Steve’s anniversary was a few days ago. I always pause, at least for a moment, to remember how great those times were after his return to Apple in 1996. …

Update: When I wrote this piece, Agenda did not use subscriptions at all. Recently, we introduced subscriptions, while maintaining the same feature unlocking approach of “cash cow”, meaning customers keep the features they have paid for. If you want to try this in an app, just setup a standard subscription…

You’ve been hearing about it for months now. Developers — and governments — are fed up with Apple’s App Store sales model. It started with Hey, and now bigger players like Epic and Facebook are joining in like hyenas sensing a wounded beast. …

At WWDC19, Apple entered into another chapter in their struggles with getting Core Data to sync reliably. Is it a case of “third times a charm”, or more like “fool me twice”? — Full disclosure: I am the developer of Ensembles, a Core Data sync framework that works with many different services, including CloudKit, Dropbox, WebDAV, and even peer-to-peer. So I am certainly not unbiased when it comes to discussing sync frameworks. …

If you have heard of me at all, chances are that it is through my work on the app Agenda. But I have worked on many projects through the years, and one of the more successful is Ensembles, a framework for syncing Core Data stores via iCloud and other services. …

TLDR; Sync is dead. Long live sync. I am hopeless when it comes to keeping up with the latest tech news these days. …

TL;DR When you pass data between threads, whether you are using value types or not, you can very easily run into undefined behavior with unexpected results. — When we first heard about Swift structs, and Apple was busy convincing us to adopt value types wherever possible, one of the main selling points was thread safety. When you work with a value type, it is like your own personal copy of the value, and you don’t have to…

There has been a lot of criticism over the years of Apple’s stance on free trials in the App Store. This has come to a head in the last few months, with a “Developers Union” formed with the initial objective of putting free trials on Apple’s agenda, and an extensive…

Update: There is a follow up post about this sales model, told from the perspective of 3 years on the market. TLDR; The note taking app Agenda is launching with a new sales model for Mac apps. On January 22nd, I am launching a new app for macOS: Agenda. When…