The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Two decades as a solo indie Mac dev (Interview)

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

This week Jesse Grosjean joins us to talk about his career as a solo indie Mac dev. Since 2004 Jesse has been building Mac apps under the company name Hog Bay Software producing hits such as WriteRoom, Taskpaper, and now Bike. We talk through the evolution of his apps, how he considers new features and improvements, why he chose and continues to choose the Mac platform, his business model and pricing for his apps, and what it takes to build his business around macOS and the driving force of the App Store.

this week on the change while we're talking to jesse gross gene about his career as an indie mac dev since 2004 jesse has been building mac apps under the company name hog based software producing hits such as right room task paper and now bike we talked through the evolution of his apps how he considers new features and improvements why he chose and continues to choose the Mac platform, his business model and pricing for his apps and what it takes to build his business around Mac OS and the driving force of the app store. For our little listeners who want to skip the ads and get a little closer to the metal, check out our membership at changelog.com slash plus plus. Today, our plus plus subscribers get a bonus 10 minutes to enjoy. We talk with Jesse about the similarities of Write Room and iWriter, as well as the super early days of the changelog when this all began on Tumblr.

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With Honeycomb, you guess less and you know more. Join the swarm and try Honeycomb free today at honeycomb.io slash changelog. Again, honeycomb.io slash changelog. So we have Jesse Grosjean here, who has been running Hog Bay Software since 2004. Jesse, welcome to the Changelog. Hi, thanks for having me. Happy to have you, Jesse. I think I've been on your mailing list for years, but I think you emailed me for the very first time in years, a few weeks back with the launch of Bike. Yeah, I'm a one person do everything kind of, and I like programming a lot and everything else.

I kind of like visual design, and after that, it goes downhill quick. And my mailing list, like once I sent it out in like one week, I sent two newsletters. But the last time I think was like 2018, so it's up and down. Yeah, which speaks to the challenge of any Mac developers, but we'll get into that, of course. The last time I think was like 2018. So it's up and down. Yeah. It speaks to the challenge of any Mac developers, but we'll get into that, of course. But that is the ups and the downs of one person shows. Yeah.

Sometimes you have news and sometimes you don't. Yeah. It's kind of nice though when you sign up for a newsletter and you're like, I'm interested in this, but I don't want to get like weekly updates on what's happening. it's like when i hear from jesse pay attention because he's got something to say yeah he sure did this last time around which was nice good good good yeah i always hope that again when i've done my little research on newsletter writing they're always like send it once a month or everybody will think it's spam and so so I do get, you know, I try really hard to make it no flashy

graphics, all this, but I still get spam reports of people saying, you're horrible. But I try. I never signed up for this. What's hog-based software? Get out of my inbox. I signed up for this in 2018. Yeah, come on, man. Email me more.

I appreciate that sentiment, though, Jared, that you said, because sometimes I feel like, especially when you sign up for a new service and they opt you into all the emails, like that's like the worst tactic ever. Yes. And then you have to go un-opt in. Like I never did in the first place.

Right. Just because I signed up doesn't mean I want all your emails. And then they like email you way too often with updates that are just not important to you. And then they become noise, not ceiling. And it's actually negative to their brains. You're like, actually, now I see the warts in your software more because all software has bugs, of course.

And then you're like, scrutinize their validity in your life as we do with software. We were just talking about like, I'm a user of past, of Rightroom. And I was like, oh, man, all-based software. I know this. I know Rightroom. And I had to remind myself. And then we'll probably talk about iWriter and different things have happened in the writing app world in Mac. And I'm like, I don't use it anymore.

And it wasn't because you sent too many emails. So kudos to you for not doing that. But there are some software you scrutinize because they talk to you too much they badge you too much right and they become noise and not signal either in their actual software or in their emails it's like you know what just leave me alone already you know right yep i definitely although one of my resolutions here is that i send this newsletter more often than once every couple years now that i have. Now that I've got it all planned out now, I've actually got some big features. So watch out.

