512 Pixels

While Apple isn’t at CES, they sure can be felt in Las Vegas most years.

I waded through a bunch of weird, not-so-good RSS apps for the Mac to pick the best one. TL;DR: it’s Reeder.

If I had unlimited funds to grow my Mac collection, a TAM would be first on my shopping list.

Cabel Sasser:

Coda was removed from the Mac App Store in mid-October, at the same time version 2.5 was released. Since new releases always generate a short-term sales spike and we wanted the numbers to be fairly representative of “typical sales”, we looked at one month on either side — September and November.

The results were interesting. We sold a couple hundred fewer units of Coda post-App Store removal, but revenue from it went up by about 44%.

Now, two explanations for that: in addition to keeping the 30% that would have normally gone to Apple, we also returned Coda from its sale price ($79) to its regular price ($99) alongside the release of 2.5. Even if those factors hadn’t been in play, though, I don’t think the decline in Coda revenue would have been as dramatic as we originally feared it might be.

The best way to advertise on 512 Pixels is via the RSS feed. Exclusive for one week, sponsored posts come with a whole pile of benefits. I’ve got openings for the next two months available now.

I don’t often want to shout “Amen!” after reading a blog post, but I don’t disagree with a single syllable of this. These paragraphs really hit home:

Apple has always been a marketing-driven company, but there’s a balance to be struck. Marketing plays a vital role, but marketing priorities cannot come at significant expense to quality.

I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.

Tim Cook’s a master of real-world logistics; he needs to exercise those muscles over Apple’s software now more than ever.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been making shows as Relay FM for 20 weeks already.

Realmac Software’s Dan Counsell:

When you get swept along in the shininess of the App Store it’s easy to forget that you no longer know who your customers are. You don’t have any of their details, you can’t even respond to them when they leave a review on the App Store. The fact of the matter is they are really Apples customers, not yours.

When you sell directly outside of the Mac App Store you get the contact details for every single person that buys your products (and rightly so), this is often overlooked but it’s key to running a healthy and sustainable business.

Since the summer of 2011, I’ve carried a notebook with me.

It started as a way to journal on the go, but that was replaced by Day One pretty quickly. My use of paper notebooks evolved into a low-friction capture system for notes during phone calls, meetings and brainstorming sessions.

For a while, I stored them in a big Ziploc bag, but that didn’t scale for long. It was hard to go back and find notes later, and as work got busy, I was burning through notebooks pretty quickly. Before long, I had a stack of filled notebooks hanging around.

I started scanning my notebooks after about a year of using them heavily. By making high-res PDFs named by the dates the notebook was in use, it became easier to go back and find anything that hadn’t made it into OmniFocus or Evernote.

For physical storage, I sprung for the Field Notes Archival Wooden Box. It’s a luxury in a world where a shoebox would have worked just fine, but I like the way it looks on my bookcase.

In a digital world, there’s still a place for things like paper notebooks. They can’t cause distractions in meetings and don’t require Wi-Fi. While I try to be good and not have much just in a Field Notes notebook, if something is, I can get my hands on it later quickly.

This week, on Connected:

At the end of 2014, Stephen and Myke reflect on what proved to be a wild year in technology.

Come for jokes about Instagram, stay for a review of the most important new app of the year.

This episode was made possible by:

• lynda.com: An easy and affordable way to help individuals and organizations learn. Free 10-day trial.
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• Squarespace: Start Here. Go Anywhere. Use code WORLD for 10% off

The BBC:

Mars rover Opportunity, which has been exploring the Red Planet for more than 10 years, is suffering from memory problems, Nasa has said.

The six-wheeled vehicle - not to be confused with Curiosity, which launched in 2011 - keeps resetting unexpectedly.

The Opportunity team thinks an age-related fault affecting the flash memory used by the robot is to blame.

It believes it has found a way to hack the rover’s software to disregard the faulty part.

It’s amazing that Opportunity is still working at all. [Its sibling, Spirit]((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_(rover)) sent its last communication to Earth in 2010, which was far longer than NASA’s original plans. Hopefully this fix can keep Opportunity rolling a bit longer.

Once a year, I’m reminded how glad I am that I didn’t study broadcast journalism in school.