Happy Monday, everyone!

We made it to the 14th issue! Thank you to everyone who read last week’s issue ❤️

This week we have a new sponsor so make sure to check out Tokens either ☝️ or 👇.

📆 Today I’m featuring Antoine van der Lee and Matthias Gansrigler.

Antoine is the creator of RocketSim. RocketSim helps you to create a recording from the iOS simulator and export it as GIF or MP4. There are plenty of reasons why we iOS developers would want to share screen recordings of our apps from the simulator. I’ll regularly share videos to my team over Basecamp or to my friends over Twitter. Before using RocketSim, I would take terrible looking screen recordings but it got the job done. However, attaching great looking screen recording to GitHub was always tough since GitHub doesn’t allow the uploading of videos 😬 But all of my problems are solved with RocketSim 🙌 RocketSim records videos natively from the simulator and can even convert videos to a GIF (for GitHub). RocketSim is a must have, in my opinion, even if you only make screen recordings very seldomly. It’s such a pleasure to use. You also get the ability to save and open deep links with RocketSim for making other aspects of iOS development easier. I highly recommend you give RocketSim a try!

Matthias is the creator of Yoink. Yoink simplifies and improves drag and drop on your macOS and iOS devices and speeds up your daily workflow. Drag and drop is such an integral part of the Apple interfaces. I’ll be dragging and dropping stuff all day and not even know I’m doing it. While it may seem fine drag and drop within a single app, it can sometimes get weird when using it between apps and when using Finder/Files. Yoink is my favorite solution for unifying the experience over the whole operating system. At the core, Yoink is a shelf for temporarily storing files when you want to move them around. Drag a file and Yoink will appear. Open the app you need for that file and drag and drop it from Yoink. It’s so simple but so beautifly done. But it’s also so much more! There are plenty of system integrations on both macOS and iOS that make it easy to anywhere and with any type of workflow. Before using Yoink, I would delicately arrange my windows so I could drag and drop from one to the other. It was not fun or pretty. Yoink is always one of the first apps I install whenever I’m setting up a Mac or an iOS device. The time and frustrations that are saved when using Yoink is so worth 😀 Check it out today!

👉 Please make sure to follow them or support them anyway you can! 😇 I’m excited to share their indie dev stories.

Indie Devs

Antoine van der Lee

Spanbroek, Netherlands

Lead of mobile development at WeTransfer, weekly blogger, and creator of RocketSim

RocketSim

Matthias Gansrigler

Vienna, Austria

Full-time indie developer working on Yoink, ScreenFloat, Transloader, Glimpses, and more

Yoink

Antoine van der Lee

Q&A

1) What is your name? Where do you live?

I’m Antoine van der lee, living in Spanbroek. It’s a small village a little up north of Amsterdam.

2) Introduce yourself. Education? Background? Main job? Interests outside of tech? Interests inside of tech?

After building my first website, at age 13th, I continued my journey of interest in tech. Interestingly enough, I graduated with my bachelor in Interaction Design, mostly focused on UX and Interface Design. At that time, you had more chance of seeing me in Photoshop than writing any code.

Nevertheless, I had a significant interest in building things, so I decided to dive into building apps at my internship. Firstly Windows Phone (forced to), secondly iOS because I was mostly interested in developing apps for iPhones. Having a background in both design and development forms an excellent foundation for building quality apps.

Today, I’m the lead of mobile development at WeTransfer, in which I’m mostly responsible for the Collect iPhone and iPad app. In my spare time, I like to write blog posts and educate on my blog called SwiftLee. Speaking at conferences is something I like, and you might even have the chance to see me doing a workshop. If you want to talk to me outside of tech, your best option is to go to a local Golf club. Although that can change in a few months, I love doing new sports, ha!

3) Have you ever considered yourself an indie developer?

Although I introduced myself with details, I didn’t mention RocketSim at any time. For most parts, I would say I’m not an Indie developer as I’m working full-time for WeTransfer. However, in my spare time, I’ve developed RocketSim, which might make me eligible to be called an Indie Dev. You could also call me an Indie Blog Posts Developer, but I’m not sure if that’s a thing ;-)

4) What got you started/interested in creating your own applications outside of your “normal” job?