It could be two months. You might get another mailing. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Well, there's one thing that I think people do enjoy, especially from Mac app developers. And I dare I say even indie Mac app developers, they tend to be indie more than they are like mainstream. I just, just the way of Mac apps is knowing the story, you know, knowing not

so much like the day-to-day of Jesse's life, so to speak, but like, why do you care so much to write bike? Why do you care so much to, you know, put the work in, be a solo person why does that matter to you and the details of making that work i think the audience you that you sell to could you know care about the story and there's a lot to a story that i think people often underestimate when they go solo like you are and they have less people involved story can be more of a selling point than just simply the software you write. Yeah, and I definitely think I probably don't do that well enough, although it sort of goes back and forth. Again, one person show, everything's a bit quirky. And so the newsletter, I said I get bad responses back. Mostly I get lots of people saying, oh, I'm so glad you wrote. It's been so long. And so sort of some people hear some about me that way

and sort of form an opinion. And I'm fairly active in, I have a user forms, but that's pretty hard to keep track of. But for story, I did think of that. And my about page is updated more than a paragraph. I have pictures on it now. So that I have a dog in the background here. And they're not clickable though.

I can't click them and see more the sizes. Like, I want to get into the details of your dog and your family and this mountain you're hanging out on. But I can't see the bigger version of them. I'm sorry. Yeah, I thought about it. It's a step in the right direction. It's a step in the right direction. But, you know, the kids and everybody who wants their photo on the internet.

Yeah. Right. True. Iteration. Well, they're there at least. You do have kids. It is true. You've been to a mountain before. You live in Maine, which I believe you have some mountains there. Hey, I'm a mountain biker and I want to go to Maine someday in my life to ride

the hills you all have there slash mountains you all have there. Because here in Houston, Texas, it's pretty much flat. It's very trail, not a lot of downhill. So I look forward to going to Maine one day to mountain bike there. Yeah. Well, they have, there's, I think depending on where you live, we have mountains or we most definitely don't, but we have, there's one, one we've got Katahdin and that's very mountain-like, although it doesn't show up against Rockies and things, but it looks, it's quite, quite a hike. I also tend to blend Vermont and Maine together, despite my awareness of geography. So forgive me.

Don't offend him. Well, Jesse, the one story that I've known about you, not really through your writings or your about page, just through like watching you write software over the years from a distance. I don't have a microscope out or anything. But if we look at the apps that you've written, all Mac native apps, we've got Task Paper, which is plain text to-do lists.

You've got Write Room, which Adam referenced, which is distraction-free writing. And now your new app, Bike, which is really a simple outliner. There seems like there's some through lines, the philosophy, maybe your viewpoint of what good software is. Plain text seems to be at the heart of it, some sort of like focus or distraction-free or simplicity. Can you talk about some of the virtues in the kind of software that you like

and why you like that kind of software or why you like to make that? Yeah, so let's see. So I, you know, wanted to do cool computer things in high school. That was sort of my goal. And I was interested in graphic design mostly because I liked Mac for some reason. I'm not sure why. And I wanted, you know, Photoshop was the top of the, I graduated high school in 1995. So that's the time frame.

And then I went to college and did computer science and studio art, sort of more studio art as a minor and more I like to draw and stuff. But I like looking at visual things. I'm not too much, you know, server algorithms or things like that. I want to put things on the screen I can click and went to a startup that was sort of doing visual things. And then after a year of that, went and worked at the University of Maryland in their human computer interaction department as a programmer, a research assistant kind of person. And that was neat in that I hadn't, you know, it was lots of interface design kind of things.

And in particular, they were doing zooming user interfaces where you kind of, it's a two-dimensional surface that you zoom into smoothly. And so all of that was neat and lots of experiments and cool demos. But in the end, I also sort of have this interest in taking notes on things. And I came to the conclusion that it's really hard to get a zooming interface or any other fancy interface to be generally as productive as just like a plain text editor. You know, if you put that information that you're visualizing, and there are tons of exceptions, but I'm just talking about for a day-to-day, an average person, Well, let's

see, I put my grocery list in this text editor and it looks just as good and as easy to manage as some fancier tool. And so that sort of realization, which wasn't immediate, but you know, that I sort of came to, and I especially came to it with Rightroom where that was kind of just a a fun idea that i did in a week and it got more attention and applause and money than stuff i'd worked on for years so that got my attention i was like hey well and so oh i sort of am i wonder why that is and stuff and sort of one thing that i have come to think is that you know computers, computers are magic. Maybe this is old news, but especially for like 1995, you know, 50 years old, but that's sort of the big difference from paper and all these things that we add on top of it are valuable. But if they get in the way of these core little things, like I can copy and paste text or something, it there's your,

