ramblings of joe / posts

Can we talk about the App Store?

An image showing the iOS, Safari, and App Store logos (source: Apple's press release about the DMA)

There has been a lot of press around changes to the App Store lately.

First there was a US court decision that forced Apple into allowing apps to include an “alternate payment link”, and just yesterday they announced a sweeping set of changes coming to the EU App Store due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that is scheduled to come into effect in March.

Both of these legally mandated changes are being implemented in such a way as to do the absolute bare minimum required and make everyone who decides to use the new options pay for it.

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15" MacBook Air

I side-graded my 2021 16" MacBook Pro to the 15" MacBook Air. I’ve been doing a bit more travel lately, and I’m getting tired of lugging the bigger 16" beast around with me. The smaller machine is a tradeoff in a few areas compared to the Pro, but it shaves 1.4lbs (0.59kg) of weight off, is significantly thinner, and slightly smaller.

a photo of the 15 inch MacBook Air stacked on tof the 16 inch MacBook Pro

The 15" Air stacked on top of the 16" Pro to illustrate relative size.

I haven’t had the opportunity to take a trip with it yet, but in some trial runs throwing it in my backpack, the difference is already feeling nice.

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My Home Office (2023)

It’s been about a year and a half since I wrote my last home office post and while much of it has stayed the same, I’ve updated and moved things around quite a bit and felt it was time to write about my current setup and share some new pictures.

A photograph of the desk and surrounding art in my home office

A photograph of the desk and surrounding art in my home office (October 2023).

I’ve been working remotely since mid-2016 – now in my eighth year. The majority of that time I was working for Bleacher Report/Turner Sports, then remotely for Apple1 before joining a startup named Commonstock. After a little over a year at Commonstock, we were acquired by Yahoo2 where I now work as a principal software engineer on the Yahoo Finance iOS app.

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Dutch (part two)

as we approach the first birthday of our dog Dutch, i wanted to look back on our time with him as a puppy with fondness and appreciation for what he’s taught us and the many fun things we’ve done with him.

A photograph of my dog Dutch and I at Del Mar dog beach in southern California, looking out over the ocean with a mostly clear blue sky

A photo of Dutch and I at Del Mar dog beach in southern California.

in june of last year we decided to bring a puppy home. we had been talking about getting a dog at some point, then one day i ran into an old friend at the gym who had some puppies available from their litter of goldendoodles. we really weren’t planning on getting a puppy right then, but we saw this cute little ball of fluff with his unique silver and black coat and we fell in love. after a lot of discussion over a couple days we decided to take the plunge into puppy fueled depression and sleep deprivation.

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Albums

i haven’t written about my new app Albums on this site, which is a little bit intentional and a little bit of an oversight. let me explain.

i don’t know who reads this blog. intentionally. i have no analytics, no email subscription list, nothing. if i had to guess, the number of people that read any given article is more than five and less than one hundred. i’m not sure if that’s me being dismissive of my own reach or trying to be somewhat realistic about the deluge of content we wade through every day.1

so back to not writing about my new app here. it’s a bit of an oversight because this is my “official” website. it’s the one that bears my name and the one that has some reasonably important announcements on it. it should probably contain at least some reference to my first indie iOS app in over a decade. as for it being intentional, i don’t consider the app to be “finished” yet. it’s still missing functionality that i desperately wanted to put into the first release, but somehow convinced my perfectionistic ADHD brain to push below the line. i stubbornly didn’t want to announce the app in a long-form post until it was “ready”.

but that’s kinda silly since as we’ve established: i’m not sure if any significant number of people read this blog and even if they do, is an app ever truly finished? i may be waiting a long time.

so without further delay: i shipped version 1.0 (and 1.1) of my first indie app in over 12 years. it’s called Albums, and it’s one of the things i’m most proud of building.

Some screenshots from my new app ‘Albums’ displaying a portion of my music library.

Some screenshots from my new app ‘Albums’ displaying a portion of my music library.

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