Just reset the message cache in Airmail for the fifth time in two days. At this point, I have no idea why I'm still using it.

Potentially great app completely ruined by annoying bugs.

I'm starting to think that some adults actually care about politics in a non sarcastic manner.

Lots of popular podcasts are long. Really long. 1.5 - 2.5 hours long. I don't know about you, but I think that's nuts. Half an hour is a much more manageable length for a podcast.

Why aren't there very many good 30 minute podcasts?

It's the ads, stupid. It's always the ads.

You can have 3 sponsor reads in a 2 hour podcast with no trouble. Even if the ads are a disrespectfully long 3 minutes¹ each, that's 9 total minutes of ads - just 7.5% of the total episode length.

Now try that in a 30 minute show. You're looking at 30% of the entire show as ads. No one is listening to a podcast that is 30% ads².

Vesper's custom sync service is being disabled, and the app will be removed from the App Store:

Sync will be turned off Aug. 30 at 8pm Pacific. We'll destroy all the data, and neither we nor anyone else will be able to recover it.

Apps die all the time - it's a part of life. Vesper was a well-made app, even if it never clicked with me, and it's a shame to see it go.

The interesting part is the sync service. You see, Vesper's developers decided that Vesper was simply too good to use something like iCloud sync or Dropbox sync. Instead, they created a custom sync service from scratch. I'm sure it was fabulous.

Now that it's going away, I hope you can see why that's a really bad thing.

Had Vesper used iCloud or Dropbox, users of the app would continue using it until some future iOS update finally broke compatibility.

At least the devs were nice enough to update the app one last time to add an export feature. That's a nice touch.

Ultra low-carb pancakes with butter. Turkey sausage cooked in coconut oil.

What have I become?

This app shouldn't need to exist.

If you visit a site with an RSS feed and tap the Feed Hawk extension, Feed Hawk will subscribe to the feed and display a confirming alert.

RSS apps should have an extension built in. None of them do, so Feed Hawk was born. I feel silly paying $3 for it, but I feel sillier using a clunky bookmarklet to subscribe to feeds, and not being able to subscribe at all in Safari View Controller.

It's been a little over two months since I published this fantastic little snippet. I'm happy to report that nothing has changed, except for the message has become twice as loud.

There have been several articles floating around recently about how task lists are stupid, and you should use your calendar instead. Thanks to the power of procrastination, Ben Brooks wrote the response that I have been busy not writing:

I think this trend is stupid, and your time is far better spent learning how to stop procrastinating than it is planning out every waking minute of your day.

A few thoughts about my current email client of choice.

Bulk Editing Mode

The bulk editing mode is hidden. It's hidden so well that I had to research how to activate it. It works fine now that I know the secret handshake, but it's not very discoverable at all.

It won't move to next message

Say you're reading an email, and then you run one of the handy actions that Airmail so thoughtfully provides. Great - you're automatically moved to the next email in your list, right?

No. No you are not. You're right back in the inbox. Every time. Every single damn time. This is terrible.

Bugs as far as the eye can see

So many things don't work quite the way they're supposed to. The most glaring bug of all is how sometimes, for no reason that I can figure, emails that you have already dealt with decide to come back to your inbox. These could be a day old or a week old - there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. But once these phantoms come back, they are going to hang out until they're damn well ready to leave. And the best part? These messages only show up in Airmail. If I look at the same account in Mail, everything is fine.

The only way to get rid of the phantom emails is to reset the message cache and re-download all your mail. This is obviously not great.

What now?

I don't know. I really just want Mail.app with a share sheet. Since Apple doesn't want to do that, I keep trying third party apps that are great in ways X and Y, but broken in way Z. I'll keep using Airmail for now, but it's hard to imagine it being a keeper.

When you sell your company to a goliath, you are basically fucking all of your customers. But you get to buy a yacht, so that's cool.

Make sure that the yacht is worth it.

If you decide the yacht is worth it, then sell away. Just make sure you know what you're doing.

Don't kid yourself and think the sale is better for your customers. That might be true in 0.01% of cases.

You're probably not that special.