it's a, it's always a trade-off and it's taking away. And so that's sort of been my assumption for a long time is that for the kinds of things I'm interested in that are text based, just basic text editor is sort of the foundation and try to expand on that idea. But be aware that anything you do is going to have a plus and a minus and that you might just be losing. You know, it might be better to go back to the text editor. We're talking to the choir here. Jared's a sublime text user. He will code in it and he will make his lists in it. He'll write markdown in it. Like he prefers it over any app that will give him extras on top of it. You can speak for yourself, of course, but you know,

like that's the basis and he kind of goes back to that every time. Like I'll use notion, I'll use Things, I'll use other apps, but it's always text-based for Jared. And I like that too, of course, but he seems to like gravitate towards that first and always versus, you know, move around different apps. And I think you could save yourself a lot of time by doing that. Although for a programmer like me, it would be boring

because I want to try new things, right? Right. I'm trying to beat that text editor, but it's hard, right? Yeah. So, yeah. And so anyway, with task paper was sort of, I did write room. That was sort of a phenomenon. Interesting.

But if you add any feature to it, it's no longer it. So it's sort of a, at least for me, who's not interested in doing the marketing, at least not able to do the marketing. Maybe I'd like it to be super popular and rich again but i i sort of reached an end point where if i touch it anymore i break it and so task paper was sort of taking that idea and saying okay text is nice because it's this universal interface what are a few basic things I can add to make it a little bit better for managing a to-do list? And so I don't know if people don't know,

but TaskPaper is a plain text to-do list that does some very basic syntax highlighting. For example, if you type a line and end it with a colon, it makes it bold. And that's about all Virgin 1.0 did. Very basic things if you're like a programmer listening to this podcast, sorry,

but I iterated on that for a while, sort of that basic idea, but putting a model behind it so that it's a scriptable and you can write plug, not really plugins, but automate aspects to it and style sheets and all that. But what trying to keep the basic simple text part, but then allow people to extend it with their ideas.

So that's sort of where I am with my apps now. I try to make very simple things that just have a few ideas, but then other people can extend them. And usually the other people's like the 1% of programmers, I think. But it's sort of the people who I interact with in my forums. And that's kind of where I am and where I have the fun. Some of the features in Bike, and Bike is your new tools and outliner. The features that you list for Bike are things like opening files is fast.

And scrolling is fast. And it's 2022 and yet I read that and it kind of speaks to me and I'm like, yeah, I want that. And that makes me wonder or kind of consider the bigger picture of maybe the macOS platform or software in general, maybe the practices of the community.

I don't know what it is, but it seems like so much that we use isn't fast. It's bloated, or it's laggy, or it's, pick your adjective, but it's not fast. And so your features, which you wouldn't think, I would think today that would be table stakes, but it's kind of like, hey, bike has this and not everything has that. So I guess two part question. Why do you think that is? And then maybe go into some of the things that you had to do in order to make bikes so fast. Well, a few things. First, I'd ask people to test it out themselves because there's different ways to say fast, right? And so bike is not a programmer's text editor that can open a hundred megabyte log file.

It should be possible to, I need to change some things in the backend, but it isn't now. I sort of, in the name of simplicity, but it's fast for user-sized data. And so I use Moby Dick as my text file because it's bigger than anything I ever do. And that's sort of one thing. It's fast for what it is not necessarily sure sublime for mac os i think that a lot of text i mean the whole text system it comes from 30 years i don't know you know whenever next step was and so they have a really hard job of supporting everything that was there and evolving it forward and you know i can't imagine trying to do that. So their standard

text component that most applications are built on has legacy things that has to support. And in particular, bike is a fast outliner. And I've actually just been discussing with some people in some forums. Well, why is it really fast? You know, everything, text edits super fast on my computer already. And many cases text edit is fast but using go back to my other app task paper which is based on ns text view which is the core component for mac os basic scrolling is fast but there's all kinds of little weird things that happen for example if you resize a document in the middle all of a sudden it'll get jumpy and happen. For example, if you resize a document in the middle, all of a sudden it will get jumpy and it might place like,

you know, you resize the document, you place your cursor and it jumps to a different position. And so it's little details like that, that I'm trying to get right in bike. And which is, you know, there's lots of editors that get it right,

but it's some work to do too. Yeah. And so I guess the question was why is bike different you know i got rid of legacy and then there's two aspects of fast there's you know how big of a file can you open and bike is okay at that it's not great but it's good for pretty much anything people are going to use it for and then there's also uh like scrolling performance and animation performance and they are bike is particularly I've been careful. It's, you know, it's using core animation, which is, I don't know, since the iPhone, it's been around.