RocketSim started as a tool I needed myself. The very first version only contained functionality to open universal links (deeplinks) with ease. Collect contains many different universal links, making my life much more comfortable with a tool that manages them for me. At that time, I didn’t see much value in releasing it to the public.

Once I started developing the recording functionality, it became much more valuable. I started building this feature for myself at first, so I could easily share progress with my colleagues. I quickly realized many other devs could use such functionality, after which I decided to make it production-ready.

The blog is a different story. My first post ever dates back to 2015 while I only started writing weekly in 2018. Looking at the stats, I can see this milestone since I’ve been receiving many more visitors. Consistency is king and drives growth in this matter. The main reason to start writing every week was to learn something new myself every week through writing about it. I also liked teaching others, and a quality blog is an extra reason to speak at conferences.

5) How do you balance your time between friends/family, work, hobbies, and indie dev?

Planning! Without it, I would go crazy. I’ve blocked every Monday evening just for writing a blog post. I also try to plan another evening for RocketSim, website maintenance, and other stuff, but that evening is less consistent. Another essential planning thing I like is to block evenings for friends/family. It prevents me from spending too much time on a hobby and forces me to chill out and relax. Although it might sound crazy, it’s giving me much less stress as I know I’m in balance.

Besides, small steps form more significant actions. If I can do a little thing every day, I’ve made significant progress every week. This technique allowed me to develop RocketSim 3.0 on the side, where I spent half an hour at the end of a working day to fix smaller things.

I also try to find the sweet spots between hobby and work. WeTransfer loves open-source development and supports my community work. We’ve been donating, developed many open-source frameworks, and I’m allowed to speak at many conferences. It’s an excellent way for me to be a brand ambassador while doing the things I love.

6) RocketSim - Sooo… I created CrunchyGIF to solve a similar problem of easy screen recording but RocketSim is done so much better 😁 I love how it can capture the simulator screen entirely and exactly. How did you take screen recordings before you made RocketSim? And did you know what kind of dark magic you had to do to get the screen recordings to work perfectly in the simulator?

Haha, yes! You’ve been a great resource and help during my FFmpeg journey (which I did not end up using) and my GIF processing learnings. Before RocketSim, I was using “xcrun simctl io booted recordVideo recording.mp4” from the Terminal. Although this worked great, it was just a bit too much effort to go into the Terminal and use this command. On top of that, it didn’t give me GIFs to share on, for example, GitHub.

RocketSim is kind of a layer on top of xcrun. Using the same recordVideo command to create the recording, I use native Swift code to process it into a quality GIF and MP4 format. Although this might sound easy to build, it was quite challenging. I decided to launch RocketSim from the App Store to not worry about visibility and payment processing. It’s also kind of a way to create trust for end-users, having a sandboxed application. However, executing xcrun commands from a sandboxed turns out to be not so simple. I guess you can call that the dark magic you mentioned, although I didn’t know this beforehand. Take it as the secret sauce of RocketSim!

7) RocketSim - Congrats on the big 3.0 release! I feel like a lot has happened this year so I don’t remember what your 2.0 release was but what made you decide to make that bump up to 3.0? 🙃 What did you all do to plan for the launch/announcement?

First of all, it’s now available for free. It used to be pay upfront, which made it a barrier to installing it and trying it out. I disliked this mostly because I like it to be used by as many developers as possible. However, having a way to get some return on investment was still a requirement for me. I decided to add a watermark on the recordings for non-pro users, which had two benefits: making RocketSim free and leveraging free advertisement through users sharing those recordings across.

Secondly: App Store Connect. Early users of RocketSim expected to drag recordings directly into App Store Connect to use it for previews. Before 3.0, this was not possible as there are quite some requirements for App Store Previews. I needed to convert the resolution per device to match expected resolutions. On top of that, simulator recordings come without sound, which is why I tried out FFmpeg. I needed to convert both video and audio codec to match the sound and frames per second requirement. In the end, I was able to do this all in native Swift code, which took away the necessity of using a complicated dependency like FFmpeg. This paragraph describes best that RocketSim isn’t just a simple recording tool on top of xcrun anymore.

