Manton Reece

Just posted the new Core Intuition. More about WWDC travel, IndieWebCamp Austin, and Daniel considering dropping Blogger from MarsEdit.

IndieWebCamp Austin is coming up in a week at Capital Factory. Bunch of IndieWeb-related things I want to think about for Micro.blog that weekend. Everyone’s welcome!

I’ve been saying Apple’s 30% cut is too high for 10 years, so it won’t surprise anyone that I think a 50% cut for subscriptions in Apple News is also ridiculous. It’s completely out of line with the value Apple could provide to news organizations.

I was already making WWDC plans for June 3rd, so it’s nice to see MacRumors uncover clues that it’ll be that week. But Apple could minimize the chaos with hotels by announcing dates much earlier. There are a lot of wasted temporary reservations.

On the latest episode of Core Intuition, we talk about Daniel’s trip to Paris for dotSwift, the state of podcasting after the recent Spotify acquisitions, and then we close talking about Angela Ahrendts leaving Apple. Reflecting on the progress of the Apple Stores, I was thinking back to 11 years ago when I was waiting in line to buy the original iPhone. Here’s a photo of me from Damon Clinkscales while we waited in line.

Back in 2007 when that photo was taken, there were 2 Apple Stores in Austin. That was before the iPhone shipped. Today, after Apple now has 900 million iPhones in use, Austin still only has 2 Apple Stores. The stores are bigger and better than they were in 2007, but there’s no escaping the fact that you can’t scale to supporting so many millions of customers without adding new Apple Stores.

I have no major complaints with the Apple Store experience. It’s crowded, of course, and not everyone who works in retail has the right answer to every question, but they do a good job and I think most people leave the store happy. Getting support directly in person is a great perk of being an Apple customer.

But you can’t design your way out of this problem with more efficient stores or even bigger stores. At some point, Apple needs to add more stores. I doubt there’s a major city in the United States that wouldn’t provide a better experience by adding 1–2 stores.

Could they overdo it, weakening their reputation by opening too many stores of lower quality? Dominic Williams writes on his blog:

In my local city of Cardiff, they are placed directly in the middle of St David’s shopping centre. Short of repurposing Cardiff Castle, I couldn’t think of a better spot. They want their stores to be shining beacons in the cities they are in. Having one on every corner takes away their allure.

There’s a balance here. Apple Stores can be beautiful and practical without every store planned as an architectural marvel. Perfection on the design of each store might be holding them back from better serving customers.

Daniel and I go into more detail on this in the latest episode, with a discussion that eventually leads to answering the important question: why did Daniel go to a Starbucks in Paris? Enjoy!

www.manton.org/2019/02/1...

I added a new API endpoint to Micro.blog for getting recent photos for a user. This is something we’ve been wanting for Sunlit, and hopefully it will be useful for other developers as well. It works for any Micro.blog user, even if they are hosting their blog somewhere else. For example, a request to Micro.blog for my username would look like this:

GET /posts/manton/photos
  Authorization: Bearer ABCDEFG

The response is JSON Feed, and includes the photo thumbnail URL in addition to the HTML for the blog post and full-sized image. Here’s an abridged version of a response:

{
    "id": "12345",
    "content_html": "Test photo.<p><img src=\"…\">",
    "image": "[...](https://...)",
    "_microblog": {
      "thumbnail_url": "[photos.micro.blog/...](https://photos.micro.blog/...)"
    }
  }

For blogs hosted on Micro.blog, there’s also a feed of all your photos hosted at your own domain. Mine is here:

• [manton.org/photos/in...](https://manton.org/photos/index.json)

And there’s a special photos-only feed for the Discover section of Micro.blog. Here are a couple of the URLs:

• [micro.blog/feeds/pho...](https://micro.blog/feeds/photos.json) — good for showing thumbnails in a grid
• [micro.blog/posts/dis...](https://micro.blog/posts/discover/photos) — good for showing posts in a timeline

Basing our API on JSON Feed has helped keep Micro.blog open by default. The URLs that don’t require authentication can even be dropped in a reader like Feedbin to use outside of the Micro.blog apps.

We’re working on an updated version of Sunlit that will use this new photos endpoint. Anyone can join the beta on TestFlight here and you’ll be notified when the app is ready to test.

www.manton.org/2019/02/1...

Sorry @coreint was late this week! But there aren’t many tech podcasts on the weekend, so now there’s something to listen to. It’s a good one: Daniel’s trip to Paris, thinking about WWDC, Spotify acquisitions, podcasting, and crowded Apple Stores.

I heard back from Medium, and cross-posting from Micro.blog is now re-enabled on our developer account. But you’ll need to go into Account → Edit Feeds and add it again. Whew!

