches to see how it works in practice. The Swift code is simple and I trust it doing its job. But the server script, well, it needs to be battle-tested now!

I’m going to add public-key encryption of messages and/or some sort of authentication to prevent malicious attackers from spamming me with emails that, well … I send to myself.

I just released an update to Move!, the work break app I develop and use. It fixes a couple of user experience issues, like displaying a Dock icon when you view the preferences so you don’t lose the window.

Also, the app’s preferences didn’t display license details properly on Mojave and above. The app now uses Swift 5 and updated external libraries under the hood, is properly notarized (hello, Catalina!) – and a couple of MiB larger than before. I am looking forward to when we can depend on the Swift runtime being available on user devices.

I don’t know what’s going on this week, but I have written a lot for the blog. I also carved out an hour and a half today to update the structured overview of articles on this website. I always wanted to make it a good entry point but didn’t update it during the transition to another blog platform, then back again, and now it’s 2 years later already. Phew!

TableFlip is now available on the Mac App Store!

I also released updates to the non-Mac App Store version that fix CSV editing problems and improve the user interface. Of course both versions have the same features, so you’re not missing out on anything if you only own one version.

The app store page is a feast for the eyes. There’s a demo video (I already know how I can improve it a lot with the next update), Zebras, and lovely icy mountains.

Please share the news to help the app get traction. That would be super helpful!

I released an update to Move!, my work break timer, the other day. It fixes a timing bug and rare memory leaks. It’s a free update, and the app should notify you about the download automatically when it’s running.

Participate in this year’s Mac Developer Market Survey by MacPaw – the more, the merrier!

Also, have a look at the 2017 survey results.

I spent the last 15 or so months developing this beast. If you follow my ramblings, you will know that I get to work every day at about 7 a.m. and work until about 5:30 p.m., including workouts and breaks. Since I didn’t use a time tracker like Timing (affiliate link) for most of the time, I cannot say how many hours I really spent coding, sadly.

Anyway. The launch. The Archive will go live March 15th. I’ll publicize the app info page, soon.

And then I’ll spend some leisure time writing a postmortem. The beta testers have been a pleasure to work with, as always. It’s amazing how much love strangers are willing to give for carefully crafted products.

This closes a weird circle for me: my first Cocoa coding experience was adding Markdown preview to Notational Velocity in 2010, which I barely managed, having had zero understanding of Objective-C and how Xcode worked. Now I am able to create an app that exceeds NV’s capabilities all on my own. I’m very happy about this coding journey, and oh boy do I have a lot of cool stuff I am going to add after v1.0 goes live!

My friend and fellow Mac developer Daniel, known for the productivity tracker Timing 2 (affiliate link), assembled a list of general-purpose productivity apps for Valentine’s Day and offers exclusive discounts. My own app, the Word Counter, is on this list, too.

Check out his post and enjoy your lovely treat of discounted apps for Mac.

My latest project is about to be ready: it’s a strictly plain text note-taking application. If you know our writing over at the Zettelkasten Method blog, you will know the method I’m incorporating in this app. Everything revolves about flexibility and your ownership of the notes. Plus the amazingly productive method itself is baked right into the app to guide your workflow.

Sign up here for a beta invitation in early May:

http://zettelkasten.de/beta/

I will be hosting a webinar about distributing your app outside the Mac App Store next week. It’s free, and you’re very welcome to attend!

Wednesday, February 15th, 2017 @ 10:00 AM PST (will run 1 hour)

→ Register Now

Topics include:

• Ditching the Mac App Store – Why, and what it means.
• Is There Life After the Mac App Store? – Choosing an e-commerce provider.
• Getting Back to Development – How you change your code to work outside the Mac App Store.

Plus you’ll see me live. That alone should be motivation for you to visit, no matter the topic :)

Disclaimer, aka Code of Honesty and Transparency

Maybe you just arrived on my blog and don’t know how I do things around here, yet, and how much I value morality over profit anytime. So let me erase your doubts about this webinar cooperation.

I use FastSpring to sell my stuff. I really like their service, so I wrote a guide in 2015. FastSpring in turn was impressed by my initiative and helped me spread the word a bit and provide background info whenever I needed anything. I am not getting paid by FastSpring for the book. It’s my own creative work. I maintain it because I think it helps you, fellow developer, to set up your own indie business.