At last, I fixed a bunch of small things. You can now reorder deeplinks, record on Big Sur, see a recording duration in the status bar, and I’ve improved the thumbnail design with extra metadata. Not to forget, I built a completely new website.

8) RocketSim - What is your favorite part of RocketSim to work on and why is it the the GIF conversion? 😉 Your GIFs like so so good. How did you initially do the GIF conversion and where did you end up?

I knew it; you’re so into GIFs! This section is why I didn’t mention GIF conversion before. It’s a big part of the 3.0 improvements and has improved by a lot since 2.0. Once you start reading through “Optimise GIF file size” and “Improve GIF quality” blog posts, you’ll visit stone-age articles from the early days of the internet. GIFs are old, and can you can improve them in many ways. As you know from CrunchyGIF, GitHub requires GIFs to be smaller than 10MB. This size is super challenging, especially if you like to have GIFs of high quality.

I started using open-source frameworks at first. They did the job, gave me GIFs but didn’t do anything with optimizations. Several C libraries exist but either come with a license or are no longer maintained. I decided to take the challenge and write optimizations myself.

Writing the improvements was challenging and fun. Honestly, you were a great motivation to keep it going as I was continuously sharing my progress on Twitter with you. You kind of held me accountable, which is essential for these things to make progression. I wrote a measure unit test, which gave me direct results of the code. Apart from playing around with frame qualities, I applied tricks like removing duplicate frames by extending the first frame’s delay. The improvements turned out well, but adding the watermark increased the size a bit. It makes an extra reason to go Pro!

9) RocketSim - The one feature I haven’t used in RocketSim is the deep link launching yet (mainly because I don’t have an app with deep links 😝). Was this feature in your original feature set for RocketSim or did you realize you needed this while using RocketSim and you just plopped it in there? I love that you can save deep links though! I used to save them as home screen bookmarks when I used them for other apps back in the day 🤷‍♂️

As mentioned earlier, it’s how RocketSim started. I had a little HTML website at the time containing all those deeplinks for testing. It was hard to maintain, and as we have WeTransfer transfers as deeplinks, they often got outdated. On top of that, it wasn’t maintainable in a team.

I decided to create a syncing functionality to add a JSON file containing the deeplinks to our repository. This way, my colleagues could add new deeplinks as well, and we had a shared list of deeplinks to test. Together with the launching functionality made it super easy to test out links. I often get transfers shared with me to test specific scenarios or bugs. I can now copy that link and use the “launch from clipboard” functionality in RocketSim.

10) RocketSim - How do you like using GitHub issues as your public issues tracker for RocketSim? I’ve only used GitHub issues for open source projects. Does it work pretty well? Would you use something different if you were maintain a non-developer focused app?

I benefit from the fact that I’m targeting developers with RocketSim. I’m sure they’re familiar with GitHub, which lowers the barrier of creating issues. I’ve had many reports already, which helped me improve RocketSim and set a direction for future improvements. I also started using the repository as RocketSim’s website, as building a website wasn’t a priority at first. Altogether, it has been working great for me, but I can imagine it doesn’t work well if your target audience isn’t familiar with GitHub.

11) RocketSim - What’s next for RocketSim?! Got any other future features that you can share with us? 😀

Some of the most requested features contain recording sound and touches. The only way I can make this work is by creating and injecting a dynamic library into the simulators. Or well, I want to try and build it this way! It’s not going to happen short term, but I’ve had great help from Ahmed (Flawless App) to get me started already.

12) What’s been the hardest part of being an indie dev? What the most fun part of being an indie dev?

I guess the most challenging part is focus and planning. It’s super easy to jump on a new cool project, especially if you’re stuck. I’ve had several moments with RocketSim 3.0 in which I couldn’t find the right solution. For example, my FFmpeg journey for GIF and MP4 conversion took much time and didn’t work out. The fun part, however, is the feeling of achievement. Once I launched RocketSim 3.0 and watched all the great responses, I felt proud. As developers, we’re in a unique position to develop our ideas and deliver them to the world, which is a great satisfaction.

13) Is there anything else you’d like to tell the indie dev community about you?

