I’ve even decided not to take a salary this year at all in order to invest in the Dish itself and keep it afloat. We’re still chugging along steadily in revenue, and we are brainstorming about new sources of income (stay tuned), but it remains unlikely that we will reach our target of $900,000 by the end of the year, even though we have already brought in gross revenue of around $680,000 – three-quarters of the way there.

Sullivan taking The Dish to a completely reader-supported business model created a huge wave of attention from other media outlets, as well as hope from other publishers (both indies and bigger media sites). In many of the shows I’ve listened to and articles I’ve read over the past few months that discuss the future of publishing, Sullivan’s leap with The Dish has been one of the central examples. If he can’t make it then that stinks.

We’re still in the beginning of this era where content creators and artists have a genuine fighting chance to be wholly fan-supported. And while it’s easier than ever, it’s still not easy.

When Ben Brooks eschewed all his ads and went wholly reader-supported, he ended up taking a hit in his site’s overall revenue — dropping from $2,100/month in ad revenue to $1,000/month in member support.

When I took this site full time two years ago, my business model was (and still is) to have the membership exist alongside the advertising revenue — I need both streams to make it work.

And it looks like The Dish also needs to find other revenue streams in addition to their subscription paywall in order to meet their goal of $900,000/year.

Coming back to the aforelilnked On The Media podcast: “There is no silver bullet. There is only experimentation, determination, and a whole lot of blind hope.”

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This Tools & Toys guide was written by yours truly, and it’s a doozy. As I say in the article, one of my great joys of summer is getting up early while the air is still crisp, brewing a cup of coffee, walking into the backyard, and starting up a chimney full of charcoal for a day of slow-cooking some smoked BBQ.

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The six different segments cover streaming services, subscription business models, ads and ad blockers, and direct support from readers. The business examples were all with big-name media networks and websites, but the struggles they’re facing are no different than what guys like you and me are facing: how do we keep the lights on so we can keep making awesome stuff for our best fans?

For me, it’s a conglomerate of all sorts of things. The largest and most-significant slice being the monthly membership to this site, but the rest of the pie is a combination of advertising and affiliate links.

At the end of the show, Bob Garfield concludes with this line:

There is no silver bullet. [...] All there is is experimentation, determination, and a whole lot of blind hope.

Which parallels something Merlin Mann said in his interview on CMD+SPACE a while back: “As long as you keep putting out interesting stuff, you’ll keep discovering interesting stuff to put out. It’s an iterative and ugly process.

As an indie writer, I’ve always put a lot of emphasis on the determination aspect — show up every day — but very little emphasis on the experimentation aspect. For me, my daily podcast ended up being an excellent members-only perk for when I took the site full time, and as I look at the shows I’ve done over the past 2 years and the feedback I’ve received from listeners, I mean it when I say the show has become one of my favorite things where I see a lot of my best work manifesting.

I can think of two other excellent examples of experimentation that made a way for revenue: John Gruber’s wild idea of an RSS ad sponsorship, and Marco’s wild idea of a very simple, very classy digital magazine.

At the end of the day we all just want to pay our bills, feed our families, put our kids through college, and keep the office lights on so we can keep on making things.

Though I wasn’t there when Marco decided to make The Magazine, nor when Gruber decided to start selling RSS sponsorships instead of a membership, nor when so many other folks took a leap to try something new. But I imagine the internal dialog was something along the lines of: “Maybe this will work, maybe it won’t. I guess we’ll find out…”

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Mad Mimi also offers robust APIs, integrations, and add-on features. This makes it a perfect fit for today’s visionaries, artists, and entrepreneurs, including great digital brands like Fancy and StumbleUpon, who use Mad Mimi to communicate with their customers.

Best yet, Mad Mimi is free for up to 2,500 contacts. We hope you’ll give us a try or email us with questions.

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My thanks to Mad Mimi for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

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I love Thein’s concluding sentence:

I’m personally very glad that I’m not entering the mirrorless market now, or upgrading from one of the 12MP bodies — all I can say is good luck choosing!

My sentiments exactly. The mirrorless market is just exploding right now.

The E-P5 is the big brother to the camera I own, the E-PL5, and it rivals Olympus’ flagship, the E-M5. In a nut, what’s great about the E-P5 is that: (a) it has the same incredible image sensor as the E-M5 and E-PL5; (b) it has the same 5-axis in-body image stabilization as the E-M5; and (c) it looks absolutely stunning. What it’s missing when compared to the E-M5 is a built-in viewfinder and weather sealing.

Also, Olympus released a few new/updated lenses: the 17mm f/1.8 (which just so happens to be the E-P5′s kit lens), and then the well-known 45mm f/1.8 and 75mm f/1.8 now come in black.

