creinhardt

I was floored to find out recently that the web interface for iCloud (iCloud.com) has no way to edit a spreadsheet in-browser. I thought for sure they’d have browser based Numbers at this point, but nope! I think if they haven’t done this yet it ain’t gonna happen.

Thanks, I loved this article, time to re-read it again!

For anyone who wants to know more about the early history of undersea cables, I also enjoyed ‘A Thread Across the Ocean’ by John Steele Gordon.

Basically! Is heart rate recorded to a Pebble specific app, or can it be synced with things like Apple Health?

I guess the one other feature I like of the Apple Watch is the rings/daily fitness goals functionality. I'll have to look into the Pebble more to see if that's possible. I also like the background monitoring features the Watch has (hypertension, etc.), but I'm assuming that's a little too much for the Pebble.

I wish someone would take all the Fitness sensors of the Apple Watch, and put it in something with a simple e-ink display like these Pebble devices. I don’t care about apps, I just want a thing that measures my heart rate, notifies me if I get a call or text, has more than a couple days of battery life, and that’s it.

Isn’t this basically Apple News? It would be great if you could select your local news source, and it funneled part of your subscription their way.

Having worked in this space from the publisher side for a bit, I can tell you that many paywall vendors tried the micro transaction approach, and the friction level was just too high for it to ever catch on at the scale needed to sustain a business. Definitely too much for a local newspaper or tv station site, the juice was never worth the squeeze.

Yeah, you could also say "Most men die between 30 and 90".

Is WPEngine actually the biggest Wordpress host? I'd have bet that GoDaddy had more, or maybe even BlueHost/HostGator/EIG.

I maintain that the Wordpress.com confusion has done more harm than good for Wordpress as a platform over the years. I really wish Automattic had chosen any other branding.

Dang, hadn't thought about Shogo since playing a demo a loooong time ago. Thanks for triggering a good memory!

I'm glad it's not completely dead too! It'll be interesting to see if Static JS CMS continues to gain steam, or if folks continue with Decap.

I've always found the rush to the headless CMS to be a bit baffling, and strongly developer focused while forgetting most users. How are folks actually writing the content, are they just writing markdown by hand? I understand decoupling management of content from presentation, but the lack of options for editing was always confusing to me. Glad that now we'll have at least two good fully open source options.

This is a great list! Hadn’t heard of cms.js before, looks interesting.

I wonder what the dividing line between ‘blog’ and ‘framework’ was? I was surprised to see 11ty and Jekyll under blog, instead of down with Gatsby and Hugo under Framework.

Have you tried Hugo with NetlifyCMS? I've been pretty happy with that combo on a few small sites I run. Here's a starter: https://github.com/netlify-templates/one-click-hugo-cms

That’s fair! I do think you could trigger events for that kind of thing in Universal Analytics though. Seemed to have plenty of affordances for use in apps as well. I still question whether going for a ‘clean break’ is the best idea. Obviously products have to improve, but I’m surprised to see them imperil their massive user base this way.

Yes, Google finally realized that everyone hated looking at 'pageviews', but loves looking for an event called 'page_view'. Much easier to understand!

Honestly though, for a huge segment of their users this hides/obscures the number one metric they look for. I understand that with SPA"s and stuff things are much more event driven, but they're absolutely going to lose some users over this.

I'd be interested to see if there's any data out there showing that Gutenberg contributed to an increase in Wordpress adoption (both the open source version and selling WordPress.com as a service). My hunch is that people aren't coming to the platform because of the block editor, but the rest of the eco-system. Gutenberg still isn't as user friendly as Squarespace or Wix, and it's different enough from how OG Wordpress operates that most power users don't like it either. I think a more friendly editor was the obvious next step, so it's not misguided, but something about how it was implemented doesn't seem to click with a lot of users.

Still involves a bit of selling, but isn't that basically UpWork's model?