Then late 2016, FastSpring approached me as their go-to expert for Mac app development. They plan to show how easy it is to use FastSpring to distribute Mac apps. In other words, they want to own part of the good news for obvious marketing reasons.

With the recent Out-of-App-Store Success Stories by Rogue Amoeba and Kapeli, it may even be a growing market.

I was skeptical at first. I will not violate my strong ethics; teaching people the One True Way™ is more important than easy money. But I came to find FastSpring values delivering useful content over running a 60-minute ad show. From the get go, FastSpring wanted me to create the content. Not even once did they suggest I add something to my slides. They totally risk I go live on Wednesday and tell people to use a competing service. But I won’t, because I know no better service provider. I liked the concept, so I agreed. I am getting paid by FastSpring for this webinar gig. But it’s 100% my webinar.

To stay true to myself, I will give genuinely helpful advice to empower the attendees to become independent. Of course I’ll show FastSpring’s features, just like the screenshots I put in my book. All because I believe in their service, not because they bought my loyalty with the speaker fee.

In short, this is not an advertisement for FastSpring. I haven’t sold my soul. It’s a cooperation out of mutual respect.

Hope to be seeing you around on Wednesday!

I’ll send out a beta invitation to everybody on the TableFlip Newsletter this week. If you want to help me find quirks in the app and overall make it more usable, this is your chance!

Everyone who reports an issue will get a free license when the beta ends. Also, I’ll invite interested folks in batches, so you may not get your hands on the app this time but maybe in 2 weeks.

→ Join the Beta List

Tell your friends and in general everybody who’s using Markdown and/or deals with lots of tabular data in their work.

All 3 amazingly useful objc.io books are 30% off this week. Grab all three of them in a bundle and save even more.

If you use my link, I’ll even get a small kickback thanks to their affiliate program. I wholeheartedly recommend you take at least the time to read the samples. The team updates their ebooks regularly, and you’ll get a Swift 3.0 edition later this year, too.

I have added a /now page to this site which shows what I’m currently doing, thinking about, or whatever. I like the idea. Kudos to Matt Gemmell for showing his.

This year, the team of Texts, Brett and I teamed up to bring you the best minimal writing product bundle for the Mac. It’s designed to get you through NaNoWriMo: the accompanying guide tells you how to make the habit of writing stick and how to get most out of the apps.

The lineup of apps:

• Texts for focused writing (even on Windows PCs!)
• Marked for previewing and reviewing
• Word Counter to increase your productivity
• BONUS: iThoughts X (coupon for 30% off) to plan the plot with Mind Maps
• BONUS: Minimal Writing on the Mac guide

I use these apps myself to write, so creating this bundle was a no-brainer and a very exciting experience – oh was I busy! – but more on that later.

The Productive Writer’s Bundle is a sexy deal at more than 50% off, for $25 instead of $60 – for every author, be it novelist or non-fiction technical writer.

Grab it now. And tell your friends.

Move!, my personal favorite productivity and health enhancement app (and, apparently, my own creation), is now available on MacUpdate. Check it out for free if you haven’t already.

Please leave a quick rating on MacUpdate so other people know how good you feel, now that you take regular breaks from work.

If you feel super-awesome today, feel free to leave a short review, too.

Your support helps me continue my work. Every star counts! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you!

The Apple Watch is all the hype since it gently reminds you to stand up and move regularly. That’s a very good thing. A gentle reminder won’t cut it for me. That’s why I created a solution which jumps right into my face.

Look at the project page of Move!.

It features responsive timers: when you don’t touch your input devices, the clock will not start to tick. Only when you sit down and work will the timer start and make you stand up soon.

Move! is now ready for El Capitan. The upcoming OS X update can come!

During summer, I have created a work break timer called Move! which really works. It gets in your way, it cannot be postponed. I created it to make me get up and stretch and do something else for a couple of minutes every half hour.

Sascha and I plan to add exercise instructions later. Right now, we’re happy to have a tool which forces us to get up every now and then and get healthy. (Backed by research, mind you!)

Try it.

It will get on your nerves. Continue to take breaks when it tells you to.

You’ll hate it.

You’ll yell at it.

But it will make you feel better in the afternoon.

Do yourself a favor and try to do some diagonal stretches or a healthy 1-minute routine.

Download Move! on its dedicated page now and experience it for yourself.