This weekend we had a call with a prospective client eager to pay us to help them build out a new social media feature in their (very cool) software system. We turned them down. They had an urgent deadline, but that doesn't scare us. They'd also already done some exploratory prototyping before they realized they needed some help, so they had a pretty good idea of what they needed help with. After listening to them describe their current status, I asked a few questions and then realized they had run into a little snag with a non-obvious feature of the API used to talk to a particular cloud service. They didn’t really need our help building and delivering the short term solution, they just needed an email briefly describing the shortest path from where they stood, to the goal. I sent them the email they needed, right after the call. They're running with the ball, now, and they're gonna make the goal. We didn’t lose business, we made a friend. A fascinating thing about th
Pulling iBlogger off the #iPhone #AppStore a few years ago wasn't an easy decision. One of the first apps on the App Store in 2008, iBlogger had grown a loyal following of thousands of bloggers who had created over a million blog posts in the first couple years. Countless more after that. To save the product, we had to kill it. But iBlogger was always a labor of love for my team, not really a profit center. We didn't have the bandwidth to maintain the old Objective C source code and migrate the app to Swift at the same time. Too many things were changing at once, new blog platforms being created, old ones being retired, new protocols, social media, and a strong demand for iPad support when the core of the app made unfortunate assumptions about iPhone screen sizes. To save the product, we had to kill it. So we did. Today, that painful decision bears fruit. iBlogger is back on the iPhone and #iPad #AppStore! iBlogger 3 is a great new foundation for the future of mobile bloggi