But most text editors aren't built on that. And so I just do some basic things like I only draw what's visible in the text area and I don't lay out everything at once. I do estimation. And so that makes scrolling a bit tricky to implement because like if you're scrolling up and your estimates are off, the whole screen is going to bounce around. So those are the areas where I try not to do dumb things maybe. And I don't have to deal with legacy. And those are the two things that bike is good at yeah legacy being like older versions of mac how do you describe legacy in this case well like i'm just i'm just saying like compared to ns text view which is the standard that they have so much extra work to

support that you know i'm sure they know all these techniques just as well as i do but to get it all to work on the current version and then 20 years of application api support is the trick yeah right one thing you mentioned too on the bike page in terms of speed and you know this this conversation we're having here is this moby dick workout which you mentioned Moby Dick in this, in your description there, but this is me marketing right now. Not bad. I mean, there's a get a repo for it. So you can actually encourage others to leverage a repo and use the zip files you have for, you know, to do it on their own, basically. Right. You know, it's available out there, but you mentioned like opening the the file it wasn't fast you know this is like here's the test essentially scroll to the end

resize the window is it still fast scroll to the middle resize the window is it still fast select all cut paste undo redo app still standing okay and i do those things like i will you know you make a list you want to take it somewhere else because hey the app is very simple you want to move it to an email or you want to share it with somebody because your app doesn't really do sharing. You know, like I can't share my bike file with Jared and we collaborate. So I'm going to want to like eject and, you know, text my wife my list for our packing thing or whatever. Share this idea outline I've made with an outliner. So I'm going to want to cut it and paste it and redo and do different things. And so these are things that like are common everyday tasks when you use an outliner. And so you want to see if it still stands, if it's a big list, if I got a big idea

or a small idea. So that totally makes sense. But this Moby Dick workout is pretty, it's pretty interesting to like give your user base a tool to say, okay, is this thing still working? It's a new app, whatever, help me troubleshoot. And that's, that's smart. Yep. Well, it has been, I don't know when I, you know, January or something, I was like, all right, what am I going to do here? Because it is, I was wondering that the real reason I made that is because previous to bike, I worked for like from 2017 till last August on a big rust project text editor where I did all the algorithms, everything to make it load gigabyte files, you know, fancy, fancy. But there was some I could never quite get it all done. And so bike was, all right, what's the simplest thing I can do? And bike right now for the list of paragraphs is just a flat array, which is a dumb data structure if you're trying to make it performant.

But actually, it does Moby Dick fine. So that's why I made the workout because I was like, do I really need to be able to load a multi-gigabyte outline? Well, it would be extra work. Let's try this for now, and then I'll add that later. What was the Rust app that you did, and what's the backstory there? That I failed? Yeah, it's...

I wasn't going to say failed, but you did. Okay, that's fine. Yeah, yeah. Someday, maybe. But another text editor, but with a workspace attached. So I've been working in plain text for a long time, like you said, and that's sort of been the foundation. I always think, all right, plain text. And so this was just sort of the neck.

And I've made task paper and I made another app called Folding Text that are sort of trying to allow you to have plain text, but extend it with other formats. You know, how do you have your context in plain text, but extend it with other formats that, you know, how do you have your contacts in plain text or something like that? So this was a workspace where you could have, you know, supported different syntaxes. So a database, you have a whole bunch of plain text files, and then it would read the syntax from them and parse out a database and make it live. So you could have live queries of all these interesting things all interesting but i was going through huge amounts of work extra work to support the plain text aspect right all these extra uh formats and syntax highlighting and it still

always looks kind of programery at the end right and so bike is not plain text. Bike is HTML based or OPM. It's a markup language based. And I've sort of decided that for me, making selecting some text and making it bold just looks so much better. And I can think better with that than adding markdown syntax or some other syntax, which I have advocated in the past but it just yeah i started taking notes on the ipad just a little bit in the notes program and i was always like you know sort of notes being what i'm thinking through a design and i was like wow these are easier to read than

what i'm doing in my other tool where i see all this formatting and links or folding text. I did a lot of work to hide that formatting, but it still makes everything complicated. And so Byte was just like, let's get rid of that and just make something that's easy to parse, but you don't have to see all the syntax everywhere. Yeah, you want to see what you get, the WYSIWYG, right? You want to see the actual end result,

