smweber's comments

I’m trying Gleam out right now, and having most recently been writing Go, I’m really loving: - No nil, instead Option and Result - ADTs - Pattern matching + destructuring - Immutable everything by default - `use` syntactic sugar (weird at first, but once you’re used to it it’s pretty elegant) - LSP server works great for such a young language

But most of all I think the overall simplicity of the language is really what’s standing out to me. So far I think the lack of ad-hoc poly and macros are a plus - it really reduces the impulse to write “magical” code, or code with lots of indirections. In the past I’ve definitely been guilty of over-abstracting things, and I’m really trying to keep things as simple as possible now. Though I’ve yet to try Gleam with a large project - maybe I’ll miss the abstractions as project complexity increases.

I suspect Gleam will be a great language for small to medium sized projects written with LLM assistance (NOT vibecoded) - the small language, strong typing and immutability gives good guardrails for LLM-generated code, and encourages a simple, direct style of programming where a human programmer can keep the whole structure in their head. Letting an LLM run free and not understanding what it’s written is I think where projects run into big problems.

The “Signal protocol” only specifies how encryption is performed, but WhatsApp and Signal have very different protocols for actually transmitting the encrypted messages (I think WhatsApp was at one point based on XMPP, vs Signal is a bunch of protobuf blobs over a websocket)

That's exactly it. I've been waiting for this since Dash first came out. At the time I was doing iOS dev in a lot of coffee shops and airports with spotty wifi on an 11" MacBook Air. This would have been perfect then, having searchable offline docs on a second screen! Even though I'm working in an office most of the time now, I still bought it to use on my iPad.

It's not competing with CocoaPods. Alcatraz gives you a nice UI for installing Xcode plugins, color themes, etc. to customize your editor, while CocoaPods is management of libraries for iOS and OS X development.

"iOS 7 Optimized" is Apple's way of saying "built with the iOS 7 SDK".

Apps that are built for iOS 7 get the new shiny keyboard and some different behaviour when run on iOS 7, but can still run fine on older versions of iOS if the app developer is willing to support older versions of iOS. This is done by setting an option called "deployment target" to an older iOS version when building in Xcode (and testing a ton on older versions of iOS, and not calling newer APIs on versions of iOS that don't support them).

So this announcement means Apple is dropping support for older versions of Xcode (with older iOS SDKs), but older versions of iOS are still technically supported as long as you're building with the iOS 7 SDK.

Yeah, I found myself visiting the Kickstarter page today hoping there was some way I could fund the project months after it completed. Needless to say I couldn't. Seems like it would be a useful feature for projects like this - I doubt they couldn't find a use for more money.

This is amazing. It's exactly what I wanted to build when I was living in Japan, but I never got around to it. Congrats! I'll definitely be taking this with me the next time I go to Japan.

Also bought a copy - good work!

I used to pay for prepaid phone credit from Fido's website using Interac online payment. One time Fido's server failed right after the Interac server accepted my payment. As far as my bank could tell everything went through fine, but Fido had no record of any attempt at payment. I only use my credit card online now.

Me too. I even tried climbing a tree.

After having spent a couple years doing embedded OS development in C, Objective C is beautiful. The verbosity makes it much easier to read than typical C code and the memory management is brilliant compared to doing it yourself. It walks the line between static and dynamic types quite well, with most things being static except when dynamic makes things a lot easier. I think Objective C is brilliant considering what they were able to add to C while maintaining great speed and full compatibility with C.

Every so often an article like this comes up, and I think to myself, "Maybe I should export my emails from Gmail and start using a personal domain for emails" and otherwise secure my data just in case this happens to me. But what are the chances, right? And Gmail is so convenient!

I think this time I'm going to actually do something. Probably not ditch Google entirely, but ensure I'm not entirely dependent on them.

I'd love to port it, but I'm at the point where I can't justify spending any more time on it unless I get some sales to prove there is a market for it. That and I don't actually have an Android device :S

If sales actually pick up on iPhone, I think it'd be a good project for me to learn the Android SDK.

Hi all,

I'm hoping to get some feedback on my second iOS app, Scrollendar. My first app, LessonLog, is pretty niche (teachers with iPhones), so Scrollendar is my first app that I feel has a chance at any kind of popularity.

Some background: I finished Scrollendar v1 and got it on the App Store last May. The first version only took about a week to build, and although I was fairly happy with it, it had some rough edges. Having an engineering background, I figured I'd leave the marketing until after I submitted a few updates and got things a little more polished.

However, I made two assumptions that (unsurprisingly) turned out to be false:

1. I greatly underestimated the amount of time needed to fix the rough edges and be really happy with the final product. I ended up adding the scrolling day view, which ended up being a lot of work, then I rewrote the entire backend due to deficiencies in NSDate and EventKit. What I figured would take a couple weeks took over a month.

2. I greatly overestimated the amount of people that would find Scrollendar without any marketing. I wasn't expecting many people to find it through organic App Store searches, but I figured at least one or two people would stumble on it each day. What actually happened is after an initial spike of six whole downloads the first day, the daily downloads quickly dropped to zero. I haven't had a single purchase in the last 30 days. This is even less than my niche teaching app LessonLog.

So I'm hoping to get some feedback on the app and the website (scrollendar.com). I'd also love any tips for a first time mobile app marketer. I've poured over every HN post that has anything to do with online marketing, and most of it comes down to: - have a viral component to the app (not really applicable to Scrollendar) - build a following online with a well written blog and great social media posts (I have neither right now) - build a great website with lots of useful content (like bingo cards) to drive search traffic (again, not really applicable)

So basically, my online marketing plan boils down to: e-mail mobile app review sites. Is this sufficient? What else can someone in my position do?

Thanks in advance! Scott

Agreed. This is amazing.