The black lenses won’t ship until later this year — the 17mm this fall, and the 45mm and 75mm on June 14. Personally, I’m more excited about the new lenses than I am about the new camera. My next lens will probably be the 45/1.8 (or possibly the 75/1.8), and I’m glad that it now comes in black.

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Adobe is abandoning its Creative Suite entirely to focus efforts on Creative Cloud.

CS6 will still be available for sale, but otherwise if you want the newest software it’ll only be available through subscription. $50/month for the whole suite or $20/month for single apps.

I’m still using CS3 (Photoshop and InDesign mostly), and as long as they still still work on my Mac then I have no motivation to upgrade. Heck, I’d probably still be on CS1 if I hadn’t been forced to update after the switch to Intel.

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Per Stephen Hackett’s recommendation, I gave the app a trial a while back but never stuck with it because my most-used upload location is my Amazon S3 Bucket where I use a folder hierarchy for my different websites and podcast. At the time Dropzone only supported uploading to an S3 Bucket’s root, which meant I couldn’t upload to my different folders. But with Dropzone 2.6 that just came out, that is no longer the case.

The advantage of using Dropzone over Transmit Droplets is that Dropzone doesn’t require the launching and then quitting of Transmit to upload a single file. Also, after uploading a file through Dropzone the file’s URL is copied to your clipboard. With Transmit Droplets, the app closes as soon as the file is uploaded and you’re left without knowing what the URL is.

For the nerdy readers, you could build your own version of Dropzone using Hazel and Gabe’s Python scripts for Amazon and FTP. That’s what I did to automate my Shawn Today uploads, but I’m not going to pretend I didn’t have a heck of a time getting it to work. Dropzone is much easier to set up for the non nerdy, and it has some handy interface elements that make it easy to use for non-automated purposes.

Dropzone is $10 on the Mac App Store, or you can download a free trial version from the website.

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The new PDFpenPro 6 adds document permission settings. When you share a PDF, you can restrict printing, copying, and editing of your PDFs. You can also use the new automatic form field creation tool to convert a non-interactive form into an interactive PDF form with text fields and checkboxes automatically added.

PDFpenPro 6 is available on the Smile Store and the Mac App Store for $100. A free demo can be downloaded on the Smile site. Find out why Macworld calls PDFpenPro “the crème de la crème of PDF editing and annotating applications.”

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My thanks to Smile Software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. I personally use PDFpenPro whenever I need to annotate, fill in, edit, or redact something in a PDF.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

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Recently, Backblaze released an iPhone app for accessing all the files from your computer which have been backed up. I’ve often wished there were an iOS app available so I could view and access my Backblaze data — a great way to get at non-Dropbox’d files when I’m away from my computer. Alas, the Backblaze app leaves some things to be desired.

When you launch the app you’re prompted to sign in with your Backblaze account info. You then select the computer whose data you want to view, enter the encryption key for that computer, and you’re in. You now have full access to every file which Backblaze has backed up from your computer.

Note that every time you leave the app and come back you’ll have to re-enter your encryption key and then re-navigate through the file system. I very much appreciate the security this brings, but it’d be nice if I could set a timer for how long I want the app to wait before re-asking for my encryption password.

Since Backblaze backs up regularly in the background, you’re theoretically looking at exactly what’s on your computer (or nearly identical). For situations where you just need to get at a particular file, this is a much quicker and easier way than screen sharing or remoting back to your Mac.

When you navigate to a file, you can then download it to your iPhone. From there you’re able to preview it, and, through the “open in” button, you can save it to Dropbox, open it in another app, send it as an email attachment, etc.

Unfortunately, if you download a file type the iPhone doesn’t natively recognize (such as .zip files), you cannot do anything with the file. For example: though I can download a zip file to my iPhone, tapping that file gives me an error dialog box. And without being able to preview the document Backblaze doesn’t show me the “open in” options. Thus, I cannot even email the zip file from my Backblaze backup.

This to me is the app’s biggest shortcoming. The advantage of getting at my Backblaze data is that it gives me the opportunity to find and then do something with virtually any file that’s on my Mac. But being limited to files which my iPhone can natively handle severely limits the usefulness of the Backblaze app.

Shortcomings aside, I’m glad Backblaze has shipped something. And I trust that, like the Backblaze service itself, the app will only get better over time.

Anyone under the impression that old, simple problems — like accessing the weather — have already been “solved” is nuts. “Do we really need another weather app?” Actually, if it’s better, we do. Imagine if they’d stopped making new search engines after HotBot or new smartphones after the Samsung BlackJack.

And speaking of the Yahoo weather app, it really is incredible. I submitted a few of my Kansas City, MO and Castle Rock, CO photos to the Flickr group. Who knows, if you’re checking the weather in one of those spots, perhaps you’ll see my shot in the background. And something cool I learned: they don’t just pick random images every time you load the weather for a city. They are tagging the images with what type of weather they depict, and then try to show an image which matches what the current weather is. Pretty clever.