not the star-star before a word and after. Right. I mean, and it's a trade-off both ways. Right. And it's the audience, really, who you cater to because there's a certain audience who appreciates the visual aspects of Markdown and what it gives them the ability to translate into and maybe potentially the simplicity of it. But then there's a whole different audience is like, what is that? Yeah, that makes no sense to me. Let me command B, maybe because maybe they don't even know,

you know, keyboard shortcuts. They're just like, let me select that and push the B button or whatever. I don't know how you get to bold. But I sort of imagine like, all right, in 10 or 20 or 100 years, like if you're the perfect tool for thought, are you really going to want to have this syntax on the sides or is there going to be some of you i just feel like there's a huge trade-off i understand but for me i've been on one side of it for a long time and i'm really happy

now with bike that i'm on the other side of it because it it makes a lot of things easier and not just for for the end user also if you're a programmer, you can extract the information much more easily from HTML than from Markdown. I think it's a different thing, but it's not necessarily a decision that is better or worse for programmers or for end users and stuff. But we'll see how it goes. But that's my current thinking. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Retool. Retool helps teams focus on product development and customer value, not building and maintaining internal tools.

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it i assume it's similar in nature to i writer which was markdown syntax visual first, not HTML bolding first. It leaned towards the side of like, give me two stars before and after a word, and that made it bold. And that was what you actually saw in the UI, which is where he began. And now he's, you know, anti that really in bike which is just you know almost a paradox almost for example try uh people send me documents often like something's a bug or something like that and the one big advertisement right for plain text is that you can read it in a text editor, any text editor. But one thing I found is that you can't. It's almost any large markdown document that hasn't

been written for neatness in a plain text editor to start with. Like if you're writing it in a tool like iWriter that wraps it, if you haven't been really careful to take your links and make footnotes out of them and really make it clean, it's almost impossible to decipher. You know, the links are everywhere. So that's where I sort of started to really wonder, huh, am I my tools making plain text look good? And it's also selling the idea that it can look good in any text editor but really it's tool specific often you know and so if you're in sublime and you're writing markdown you're probably very careful to uh soft wrap the lines you know make it look good and then it looks good in sublime all the time but if you're in a tool like my folding text, it would do that automatically for you.

So it looked good in folding text, but if you open it in Sublime, it'll be a mess. And sort of that's one thing that I had with Markdown and plain text in general, is it's sort of somewhat tool specific. So handwritten Markdown is portable, if I'm understanding you, because you wrote it by hand and so it's readable to you because you wrote it maybe with some tooling help where it might you know you hit a link button and it turns a thing into a link or like pre-populates the markdown for you but you're writing it by hand like i do often in size of lime text but tool generated markdown is not as

portable because the tool is just generating the syntax, which is flexible enough that it might not look good in another tool or to the human eye. And so you think you're getting this great, I can read it like plain text, but oftentimes you're not. Is that what you're saying? Yes, that's my opinion. I'm not saying it's 100% true, but that's what I believe. And so just that I feel like if you're working in a plain text editor you can make it look really well but there's some work you know you don't like if you're writing markdown and sublime yeah you probably don't do an inline link that fills half the paragraph whereas that's always what happens unless you're carefully

curating what it looks like i think that's fair, yeah. And I would say that HTML as a programmer is a pretty grokkable language itself, especially the simplicity so far. At least I haven't imported your Moby Dick, but I have put a couple of my outlines into Byte and edited and done things and then right-clicked and opened up the file in Sublime Text to see what the dot

bike file looked like and you know it's it's very basic html it's like an unordered list with a bunch of list items in there and they all have unique ids it's that's pretty easy to work with programmatically so i think it's it's portable and i think it's a good choice for this. Does that hold true whenever you export? So as a quick test, I just went to my iPhone, which I happen to have. I was telling Jerry in the pre-call as prep for this, like, oh, yeah, Write Room, I remember that. And I use iWriter, and what kept me there, I don't use it daily, but I use it really infrequently because I have old notes there.