Mostly that I’m just getting started! Together with WeTransfer, I’m looking into ways to grow even further in the community. I’ve also got many more ideas of projects I’d like to develop and, of course, RocketSim 4.0 will arrive someday soon. If you have any thoughts you want to share with me: find me on Twitter, and feel free to send me a private message if you don’t want to speak out in the open!

Matthias Gansrigler

Q&A

1) What is your name? Where do you live?

My name is Matthias Gansrigler, I’m 34 years old (born in February 1986), and I was born, raised, live and work in Vienna, Austria, Europe.

2) Introduce yourself. Education? Background? Main job? Interests outside of tech? Interests inside of tech?

After graduating from gymnasium (basically junior high + high school) at 18, I went on to study computer sciences at the University of Vienna for four years, but ultimately never got a degree. I was already working on apps at the time (GimmeSomeTune, and I believe a bit of flickery) and noticed that CS never really made sense for the kind of apps I was doing and wanted to do, so I attended less and less, and at some point just stopped. Plus, math kind of stumped me, to be honest 😅 And even though it might help here and there sometimes, or should I ever go out of business, it would help finding a job, I don’t regret it. I guess my heart has always been in the more practical, and less theoretical side of things.

While working on GimmeSomeTune and flickery, I got a “real” job as an Apple sales person at the local Apple Retail store “McShark”, which I did for a few years. When the Mac App Store hit, I released flickery on it and, maybe a year and a half later, quit at McShark and went full indie - and have been ever since.

My interests outside of tech are twofold. Front and foremost, my better half, Britta (whom I’ve been with for 8 years and counting 🥰). We like hiking, do buddy-reads (most recently “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”, the prequel to The Hunger Games) and play games (both board- and video games). Or we just doze off on the couch together.

Second, music. As a young boy, I first learned to play the flute (which I continued to do for maybe 8 years), then the piano (another 7 years of education there) and my (older) brother Florian taught me a bit of guitar (I can play most chords, but that’s about it). I’m a bit of an oldie when it comes to music - anything beyond the early 80s doesn’t interest me much - Elvis, Beatles, that’s my jam.

My interests inside of tech are software development (obviously, duh) and gaming. Most recently, I finished 100%-ing Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze on the Switch and am now playing a bit of FIFA 18 in the evenings to relax (though I really don’t, if anything, it gets me more tense and aggravated when I feel passes/fouls are unfair – which is most of the time).

I’ve been trying to get more into Swift development. It’s tough, because all my apps are all still pure Objective-C, and re-writing that doesn’t make too much sense to me.

For new projects, where I’d like to do Swift, I simply know too little to do it. I recently submitted a bug report to Apple with an example project written in Swift, and I had to look up how to do a simple for-loop, for crying out loud. 35 lines took me about 45 minutes. So yeah, that’s going to be a process.

3) Have you ever considered yourself an indie developer?

Maybe not while I was still working at McShark. But after I quit, yes, definitely. Even though I also do client work from time to time, it’s never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be one.

Indie developer in the sense that I work for myself, release my own apps. I’m certainly not independent, though, because if Apple ever revokes my developer account or decides my apps aren’t fit for the App Stores, or editors aren’t interested in writing about apps anymore, I’d certainly be finished.

4) What got you started/interested in creating your own applications outside of your “normal” job?

That started at an early age. I think it goes back to playing Myst on our Macintosh Performa 5320 CD. It came with a documentary, where I learned that the game was created using HyperCard. HyperCard was also available to my brother and me, so we started making our own little games (mostly he, because he’s older).

I hadn’t considered becoming a developer at that age (what was I, 8 maybe? - I wanted to become a private detective, and a vet), but programming stuck with me, so I went from HyperCard to REALbasic, and from that to Xcode (with the help of Aaron Hillegass’ great book “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X”).

My interest in creating software as a profession came when I started sporadically working on GimmeSomeTune and accepting donations for it via PayPal (I can’t remember how old I was then, 16, perhaps, maybe 17).

5) How do you balance your time between friends/family, work, hobbies, and indie dev?

Personally, whenever I’m not working, I feel like I should be, because it’s my job - it’s what I do, and I love it. So I always feel like I’m letting my customers, and myself, down whenever I’m not in front of my computer. That’s surely something I need to work on. To know it’s ok not to be working all the time.

