inessential by Brent Simmons

April 2013

AltWWDC

WWDC sold out in three minutes. (Or less.) I didn’t manage to get a ticket, though I did try.

I have a feeling that AltWWDC is gonna be huge this year. (I’ll be there — I’m speaking. I’d be there even if I weren’t.)

It was only a few years ago when WWDC didn’t sell out at all. It even had Early Bird pricing.

Fargo

Small Picture, Dave Winer’s new company, introduced Fargo today. It’s an outliner that runs in your browser and saves to Dropbox. The file format is OPML, so you can edit those documents in other apps (such as OmniOutliner) that support OPML.

Join App.net

I have a whole bunch of invitations to App.net — you can sign up here.

If you don’t know much about App.net, check out the weblog, where they promote third-party apps, link to their podcast, and talk about the APIs they’re building. It would be wrong to call it a Twitter alternative — it’s very much its own thing, and worth checking out.

I’m a fan. Love the vibe. I’m @brentsimmons there.

Tom’s iCloud State of the Union

atomicbird:

Users hear about how great iCloud is and how apps can use it to sync their own data. They quite reasonably wonder why your app isn’t using it. Syncing data is a great idea, Apple gives you iCloud, why aren’t you using it, dammit? But if you did use it, the app would be so unreliable that users would (again, quite reasonably) complain that it was a steaming pile of shit.

Regressing

Ryan Holiday writes in Our Regressive Web:

Google Alerts, Delicious and RSS were designed in blogging’s early days as innovations to help readers reduce this noise—to help improve their reading experience. But now those gains are disappearing. I feel that the tech press has allowed this to happen.

I had not realized that Google Alerts was having problems. But it doesn’t surprise me.

I wonder if it will go away on the same day as Feedburner, or whether the two will succumb in separate clean-outs.