Thank you for the list! For anyone interested, apparently Forestry is going to eventually be sunset in favor of Tina, but seems to be built by the same team: https://twitter.com/forestryio/status/1386274017187975168

NetlifyCMS has worked well for me, but I think Tina is what i'm going to try next. It's a good time for headless CMS options, so many to choose from!

Said elsewhere in this thread, but firewire/IEEE1394 wasn't hard to find in a PC/laptop, it was Windows support at all for the iPod that changed things. Once Apple shipped the Windows version of iTunes they were off and running.

I like it, sometimes, maybe, death could be a celebration of life?

This is a super interesting solution, i'll have to read up on it. thank you!

Sorry, reflective was the wrong choice of words, I think technically 'transflective' is more accurate. I don't think the screen will have much glare, it's more that it is visible with a small amount of light, despite not having a backlight.

Setting aside today's issues with the Playdate launch, the fact that Shopify's plug-ins are setup this way has always seemed like a missed opportunity on Shopify's part. I used some plugins that were unreliable with only ONE user, nevermind thousands. Shopify should either provide standard infrastructure, or vet more legit plugin providers setups to handle X amount of concurrents.

The panel itself is 1-bit, and is definitely a concious choice they made. I can't remember where I read it, but the screen was the most expensive component, and was likely pricier than color options. It's also super-reflective, so apparently very visible in a lot of lighting conditions, sort of like e-ink but with a great refresh rate. I beleive it's the same panel as this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694

I think Nova is already on a somewhat similar model. You can buy it and use it forever, but you only get support/updates for a year. A subsequent year is (I think) $49.

If iOS supported this model I think most devs would be ok with it, pay upfront X amount, and then a slightly smaller amount yearly for continued support/updates/development. I wonder if we'd have more 'pro/dev' iOS apps if the App Store supported models like this?

Obviously I'm a sample size of one here, but i've stopped eating beef in the last year and have only been eating Beyond and Impossible. Long term i'd be shocked if some amount of the real beef market isn't taken by plant based.

Yeah, definitely! I think it'd be a tricky thing to balance an appropriate rate for most publishers. I suppose you'd start by figuring out how many articles per-day the average reader lays eyes on. You'd also start to have to forecast revenue that's correlated directly to readership, which would probably lead to fewer articles about city council, and more listicles or salacious coverage.

Well, advertising is usually billed to advertisers as a cost-per-thousand (really, cost-per-mil, or CPM) for impressions. For a small local news site, they'd be super happy to get a $10 CPM on a local online ad. So let's just say for fun that we'd get the same rate for the hypothetical 'Spotify for news' service. Say a locally focused article about the latest city council meeting gets 20,000 views. At a $10 CPM that only generates $200 (or $0.01 per person). Does that seem like enough revenue to cover the time it took the reporter to attend the meeting, write up the story, have it proofread/edited, and then posted online and printed and still make a profit? Probably not!

The sad part is that the $.01 per person rate is way, way higher than what Spotify apparently pays out (around $0.006 to $0.0084 from some Googling).

This starts to look better if you just go to something like $0.25 per read, but at that rate you're likely charging much more than it would cost to buy a print copy, or a per-day subscription rate, so i'm not sure the economics would work out there either.

A few different outlets have tried this over the years, and it's never gone that well, as far as I know. I think that was originally the model for Tinypass, which merged with Piano Media. Not sure if they still offer that model or not, but it's the most recent I can think of.

The reality is that for all but the largest news sites, this model won't really work. Say you're in a medium-small city. Even in your best case scenario of like 50% of the population reading your site, you'd still only likely get such a small sum per-article (10-20k pageviews, maybe?) that you'd still have to supplement revenue with advertising and other revenue streams. And now you're back where you started!

I love the idea, but I just struggle to see it happen at scale.

This! I doubt whoever is running the website for the Richmond Times-Dispatch is making more than $75k/year. They're probably also maintaining sites for others papers in their group, and maybe even working on sites for local businesses too.