That being as it is, I think I’m pretty flexible overall when it comes to my work hours – if I need to go somewhere or do something else, I can always make up time on weekends, or pull all-nighters 😴

I usually have a very rough plan of what I want to get done when, so I tend to schedule around that, which has been working well so far.

6) Yoink - Yoink has to be one of my favorite macOS utilities 🥳 Dragging and dropping files without it seriously frustrates me. When did you realize that you needed to make Yoink to save us all from the default behavior of drag and drop? 🙃 What were your initial goals?

First, thank you, I’m very glad you like it!

I got the idea for Yoink while I was working in Xcode in full screen. I wanted to drag an image asset from Finder into Xcode’s fullscreen window and couldn’t do it for the life of me. That’s where the idea was born, and that was my goal - to have a place where I could temporarily place a file from Finder so I could navigate around and drop it wherever I needed to drop it.

And it’s funny, sometimes you get that feeling that you’re onto something with an idea. I got so enthusiastic and excited about it, I dropped whatever I was working on (probably flickery) and started working on Yoink. A night shift later, I had a working prototype (which, knowing myself, was probably also v1.0 I published on the Mac App Store 🥴)

7) Yoink - This isn’t my favorite use of Yoink but the I regularly need to use Yoink to drag and drop files from the web into Slack. Slack’s drag and drop integration is pretty poor which makes me so thankful that I have Yoink installed! Yoink seems to handle dropping of so many different file types that other apps can’t handle. Are other apps just bad at handling drag and drop or are there a lot of edge cases to consider for all the file types? 😇

Yes, I keep hearing that, and drags from Photos.app. Drag and drop is such an integral part of macOS, it’s quite astounding that sometimes apps ignore it or don’t invest much time in it. But to be fair, it’s quite the topic.

Implementations of drag and drop vary drastically from app to app (even within Apple’s own apps). Basically, there are two types of drags: file drags and promise drags. File drags are drags where the file already exists on your disk, so the data and file path are readily available, whereas promise drags are drags where the file and data do not exist yet, so you’re promised that it will, some time later after the drag finished. Between those, there are tons of edge cases.

Take Photos.app, for example. Photos offers the receiving app both types, a file drag, and a promise drag. If you accept the file drag, you’ll receive a scaled-down version of the photo. If you accept the promise drag, you’ll get the full version of it (which is what you want with Yoink).

Or take dragging URLs from Yoink to Safari’s Bookmark list. If you write the drag as a file-url, the bookmark will be to the webloc file in Finder, not the URL it contains (which is what you’d like to happen). So in that case, I have to not write the file url, only the actual URL to the dragging pasteboard.

Every now and then, Apple likes to throw some roadblocks in your way, too. With macOS Mojave, the number of rows you drag from a table view has to match the number of items you write to the dragging pasteboard. Now, in Yoink, there are single files (which are separate rows), and Stacks, which is one row that contains multiple files.

It was quite a shock during the first Mojave betas that dragging Stacks out of Yoink suddenly didn’t work anymore, and resulted in an exception. I spent a few nights trying to find a workaround for it. It never gets boring 😝

8) Yoink - I won’t start a new project without a solid name so one of my favorite questions to ask is about the origin story of the name “Yoink”. “Yoink” is so perfect and memorable. Did you get find this name right away or did it take some time? What were some of the other names if you had any? 😊

DragHelper was the working title… yeah, I know 😂.

I usually never have a proper name up until I’m thinking about releasing the app. Then it gets serious. I doubt Yoink would have been much of a success were it still called “DragHelper”.

I actually had a list of potential names - sadly, I can’t find it anymore. They were all bad anyway.

With Yoink, I just got lucky. I was watching The Simpsons (“Bart Gets Famous”, Season 5, Episode 12), where Bart steals Kent Brockman’s Danish and proclaims “Yoink!”. I don’t know how I made the connection to my app, but it was just perfect, as Yoink “yoinks” your files from your mouse cursor and holds them for you. (here’s a link to the exact scene as a gif: https://i.gifer.com/HRAA.gif)

9) Yoink - This year I started to treat my iPad as my main work device and Yoink has been key to helping me make that transition. One of the may things that I love is it helps me avoid using the Files app for temporary files that I need to move between apps. It seems like recent iOS versions and iPads becoming more powerful has helped Yoink become ever better over time. What was the first version of Yoink on iOS like and how has it been adopting the new iOS features over the years?

iOS 11 made it possible to bring Yoink to the iPad, as it introduced drag and drop to the platform.