Still can’t believe that pass interference no-call in the Saints game. Hard to imagine anything more obvious or more decisive on the outcome of a game. Disappointing. 🏈

Posted the latest Core Intuition with a discussion of Dark Mode, maps in DuckDuckGo, and some optimism for Apple expanding their web services.

I love having a business model for Micro.blog that means we can work with third-party developers instead of against them. True story from last week: I’m at dinner with family, and my kids were playing around with the Micro.blog iOS app. While we waited for our table at the restaurant, they were giving me all sorts of feedback, including that Micro.blog should have a tab bar on iOS instead a menu to switch between the timeline and mentions. (I like the current design because it lets the full height of the screen be used for reading posts, and you can swipe anywhere to go back, but that’s beside the point.)

“You should download the third-party app Icro,” I said to them. “It’s a beautiful app that has a tab bar.”

Everyone downloads Icro.

“Oh yeah, dad, Icro is much better than your app.” 🙂

And that’s fine. What we care about is whether more people are blogging, storing photos at their own domain name, and moving away from the massive ad-based social networks. There should be a variety of apps to accomplish that. I’m just happy that an increasing number of apps work so well with Micro.blog.

www.manton.org/2019/01/1...

It might surprise some developers to learn that the 4 official apps for Micro.blog — the iOS and macOS apps, Sunlit, and our microcasting app Wavelength — don’t actually share very much Objective-C or Swift code. To minimize dependencies and so that we could more easily develop each app quickly on its own schedule, in some cases we’ve duplicated similar networking or controller code between projects. Now that the apps are becoming more mature, we want to consolidate the Micro.blog API logic in a shared codebase.

Jonathan Hays has been developing a Swift-based framework and example app for the Micro.blog API. It has already been added to the next version of Sunlit, and the plan is to add it to the other apps as well. We’re making it available as open source for anyone who wants to use it as a starting point for their own apps. It supports iOS, macOS, and even tvOS. It’s still early, but we welcome any feedback or pull requests. Enjoy!

www.manton.org/2019/01/1...

Speaking of Android, I’ve added a link to Dialog from the Micro.blog “New Post” page. Plus new app icons!

Nice update from Vincent Ritter on his upcoming Android app for Micro.blog, Gluon. Looking good!

I wrote in a post last year — and in the companion podcast episode — that pushback against Instagram is coming. This week, John Gruber didn’t hold back on how much worse Instagram already is:

At the time Facebook acquired Instagram, Instagram was by far the nicest social media experience I’d seen. It is now quickly descending into a cesspool of crap. I fully expected Facebook to Facebook-ify Instagram, but it’s sad watching it happen. It seems to be accelerating in the wake of the departure of co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger — again, surprising no one.

The way forward is clear: post your photos to your own blog. Here’s a selection of recent photos on Micro.blog, all starting on someone’s blog.

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Basecamp has moved their blog Signal v Noise off Medium.com and back to their control. DHH’s post is so well aligned with what we believe in for Micro.blog that it almost reads like part of our mission statement:

Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

Medium.com was swinging in the wrong direction, especially with the change last year to no longer allow custom domain names. I think 2019 is going to be a great year for blogging.

www.manton.org/2019/01/1...

We shipped version 1.4 of Micro.blog for macOS today. This update includes the following changes:

• Added clicking on a photo in the timeline to open it in a new window.
• Added setting alt text on photos for accessibility. Click the photo thumbnail before posting to your blog.
• Improved how the navigation animates when opening a conversation or user profile.

As part of preparing this release, I accidentally opted in to Dark Mode in macOS Mojave before Micro.blog was ready for it. I’ve released a 1.4.1 update to revert this. However, if you love Dark Mode and want to see the in-progress version of Micro.blog, you can download a beta of version 1.5 here. The timeline and posting screen still have a white background, so when those features are ready we’ll do a final 1.5 release.

www.manton.org/2019/01/1...

Very happy to see that Dialog is now out of beta! Dialog is the first Micro.blog app for Android available in Google Play. From the blog post announcement by Mike Haynes:

It is with great excitement that I announce Dialog is now officially out of beta. If you were a part of our public beta, there should be an update available soon — if there isn’t already — and new users can download the app now via the Play Store. We also encourage everyone to leave a review for the app there if they have the time.

Dialog is a full-featured Micro.blog app. Browse the timeline, Discover, favorites, view conversations, post to your blog, and send replies. I’ve also updated the Micro.blog help site to link to the new Dialog web site.

www.manton.org/2019/01/1...

Registration is open for IndieWebCamp Austin. February 23–24.