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So, while we might be flying blind right now, don’t assume that means Apple has nothing planned. And don’t assume that what is planned is anything you’ve heard as a rumor.

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(By way of Cameron Moll, who added a fantastic quote from Neil Postman which you really should click through and read.)

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You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” [Obama] said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

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Today, Riposte 1.2 is available and brings a handful of new features and improvements, as well as a host of new “Pro” features.

The Pro features include customizing the app using one of several new typefaces, including Avenir; an auto-saving of drafts; a Private Messages quickview button; auto dark and light mode depending on time of day; a 3-finger gesture to control brightness; option to hide the Status Bar; and more. These features become available after a $5 in-app purchase.

Riposte is now a free app, but it hasn’t always been. When it first launched it was a $5 app, and about 2 months later it went free. If, like me, you were one of the users who bought Riposte when it first launched, to get the new pro features you’re now looking at a $10 app. But Riposte is one of the premier iPhone apps for ADN — it is fast, feature rich, packed to the rafters with clever and helpful details, and is on an active development cycle. Even if you paid full price when it first came out and now chose also to upgrade the Pro features, I consider $10 to be a fair price for Riposte.

Riposte doesn’t need the Pro features to be a great app — it already handles the core functionality of ADN with aplomb.

When Riposte first shipped, the two things which most stuck out to me were its inclusion of a 1Password shortcut button on the login screen, and its use of the hamburger / basement menu design. Though some advocate against this sort of navigational design, I think it’s great when used in a good setting. And for an app such as Riposte it especially makes sense because the primary view is just the unified timeline.

A few months after its initial release, Riposte 1.1 came with support for Private Messages and granular settings for push notifications. The granular push notification setting means you can enable or disable push notifications for many different types of interactions — I like this because it means I can choose to only get a notification when someone sends me a Private Message.

Private Messaging in Riposte is great. The app supports individual chats or group chats, and since ADN doesn’t require following for PMs, anyone can send and be a part of a private message. It’s more like a private reply versus a public reply. I’m thinking that ADN group messaging will be the new Glassboard for me this year at WWDC.

One of Riposte’s new Pro features is the option to enable a quickview button for private messages. This button hovers at the bottom-left of the screen and offers one-tap access to the messages pane from just about anywhere in the app (as opposed to having to drill down to the Menu screen to switch to the Private Messages view).

If you have any unread PMs, the icon will be filled in with blue; otherwise it will be more transparent.

Similarly, if you have the Full Screen mode enabled (as shown above — a setting you can toggle under Riposte’s General Settings), the button for creating a new post hovers in the bottom-right corner of the screen at all times. By turning on the Full Screen mode, the common “back” button (for returning to previous screens if you’ve drilled down into a conversation view or a web page) is gone.

Riposte gets past the missing “back” button by using a swipe-left-to-right gesture for going back. Pretty much from any screen you are in, swiping left to right will take you back one level.

This has become one of those gestures I find myself using in many other apps — similar to how I was always trying pull to refresh in apps that didn’t even support it, I’ve begun swiping right to go back in apps that don’t support it.

Jared Sinclair, one of the developers of Riposte, said:

We take push/pop transitions at face value: swiping to go back is like pulling yourself back to where you were before. If I can’t picture an app as a set of cards laid out in a grid on a table, I can’t understand it.

It’s clear the Riposte guys thoughtfully implemented this swipe gesture. For example: on the screen for composing a new post, swiping left-to-right or right-to-left moves the cursor one character respectively. Thus there is a “Cancel” button on the post compose screen for going back to where you were.

There are several other swipe gestures, such as two-finger swiping up/down to switch between light and dark mode, or two-finger left-to-right swipe to get back to the root Stream view.

And speaking of swipe gestures, one of the gestures included in the Pro feature is a 3-finger brightness control. While using the beta of Riposte 1.2, I showed this brightness control shortcut to my wife, and she asked why that wasn’t something you could do in every app. I agree (sort of).

In the iPhone’s Settings there are a handful of toggles buried too many taps deep, and I wish it’d be easier to get to them quickly. Brightness control is one of those, and while I don’t know that a universal iOS gesture of 3-finger swipe is the answer, I like that Riposte guys at least did something.

Typefaces

Preeminent among the Pro features in Riposte 1.2 is the option for different typefaces.

There are a total of 9 unique typefaces (a combination of iOS stock and free options, including Avenir, Exo, Gill, Signika, Source Sans Pro, and others). Some faces have multiple weights, making a total of 14 different font options.

Of the options, Avenir and Signika are my two favorites — I’ve been using Avenir at the Extra Small size.

I asked the Riposte guys why they were charging for a Pro update that didn’t include licensed typefaces such as Proxima Nova, Whitney, or Chaparral Pro. Their reply was that the typefaces they like are a little too expensive to license until they see what sales are like for the Pro update. Their intention with the Pro upgrade is for it to be the locus of future features, so it will only get better.

