Hello,
I hope everyone is having a wonderful Christmas eve. I’ll be spending the weekend with family, so this week’s newsletter is very brief. I really just wanted to wish everyone a wonderful holiday and thank you all for subscribing and reading each week.
Next week I will be working fixing the Stripe issue I detailed here, and finalizing our end of the year feature for publication on January 2nd. I had hoped to work on a few other features I’ve had on my list for a while, but this Stripe issue really needs to take priority. I got a good start on it yesterday and hopefully there won’t be too many setbacks and I can get this rolled out within the next week.
Some things I saw around the internet this week that are worth your time:
- MacStories posted up their best apps of the year. And while I may be blamed for Last.fm infecting the team, they recommended an app called Raycast that is currently disrupting one of the bedrocks of my entire Mac computing life: the launcher. I’ve been a devoted Alfred user to the point where it’s the first thing I install on a new Mac. After this glowing review I decided to give Raycast a try for a few days doing my real work. It’s annoyingly awesome. I’ll share more and the killer feature that will probably be the main reason I switch in a future issue.
- This article on TechDirt really resonated with me. I agree completely the thoughts about moving to a decentralized social media platform.
- I lucked out and got in on the Ivory alpha for Mastodon. It’s incredible. Marco Arment described it as almost a “drop in” replacement for Twitter because of how familiar it feels. I agree. My entire Twitter life was basically spent in Tweetbot and this feels like a warm blanket of familiarity. Between finding a lot of the same people on Mastodon that I followed on Twitter, and using a few BirdSiteLive instances to follow a small handful of people (baseball writers) that will probably never move over, I have basically removed Twitter from my daily life. I don’t miss it. Ivory was the final push.
- One of my goals of 2023 is to remove Google Analytics from Chorus; this looks like my leading alternative. If anyone else has something they recommend, I’d love to hear about it.
I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of the weekend filled with good food, good drinks, and good friends. I’ll see you in the new year.
Best,
Jason Tate