The folks at The Unofficial Apple Weblog were kind enough to invite me to write a guest post about my experience at the recent Apple iPhone Tech Talks in New York City:
Inside view of the iPhone Tech Talks from Daniel Jalkut
Thanks to Mike Rose for approaching me about writing this up!
Starting a blog changed my life. Before Red Sweater Blog, nobody knew who I was, nobody cared what I was working on, and nobody (relatively speaking) bought any of my products.
I’m not saying the blog changed everything overnight, but my first post, on June 24, 2005, set the stage for what has been an exciting 4 year adventure. At the time, I was fresh from graduating with my second BA degree (in Music!), and was scraping by doing freelance development for an assortment of clients. Today, I spend every day working on my own software, which sustains me and my small family.
So what changed? The moment I started blogging, I became part of a community. Sure, the community was just myself and a few readers at first, but as my readership grew, it merged with other readerships, and connected me to other bloggers and readers, many of whom have become good friends. Every opportunity I’ve had the privilege to take advantage of over these years can be traced back to the reputation I earned and the friends I made by blogging.
Dan Wood wrote about the value of blogging on his excellent marketing blog. The Importance of Blogging discusses the benefits of writing a blog in more concrete terms than I have here. Check it out!
Some of you consider yourself more adept at reading than at writing. I know you’re with me, because you’re the type of person who had no problem digesting the content of this post, and you’re still reading five paragraphs later. You might be tempted to think you can’t start a blog because you’re not the world’s best writer. Think again. I covered this a couple years ago in another post: No More Excuses. I stand by those thoughts today.
If starting a blog is so great for your reputation, and will make you lots of friends, and bring you fame and fortune, why should I share the secret with you? Why not keep it to myself? Because I write blog editing software? Well, sure, more blogging is good for me. But much more importantly, it’s good for you. Helping others has always been a mission of this blog. It’s one of the things that led to its success, and it is one of the aspects of my work that gives me the biggest charge.
So start a blog intent on helping others. You’ll reap personal benefits and feel good all at the same time. Furthermore, everybody who ever helped me over the years holds a special place in my heart and they’ll always have my deep respect. If this post gets you to start blogging and achieve the level of success you deserve, maybe I’ll earn a similar spot in your heart. Bonus!
As an indie software developer, one of the biggest challenges I face is keeping a schedule. A real schedule that means I’ll actually ship software every so often.
When you work for somebody else, there’s usually somebody in charge of making sure that you stick to a schedule. These people usually have little concern for code correctness, refactoring, or frankly, anything that falls under the vague heading of “doing it the right way.” There’s something to be said for this: they get things shipped! And if a product is of shippable quality, it’s a shame to withhold it a day longer than necessary.
But I’ve fallen a bit into the mire of excessive feature development with MarsEdit. The old parable about the hand in the cookie jar applies here: I’ve got so many cookies in my hand, that it’s impossible to take my hand out of the jar without letting go of a few.
MarsEdit 2.4 is available today and features a few … cookies … that you might enjoy. In particular, this release fixes bugs, fine-tunes a lot of behaviors that have been bugging me for ages, and takes support for the increasingly popular SquareSpace to a higher level.
MarsEdit 2.4 changes in summary:
I’m still working hard on a number of features that people have been asking for. Yes, I’m kind of a jerk when it comes to disclosing details about future releases, but suffice to say I hear you loud and clear when you ask for WYSIWYG editing or support for WordPress pages and custom fields. Am I promising those features anytime soon? Not exactly. But let’s just say that I would be a fool if I didn’t take the demand for these items seriously ;)
Stay tuned for more cookies soon. In the mean time, enjoy these improvements in MarsEdit 2.4!
What a whirlwind few days it’s been. Late Thursday evening, I was inspired by the current MacHeist promotion, and decided I would like to offer a 20% discount coupon to my customers. 1/5 off? That would make it 1/5 free, right? So it’s not a 5-finger discount, but a 1-finger discount. (Too clever for my own good, perhaps!)
I added the coupon code “OneFingerDiscount” to my store. But before I went to bed, I had the idea that other developers might also like to get on board. I tweeted:
MacHeist isn’t enough? “OneFingerDiscount” coupon = 20% off until MacHeist ends. (Other devs, add coupon, retweet).
Feedback from other developers was immediate and positive. What the heck. I registered a domain: http://www.onefingerdiscount.com/ Before going to sleep I invited developers to let me know if they were using the coupon, so I could list them on the site:
Going to sleep. If you want to offer 20% “one finger discount” while MacHeist lasts, email me [email protected]. Launching tomorrow.
Fast-forward 8 hours and we had dozens of developers on board. I spent the weekend splitting time between my usual childcare responsibilities, and desperately trying to keep up with the interest among developers and the press. And customers! Who were thankfully visiting my store at an increased rate, and buying more of my software than on average days. The promotion has been a great success!
Now the event has been going for 3 days, and is slated to last through the end of this week (Friday). As of this writing, we have 85 developers participating, and the number is likely to keep rising. If you are a developer and want to participate, you can still submit information to me after adding the coupon code to your online store.
If you’re not a developer and are just looking for some excellent discounts on a huge variety of Mac applications, check out the One Finger Discount page and see what everybody has to offer. It’s not a perfectly designed web page, but I think it gets the job done!
The Red Sweater Blog features updates about our apps and articles about related topics.
