My friends over at Rogue Amoeba have been working their butts off for a long time, putting a bunch of work into both the technical and aesthetic design of their latest application.

Radioshift: Radio On Your Schedule

I’ve gotten to know almost everybody who works with Rogue Amoeba to varying degrees and I really like the way they run their business. They draw on the talents of fantastic programmers and designers from around the world, coordinating their efforts through the internet to produce freaking amazing software.

I would describe Radioshift as a sort of Tivo for your ears. You can browse a wide variety of freely available audio content – some available at any time, and some available on a particular schedule – and then you ask Radioshift to record your favorite programming for you so that you’ll have it at your fingertips when you’re ready to listen.

It’s sort of a coincidence that so many of my indie developer friends happen to be cranking out awesome software lately. I hope I’m not starting to sound too much like a link blog (I used to have one – remember!). But this is too good to pass up without downloading and giving it a try! Can I help it if I hang out with geniuses?

Wil Shipley types extensively about Apple’s attitude trending towards greed. A great article without a great hook. Just force yourself to start reading, you’ll be glad you did.

Most of us independent developers spend a lot of time trying to be more Apple-like. The idea is pretty simple. There’s this company, and they produce almost all of the products that we love in this world. And if we want to produce products that people love even half as much, we should emulate them.

It’s a really good idea, because there is a lot of great stuff in Apple to emulate. But reading through Wil’s article reminds me to take a defensive stance while evaluating Apple’s strategies. It’s not a lock-in that every step they make should be followed by faith. Apple is an amazingly successful, customer-pleasing company because of its successes, but also in spite of its screw-ups.

Recently on a developer mailing list, the perennial question of software pricing came up. I wrote about this a relatively long time ago. At that point I was most interested in the sheer economic mechanics of picking a price that would sit well with customers and still bring in as much money as possible. Since then, I’ve become a little more tuned in to the organic relationship between customers and businesses, and have also grown to appreciate the value of “doing what you love” even more than I previously did.

I wrote on the list that although maximizing profit might be a good idea, it shouldn’t be the primary idea. There are other emotional considerations such as whether you’re having a great time, and whether your customers are having a great time. In many cases, these situations should probably be considered higher priorities than maximizing profit.

Wil excoriates Apple, raising good points about whether Apple’s policies are more and more of the maximizing profit variety than of the maximizing fun and innovation kind. I particularly love the last paragraph of his entry, which sums things up quite nicely:

But Apple has to always remember that simply making money CANNOT be its point of existence. The point of any company should be to make customers want to give it money, NOT to get money from customers. It’s a subtle distinction that is the difference between good and evil.

Filed under one-liner personal mental mantras: “accept the customer’s money, but don’t take it.”

How to get linked to from this blog? Write a cool AppleScript solution using one of my apps :)

Eric Blair figured out how to combine the scriptability of MarsEdit with the extensibility of EagleFiler, to provide a one-key “capture” functionality that sends posts from MarsEdit into his EagleFiler archives.

MarsEdit to EagleFiler

This is what I really love about AppleScript, despite its many flaws. You never know what users will come up with next. It’s the technology that puts feature-extension of applications in the hands of everyday users.

I met Michael Dupuis as a side-effect of buying MacXword (now Black Ink) from Stephan Cleaves, who was Michael’s former business partner at Advenio. He’s a really nice guy and also an independent Mac developer, living just north of me up in Maine.

Michael just released a new version of his amazingly excellent cooking/recipes application, MacGourmet. This application inspires me to cook more, and Michael keeps making it better. While I haven’t gotten into the habit of using for everything, I really love how other MacGourmet users are able to send me a batch of recipes and I can just import them right into the application. That way I can try their recipes and tweak them to suit my tastes. I sent out a plea a few months that I didn’t have any good ice cream recipes, and a couple batches of peoples’ favorites came rolling in via email.

Version 2.2 adds some modest improvements, but mainly seems to be aimed at opening up the application to future extensions via plugin. As part of a 1-2 punch, Michael is releasing a Nutrition add-on that turns MacGourmet into a dieter’s friend by providing standardized nutritional information based on the recipe’s ingredients.

If you like to cook at all and you have a Mac, I don’t think there’s a better choice for managing your recipes than MacGourmet.