I didn’t start working on it with the intention of releasing it - I didn’t think the concept would work well, so to me it was more an exploration of the new APIs and a fun exercise. Only after using the prototype for a while did I think that it might be worth releasing.

Yoink for iPad and iPhone is such a different app than Yoink for Mac. Other than the name and having to do with drag and drop, they don’t have much in common. Yoink for Mac is more of a “drag helper” than Yoink for iPad ever could be, just because on the Mac, it can appear automatically whenever you drag something. That’s not possible on iOS, and changes the app – especially how and when you use it. You could say Yoink for Mac is more like “hold this file, I’ll need it in a second”, where Yoink for iPad and iPhone is “hold this file, I don’t know when I’ll need it” 🤔

But I digress.

The first version of Yoink was, now that I think back, already pretty elaborate. It had the custom keyboard, File Provider and Action extensions – quite a bit of work for the few months between iOS 11’s announcement and its release!

Releasing updates to my apps alongside OS releases has always been difficult for me. The yearly cycles are a bit much in my opinion. I’m currently maintaining seven apps (and doing some client work from time to time), so dropping everything just to be able to have features ready to be released alongside iOS’ (or macOS’) release is mostly unjustifyable. That’s why I’m usually a bit late with “the new shiny”.

Take iOS 14’s release. Aside from the fact that it was released without prior notice to developers, I was already working on a substantial update for Yoink for iPad and iPhone (changing the way sync works, and so many improvements), there was just no time to squeeze in new features.

I’ve been doing it gradually instead, with subsequent updates – so far, I’ve added support for the new photos picker, contextual menus, pointers, Scribble and Sketches. The new Widget will take a little while longer, because it requires Swift. And I stil have to memorize how to do for-loops in Swift.

I do always check for compatibility, though. If an already existing feature doesn’t work in an upcoming OS, I try to fix it as soon as possible.

macOS Big Sur comes to mind: on that OS – due to new insets around table view cells –, the buttons next to a file icon in Yoink slipped underneath the file icon instead of being next to it, rendering them inaccessible, and those are pretty vital.

I’m happy to state that all my Mac apps already run natively on Apple Silicon 👍🏻, that’s been important to me as well.

10) Yoink - As a follow up from the previous question, Yoink for iOS has soooo many amazing system integrations from File app, to handoff, to keyboard, to Today Widget, and more. What’s it like trying to test all of these different integrations? I can’t imagine that it’s easy. I do have to say that, as a user and as a developer, I really appreciate all of the features that you have added into Yoink 🙌 It’s such an inspiration!

The most important part was to re-use code, and not re-invent the wheel for each extension.

For example, dragging from the keyboard, and dragging from the app itself. That’s the same code, the same UICollectionView powering it, “talking” to the files via the same data storage object.

Of course I need to test it all, but it’s much easier testing and debugging one drag-and-drop code path, instead of two.

In the case of Yoink for iOS, it’s especially important to test on a real device, because many of the interactions you can do with your fingers are not as easily (or at all) available using the Simulator.

On an actual iPad, you can start dragging a file, and then, with your second finger, drag Yoink out of the Dock into Slide-Over and drop the file then. On Simulator, you’d have to first launch Yoink into Slide-Over and then drag the file. It sounds like there’s not much of a difference, but it can lead to different situations.

On an iPad, Yoink could just have started syncing when a file is dropped onto it, whereas on Simulator, it’s more likely that the sync has already finished.

Another example: dragging multiple files out of Yoink. On an actual iPad, you can drag one file, and then add more files to the drag by tapping them. That’s not possible in the Simulator.

Yet another example is iCloud sync. It’s something that should work in the Simulator just like on an actual device but, well, often doesn’t. I can’t pinpoint exactly what’s different, but at some point, the Simulator decided only to sync 3 files within a Stack at most, instead of all of them, whereas the actualy device behaved as intended.

Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that for now, the Simulator is good for most UI work, but anything beyond that, you need an actual device.

It’s great to see Apple improving in that area, though, like supporting Push Notifications. I’d like to see more of that.

11) Yoink - Is there anything on your wishlist for future version of macOS and iOS that would bring Yoink up to the next level?

Yes, on iOS, I’d love to be able to be notified of clipboard changes and react to drags while the app is completely in the background. That would be lovely, but not something I’m holding my breath for.

12) Yoink - What’s next for Yoink?! Got any fun new features that you are working on that you are able to share?

I’ve been working hard on supporting iCloud sync in Yoink for Mac. I still don’t have an ETA for it yet, but it’s planned for one of the app’s next feature-updates.

The main stumbling point is the difference in usage in Yoink for Mac vs Yoink for iPad / iPhone, which I’ve alluded to earlier.

To me, the most important part is not to interfere with Yoink for Mac’s drag-on-drag-off nature by syncing files from iPad into this list. Or the other way around, I don’t think it’s good to sync every file put into Yoink for Mac if it’s going to be removed from it a few moments later – so that’s where I’m at right now.

On the surface, it looks like a simple issue, but not to interfere with what the user expects or has come accustomed to in using these apps is the most important factor.

13) What’s been the hardest part of being an indie dev? What the most fun part of being an indie dev?

I guess the hardest part is not being too worried about everything. You know, I get a 1-star review and I think it’s the end of the world. Or I send out a press release to hundreds of sites and only one picks it up - that sort of thing. It can get to me. But it’s not the end of the world. Keep going. The next review will be 5-star again. The next press release will get picked up more.

The thing is, I’m a coder at heart. I’m not a marketing kind of guy. I don’t know why, but marketing often feels so dishonest to me (I have to sell this, pitch that), when I just want to show people what I’ve created and let them decide if that’s something they’d like to use or not.

But we live in a world of superlatives where you won’t get noticed much if you’re not flashy. Being “active” isn’t good enough. You have to be “pro-active” now (whatever that even means). If it isn’t “the most innovative thing” since yesterday’s most innovative thing, it’s tough to be noticed. My dream scenario would be one where I just code – work on, improve and craft new apps, and someone else does the marketing and PR.

Also, juggling what exactly to work on can be difficult. Should I be working on that next update, or should I spend the day answering support emails? Shouldn’t I finally write that blog post I’ve been meaning to write for ages? My website could use a face-lift… There are lots of decisions to make every day.

But I sound like I’m complaining when I really shouldn’t be, because I’ve been very, very, very lucky to be able to make a living out of what I do, and I’m grateful every day for it.

… so, you know how I just said daily decisions are the hardest part? They’re kind of the most fun part, too. I get to decide. It’s my business, I say if I work on the update today, or take a day off, even.

The developer community is amazing, as well. I have yet to meet a Mac or iOS developer who wasn’t nice to talk to. I’ve also got to know so many wonderful bloggers and editors who’ve been so supportive as well.

If I had to pick just one thing, though, it’d be to know my app has made life a little easier for someone. That’s the most rewarding thing to me, and what I strive to achieve with every one of my apps.

14) Is there anything else you’d like to tell the indie dev community about you? (there is probably more i could have poked at but I’m still learning over here 😇)

That’s great, learning never stops, and it never should. (That from a guy who just said he’s been putting off learning Swift for the longest time… 🤪)

Off the top of my head, there’s not much more about me to tell, but I can drop a few links on you ;) To the indie dev community, I’d say please get in touch, let’s talk :)

15) Do you have any other indie devs that readers should follow / lookout for?

  • Becky Hansmeyer (@bhansmeyer on twitter, responsible for Scribblet, SnapThread and YarnBuddy)
  • Jeff Johnson (@lapcatsoftware on twitter, responsible for StopTheMadness)
  • Heidi Helen Pilypas (@heidi_helen on twitter, responsible for Capsicum and more)
  • Thomas Zoechling (@weichsel on twitter, responsible for Claquette, also helping build MindNode)

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