So it's mainly because it's on iCloud. It's old notes that still matter to me that I reference every once in a while. I don't use it daily. I'm not taking ideas and putting them there. So I've sort of abandoned it, but I have been a user of it. And I went and exported just some random thing from there. And I pull it up. It gives me a markdown export oddly enough as a dot text file,

which explain that to me. I don't know why it gives me a markdown file, but dot text in the end it is marked down and I'm opening it up in an editor and it doesn't look bad. All right. Like, so it's, you know, I guess that might not be a good example because it's not it kind of is marked down in the beginning yeah and and i guess i would say there's uh two things one really where this is coming mostly is task paper that's the most of the files that i see from people which is a nested list where text, if you don't do text wrapping, then it's, uh, if you don't wrap it into a nice block, then it streams around and it's really bad. But for Markdown, like, I don't know,

I put links in a lot and that's where it really, the link ruins it. And again, ruins it is strong, like, but sure. That's a big weakness I see. And so if you don't have links and if you're using pretty simple formatting, but as soon as you're doing longer paragraphs of stuff that wrap, that are lists, it's bad. Well, the nice thing about Markdown and HTML is that Markdown renders to HTML. And you can also take HTML, parse it, and output Markdown. And so going from a.bike file, which is an HTML file,

if you wanted Markdown out of that, well, you're a programmer. You know, write a little utility that puts it back into Markdown. And maybe there's an extension. Because like you said, Jesse, you're building a lot of these things as extensible. It seems like the things that you like are focused, plain text, and extendable. And what's interesting is Task Paper kind of has an outliner in it. It's very much an outliner, but with plain text. Right. It's like a to-do list, but your to-dos are often outlined. Like do this, and then these three things and then go back and so that makes me wonder why bike in the

first place why pull the outliner out or why start fresh with just an outliner which seems like it's less capable than your existing product which people already like and are buying the stuff yep because i would test paper i think the first release was 2007. And you know, I haven't been working on it full time, every day since then. But it's gone through three major releases where the sort of the foundation changed. But it's still test paper is a plain text file format, which is parsed into a model. And then that's what the editor edits. And so the file format is essential to the app. You don't want to change that.

And so, for example, one feature that people want is to be able to bold text. And so the answer to that would be to add markdown style formatting, right? And want to you know hide links behind 10 but with the other product that i'd done folding text did all that stuff but i really it was a i did not like the end result gotcha and so if i wanted to push task paper forward i would start having to change some fundamental things if i wanted those things to be rich text. And also with bike, I really want one thing we haven't talked about. It's very, it's performant, but it's also very animated. And like I say, fluid editing, which means that everything is very smoothly animated. And that requires that I write my own text editor. And that all of a sudden requires that i break up you know it would be

sort of impossible to turn task paper into what i wanted to explore with bike without also alienating and breaking task paper in fundamental ways gotcha yeah yep you got some foundation there that you just cannot avoid if you want to explore new ideas essentially so that basic question then who when you think about bike and where you wanted to go with ideas essentially so that basic question then who when you think about bike and where you wanted to go with it where did you begin was it a tool you wanted or was it a tool that the users of task paper said well i really want this and task paper couldn't be that for them because they thought it could be but it wasn't like how did you begin to even think about what bike could be how do you design design software? Well, when I was, let's see.

So I talked about this big Rust text editor that I worked on. And I had some of these animation, basically the performance part of the text editor and the smooth animation part of the text editor was from that project. But it was not an outliner. It was more a text editor. And so I had that that I'd been working on for quite a while, but I could see it all of a sudden as I was moving away from plain

text in my mind, thinking it's not carrying its weight for where I want to go. I was trying to look back through all my other project ideas and stuff and say, all right, what am I going to do with all this? And so the Adam text editor, a while back, like, I don't know when it was 2014 or something, I made sort of a test outliner in there that was very animated, was quite structured, meaning it was a traditional outliner in that it had sell. Well, let's see. I'm trying to remember what it was exactly. But what it was is I liked it a lot.

It was 2014, so. Yeah, I liked it a lot. But when I sort of said, hey, everybody, look at this, I got a whole bunch of negative reaction from Task Paper users saying, it's too structured. Task Paper is an outliner, but there's no rules. You can indent as much as you want unindent as much as you want the structure is derived from the text instead of the text being

locked into the structure and this other animated one was not that but i still like the way it felt a lot but anyway i stopped working on that since everybody said they didn't like it. But bike is that idea. It's got all the fluid animation of that project, but it also has the complete flexibility of tax paper where you're not tied into the outline structure. Yeah, the movie you have on the bike landing page does do what you're talking about justice. So listeners in the show notes, we're going to link out to the landing page does do what you're talking about justice so listeners in the show notes we're going to link out to the landing page the movie just take a minute pause even and go watch it you'll catch up essentially visually how fluid and animated this thing is it seems very fast

based on the movie i'm assuming you're just recording your screen ensuring a version of that out it's not like taking it to After Effects or something else to make it cooler than it actually is, right? No, I'm not that fancy. Just a screencast. Right, it's the real thing. It's the real thing. This is Coca-Cola as a movie for an application you can use.

