Good for Substack! Drawing a line in the sand like this makes me want to support their cause.
I get excited when I read stories about companies or groups standing up against patent trolls. Reading this made me feel a similar sort of excitement. Of course, it will be challenging for Substack to determine which actions are "bad-faith" and which are justified. It's probably too much to expect for them to stand up for all points of view on their platform that meet their terms of use.
[edit: adding a question]
Can anyone recommend good writing on Substack to follow?
Jumping in this post to recommend the exact same idea. Learn a new language outside the type of language you're used to using. I've been using my extra time indoors to learn Clojure and Forth. The things I'm learning are already changing the way I write Swift. I'm also excited about making things on microcontrollers again because Forth gives me a way to escape the horrible tooling forced on us by the chip manufacturers.
It's hard to explain, but no other language has given me such joy in perhaps decades.
If you look back on those times where you just had a booklet and a simple BASIC interpreter or C64 Assembler crafting your tiny little applications and games without third party libraries, distracting ceremony and best-practices anxiety. Those times where you could be so proud of every little achievement because it was truly yours, and that for some reason felt your most productive years... Then you might want to give it a go.
Just don't fall for the trap of developing your own Forth. Even if that's part of the philosophy of it :)
Now I just wished there was a book akin to "Land of Lisp" but in Forth. Maybe one should...
Any insight on how this will scale into a sustainable business? I'm an indie app developer and find that most of my ideas for new products die in ideation phase because they seem financially unsustainable. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong?
Temper sounds like a feature in a larger app, not a business. Whats the next step?
We could expand to mobile which includes a large number of gamers. We also think there's more to be done around the area of healthy gaming in general (eg. avoiding toxic games).
Another thing is we've had some people ask us for tools around Facebook/Netflix/YouTube, but we're focused on gaming for now.
I'm starting to see the vision a bit. A holistic solution to creating a healthy balance of things like Facebook and video games could become a sustainable business. Headspace might be a good company to learn some ideas from. They seem to be doing really well selling "peace of mind".
Let's not mention this to the "every body is beautiful" crowd. I had a similar journey in my 20s when my doctor let me know I was pre-diabetic. Weight loss and good diet now has me feeling better in my 30s then ever. It doesn't have to be complicated.
At Pixite we've been working hard for the past few months on a resource for our mobile artist community. This was our first time shipping something with Meteor, we primarily make iPhone apps. There have been a few issues but overall its been a great development experience. A good portion of the Meteor app is embedded in our iOS apps, which gives us the ability to make immediate updates to content and certain features without the dreaded Apple approval cycle.
Let me know if you have any questions about Source or the development experience with Meteor.
I'm the dev on this app. We had some serious fun creating something fresh in the GIF building scene. Try it out and let me know what you think. We're looking for feedback to direct the next few updates.
We are about to release 1.1, which includes:
+ Ability to add frames to your animation
+ Ability to create a animation from scratch (not from automatic suggestion)
+ Saves your GIFs for later viewing and sharing
I'm the tech lead at Storybyte and have spent the last 6 months developing the app and server backend. We are now at the point where we are seriously pushing traffic to and marketing the app. Storybyte is a simple storytelling platform that uses the photos already on your phone. There seems to be a new player in this space every week, but we believe we have a simpler approach that will reach a larger audience. Give it a try, tell some stories, and let us know what you think.
We love feedback!