If I were in their shoes, I suspect I would make the same choice. Licensing a typeface for use in an iOS app is not cheap — costing in the thousands of dollars — and the ADN app market is still relatively small. Hopefully Riposte will be successful enough to both sustain its development and warrant the licensing of some elite faces like we’ve come accustomed to in the more mainstream apps like Instapaper and Twitterrific.

Post Drafts

Another Pro feature of Riposte is the auto-saving of any un-published post. You can view all your drafts by tapping the paper icon in the compose view.

Basically, when you cancel a post that has text in it (or if you quit the app), a draft is automatically created for you. It means no lost posts and not having to tap an “are you sure you want to cancel” button every time.

But it also means you end up with a lot of draft posts that should just go in the trash. After 2 weeks using the beta I had about 12 draft posts I didn’t want. A swipe and delete on each of them cleared them out before I wrote a few better drafts in order to stage the screenshot you see above.

Conclusion

ADN has become far more than just an ad-free Twitter replacement. And eventually the service will reach a point where any one single client cannot (or at least should not) handle all the functionality of ADN. But at the moment, for the core functionality of ADN as a social network, Riposte handles everything I am most commonly using with flying colors. It has become one of my favorite and most-used Home screen apps.

It’s impressive to me just how far and how fast this app has come in the short amount of time since its release. I am, as usual, looking forward to what’s in store for Riposte and for ADN in the days to come.

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Free App.net Invitations

And, of course, no ADN-related article would be complete without some free invites, courtesy of the Riposte developers and the App.net team. If you want to join ADN, click here to sign up for free (while invites last).

Note, when you join ADN your new account will automatically be following me (@shawnblanc). Free accounts can only follow up to 40 people, so feel free to unfollow me if you want.

After a lifetime in formal show business, I kind of had a theory that if you remove the structures of show business — the studio, the makeup, the microphone, the can we get you something to drink, the chair that you’re screwed into — if you remove that, you’ll get a different tone, a different dialogue. I wanted to get the dialogue that when you’re standing on the sidewalk and you’re kicking the curb and you’re with a friend and neither of you really wants to go home and you’re just standing there talking. That conversation, I thought, that’s a ‘talk show’ that I’d like to try and see if I can get that in a bottle.

(Thanks, Ben!)

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I’ve been using the beta version of Feed Wrangler for the past month, and I love the underpinning functionality and goals for Feed Wrangler.

Federico Viticci wrote a review, and I agree with every word. Especially this bit:

Of all the Google Reader alternatives I’ve been trying, Feed Wrangler struck me as the one with a clear vision, some unique features, a reliable engine, and a simple business model…

It’s difficult moving from Google Reader’s familiar service and (unofficial) 3rd-party apps and going to a completely new service that’s less familiar, less mature, and a little bit rough around the edges. But Feed Wrangler’s Read Later integration and the Smart Stream versatility are exactly the sort of forward-thinking innovation I hope we’re going to see more of in a post-Google Reader world.

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[T]he interface loses all signs of gloss, shine, and skeuomorphism seen across current and past versions of iOS. Another source framed the new OS as having a level of “flatness” approaching recent releases of Microsoft’s Windows Phone “Metro” UI.

When I think of some of the apps on my iPhone that have a “flat” design feel to them — apps without gloss, shine, or heavy skeuomorphism — I think of Twitterrific, Letterpress, and Day One. I consider these to be some of the most well-designed apps on the iPhone. If that’s the direction iOS 7 is going then I welcome the change.

A more “flat” design aesthetic doesn’t mean having to give up playfulness, whimsy, and personality.

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Check out Steven Jengo’s new single, Summer of 2042.

Fresh tunes with a softly different touch; with that kind of familiar sound, simple and melodic, deep and lazy, freshly brewed for your listening pleasure.

Take care when driving at high volume. Find more at jengo.com.

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My thanks to Steven Jengo for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

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I released my first app one year ago yesterday. It started as a small side project with the explicit goal of paying my rent.

As of yesterday it’s done $73,034 in net revenue, after Apple’s cut.

I’m a sucker for stories like this. Especially ones where the focus is on success through shipping and iterating — something I could use a reminder about every now and then.

(Via John Moltz and Harry Marks.)

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But tickets selling out in less than 2 minutes does not reward anyone’s dedication. We were all online at 10 a.m. PDT sharp, all ready to purchase, all equally dedicated. It was a de facto lottery, with an extra layer of pointless stress added on top.

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As the sheer number of Apple developers increases, the capacity of WWDC remains the same. The goals of the conference both for Apple and for developers are increasingly unmet as the number of developers who would like to be educated, indoctrinated, and communed with far outweighs the number of developers who actually can be.

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