So it's super fluid, it's super fast, and you can see how it works. Indenting, outdenting, very, very fast and very animated. Yeah, it kind of makes it fun to do. I'm just over here, you know, indenting, outdenting as we talk. What strikes me about bike at first was kind of like, you're talking about it being more fluid and less rigid. And yet, because it's like actually an outliner for a while, I've only been using it for a few days,

but for a while I thought, I got to put outlines in this thing, you know? And the way that I kind of scratch paper my thoughts, which really this is, as you said, a tool for thought outlines very much that right is you want to be able to think and move around and, you know, dive in, dive out, et cetera, is I just have a bunch of random crap a lot of times i call like a scratch sheet you know scratch.md is usually what where it lives and i have outlines in there but it's not all one big outline it's not like i have this big organized thing it's just like i got some outlines and then i got some words right yeah my my files are definitely full of crap yeah well it's interesting because as we've been going i've been realizing actually you know you don't need to outline everything jared just throw some crap in there and it works just fine like it's it is a lot more freeing now that you've kind of given me permission to just write at the top level every time because when i see the the over arrow like you know top of an outline it's got the sideways triangle i think like okay i gotta put a bullet point here but uh bike doesn't require that it's just me that was thinking that

i did you just treat it like a piece of paper and then start indenting when you want to so that's nice and are you using the focus commands you have to get comfortable with those no i'm not teach me help me so what is it option command right arrow maybe oh yeah oh i just did it and so that's how you you focus on an item so basically my file i just uh and that's where the nice you get an you slide in and it hides everything else and that's how i use my file oh wow is you know you just if you have a random idea you start typing it and you get everything else out of the way and then it's there yeah so that's cool so thank you for teaching me that what makes that interesting is it's like it's there. Yeah, so that's cool. So thank you for teaching me that. What makes that interesting is it's like lists within lists.

It's almost like an application that's much more rich, maybe even Notion level where you sort of have a page and a whole different idea. It lets you have the same feeling without the complexity. Yeah, like you leave this section and now I'm in this subsection. And I think all those apps are inspired by outliners. the complexity yeah like you leave this section and now i'm in this subsection and i think you know all those apps are inspired by outliners they're like the next thing and i i think that's good there's i you know there's a you know there's all those tools log sequence or something and then

there's some i can't remember the name of anything i have a horrible memory but all these tools for thought thought that are being talked about now are outliners plus and this is a native small little outliner just and but also i i hope to add you know right now it's extensible through apple script on the outside. I also hope to add a plugin system on the inside so you'll be able to do things a little bit more like Notion or these other tools. But my thought is that the outline editor will stay very much as it is, but then maybe you can have another view where you parse out and re-represent

the data in some other form. So maybe you have context that I don't know that actually anybody wants to store that in their outline, but you could store that in your outline structure just like text edit, but then you have it nicely formatted with little rounded corners and another

view, sort of very much like how Markdown has text text and then you generate a view this would be structure and then you generate a view anyway that's far ahead but that's sort of yeah where i'm thinking of going that's interesting you know one thing that's missing maybe it's there and i haven't seen it yet if you just added check boxes you know then you uh then you just give it of task paper altogether, right? Because that's pretty much what this is. I mean, I don't want to limit task paper.

It's got a lot of features. But my point is like, if I can just mark it off as done, now I've got a to-do app, right? Yep. And so, you know, I'm sure they'll get in there eventually. But you've got to release this thing. So now you've just rewritten task paper under a different name. You know, good marketing. You say you're not good at marketing that's a good marketing right there

because you can sell bike as its own thing you can start fresh yeah switch the foundation well not many people are buying tasks i'm no good at charging for upgrades so ah task paper last thing i charged for was 2016 and i uh this time i'm doing a different pricing model which is exciting to me because upgrades are always very painful to you i think i've only you know i've done some from 2004 and i think i've charged maybe three upgrades ever because it's just such a headache of trying to decide all right what's going to be in the 2.0 release that I can finally charge an upgrade for, et cetera. And so bike is doing subscription on the app store, which I don't really think that's, you know, I wouldn't want to buy subscription, but that's the way things work nicely on the

app store. But on my website, it's doing the model where you buy it, you get free updates for a year. What you have continues to work forever. But if you want to get another year of updates, you pay some, it might be 70% or 50% of the price to get the next year's updates. And so that's really freeing when I think about it is now all I need to do is generate value, and I hopefully will continue to get customers without having to figure out all that other stuff of how to charge them. Would that change things for you with something like Rightroom, though, where I don't want to go back to it necessarily,

