First time at Capital Factory? Look for these doors tomorrow inside the building lobby. You can still register for IndieWebCamp here. $5 or free when you blog about the event!

IndieWebCamp starts tomorrow. I’m downtown this morning, heading over to Capital Factory to do a walk-through of the venue and make sure we’re all good for the weekend.

On the latest Core Intuition we covered this Bloomberg article from Mark Gurman about Marzipan. Many bloggers have written about it this week, skeptical that Marzipan will ever produce great Mac apps, but maybe we’re not giving enough credit to Apple’s strategy. Let’s start with this part of the article:

By 2021, developers will be able to merge iPhone, iPad, and Mac applications into one app or what is known as a “single binary.” This means developers won’t have to submit their work to different Apple App Stores, allowing iOS apps to be downloaded directly from Mac computers — effectively combining the stores.

Marzipan is a multi-year effort. It exists today mostly as a prototype, not meant for developers, with obvious limitations such as iOS-like controls and sheets poking through in the UI. The next phase will be much more mature. And then by 2021 we’ll have more polish and a consistent App Store submission experience across platforms.

What we can’t predict yet is how users will react to third-party apps. An assumption in the Mac developer community is that native, all-AppKit macOS apps will always be better than iOS apps ported with Marzipan. I believe that too. Apps originally designed for the Mac will have more thought put to the windows, controls, menus — everything that makes an app Mac-like.

But familiarity might be an advantage. What if users end up preferring Marzipan apps simply because they want their apps to work exactly the same across multiple platforms? What if Marzipan is more than “good enough”, but actually exactly what users are looking for, seeing their favorite iOS apps on macOS for the first time? (Again, not the Marzipan of today, which isn’t ready, but the Marzipan of a couple years from now.)

With a unified App Store in 2021, I think it’s likely that Apple will encourage universal apps that have a single price for running across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. While this seems unfair by traditional Mac development standards — when developing for AppKit could be a completely different codebase and depth of features, justifying a separate purchase — for Marzipan it seems reasonable to pay once and get the app everywhere.

Marzipan looks like a very different transition than what we went through with Carbon and Cocoa. As I blogged about in 2003, you could start using Cocoa windows and controls directly in a Carbon app. For Marzipan, it doesn’t appear that you can mix AppKit into a UIKit app. If this holds true, it will split Mac development into 2 paths.

I plan to keep Micro.blog using AppKit, for now. But I wouldn’t bet against Marzipan, and I’ll be looking for what Apple says at WWDC. Not what they say about Marzipan itself, but about AppKit. If the usual “What’s New in Cocoa” session at WWDC is missing or filled with very minor tweaks to AppKit, the writing will be on the wall that UIKit is where we should put all our attention, even on the Mac.

www.manton.org/2019/02/2...

Writing a post today that links back to one of my blog posts from 2003! Love it when that happens. You never know what ordinary blog posts today will take on new significance 15+ years from now.

This weekend is IndieWebCamp Austin, an event for bloggers, web developers, designers, and anyone who wants to create something for their own web site, or to build tools based on IndieWeb standards. You can register here. After my first IndieWebCamp, I wrote:

There’s nothing like meeting in person with other members of the community. I know this from attending Apple developer conferences, but the weekend in Austin only underscored that I should be more active in the larger web community as well.

It’s invaluable to chat with someone in person. This year, we’ll have IndieWeb co-founders Tantek Çelik and Aaron Parecki back in Austin. I’m looking forward to hearing how the IndieWeb has moved forward in the last year.

The first day of IndieWebCamp is for introductions and sessions. Topics for sessions are based on what attendees want to hear about, so the planning is done with sticky notes that can be rearranged to find a schedule that works for everyone. This is a photo I took from IndieWebCamp in 2017.

I look at IndieWebCamp as a way to take a break from the day-to-day routine and get inspired again — to improve my own web site or discover a new part of Micro.blog to work on. As I was talking about with Daniel on the latest Core Intuition, because the 2nd day of IndieWebCamp is a hack day, it’s also a great environment to work on something you’ve had trouble finishing… or starting! There are other people around to help answer questions, and a nice block of time to focus on one thing.

If you’re in the Austin area, hope to see you there on Saturday! You can learn more here.

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Doors open for IndieWebCamp Austin at 9am on Saturday. We’ll have coffee and breakfast tacos. Full schedule and registration details: 2019.indieweb.org/austin ☕

We just posted Core Intuition 361. Looking forward to IndieWebCamp Austin and talking about whether new Marzipan rumors will influence our plans this year.

Started the day with JuiceLand. Love these silly prints on the wall.

This week’s Micro Monday features Tom Cutting of Stickman Diaries. “One of the things I like about Micro.blog is that I don’t feel like I’m performing. If somebody likes it, they like it. I’m doing it really for myself, as a record of things.”

Got to see a few things in Fort Worth with family over the weekend. Great to have some time to explore instead of just driving through.

IndieWebCamp Austin is this weekend! You can still register here.

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!

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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.

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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!