but that you feel like you can't really add things to it? And then I guess the flip side of that would be with Task Paper, I noticed that in the footer you have – you can buy it in the Mac App Store obviously and then also through Setapp. And for those who may know Setapp, it's like a marketplace of many apps where the user, me, pays one price. I believe it's monthly. I forget what the subscription exactly is, but it's based based on i believe you get paid on essentially metering yeah how often do i use your app and then they take my monthly and then give you a portion of that i'm just curious if you could speak to like you know that aspect like does set app make it easier for you to to get paid as an app developer i mean all these things it's hard to know because, like,

if I put directed all my traffic to Setapp, then it would probably be different than how I have it now, which is I have it at the bottom of the page. But Setapp does generate some money for me, definitely, but not, I don't know, $500 a month I think I get. So it's nice but it's not the final answer for me i wouldn't want to direct all my traffic to them just because i don't you know who knows what happens you it's a it's a they're right i've had a great experience

with them but yeah you don't want to do that right and so i'm trying to sell from my website where i can get the most percent of what i'm selling. Right. You want to be indie. Obviously, you're an indie Mac developer from the get. So you want to have control. You want to have ownership and say, and then giving that to set up whether they're great or not kind of ejects you from that process. You know, I'm curious, like in that world, like, could you swap task paper out? So like to Jared's note, if you add check boxes here soon and you pretty much create task paper within a bike, can you easily swap out task paper on set up and, you know,

rinse and repeat or whatever, and just kind of keep, is that even possible? How much friction is in the process of like, since we're talking about selling and making money? Yeah. I think that adding checkboxes to bike still would not make it task paper. Sure. Or adding, you know, a lot of people use task paper

for the plain text aspect. And that's the big thing I don't want to support. But from an end user's perspective, it kind of depends, right? But for the people who are hacking away at task paper, I don't see bike as really a direct replacement it's a very similar idea but it's a different thing but um i would say that from setup would be happy if i add bike and i may in a couple months i don't really know they also are i can remove task paper right away. There's no like super long-term agreement. I think, I'm not sure about that,

but they're happy to have it in or happy to have both apps in or happy to have it removed. I think they're very nice. I'm happy with them. Yeah. So they're flexible. Yeah, yeah.

Which is good for, I guess you, it's gotta be a challenge for them because if part of their lure to users would be, well, we have task paper. Well, we don't have task paper. Sorry about that. It's like not so much a bait and switch necessarily, but it's like, well, we thought you did. And you've got old screenshots that say you do. And now you don't because the fluidity of the relationship is good, but challenging to retain.

Yeah. And I haven't paid super. It's very possible that maybe there's some agreement that you have to have it in for a year or something. I don't, you know, I'm happy to have it in for however long. So I haven't looked into that very much. This episode is brought to you by Century. Build better software faster, diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of your code. More than a million developers in 68,000 organizations already use Sentry, and that includes us.

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you'd like to build. Don't love marketing. Don't think that you're very good at that end of it. That's a common sentiment, I think amongst devs, indie devs as well. We've seen stories of like the iOS store, you know, you your lauren brichters and you have your flappy bird people who like blow up but we know that like on ios it's really tough to make a living as an indie dev even as a small company unless you're in games or unless you get lucky or hit a home run you can do it but it's not easy i wonder if that's the same on the mac side i wonder how your career has gone as a new developer. Just give us the lay of the land.

What's it like to be a Mac dev? So again, I started maybe like 2002, I started messing with it because I knew I wanted to sell Shareware is what I thought it was and was also still working a full-time job and then moved to Maine in 2004. That's where I'm from.

And so my wife and I moved back and she went to the university here for an extra thing. And I said, all right, this is Maine's cheap. Let's see if I can do full-time shareware stuff. And from like 2004 until maybe 2012, every year was up a bit or a lot. And for a couple of years, I hired some other people. I'm also not much of a manager or a marketer. And it all sort of, it all went up, up, up. And then all of a sudden, I don't remember the exact, maybe 2012 or 13, it went down, down, down. And it turned into just me again, because there wasn't enough money. And then it kept on going down, down, down. And it's sort of 2016. This is all the dates are there within five years.

Sure. they're within five years sure yeah but anyway up up up down down down and then just sort of low holding pattern i could definitely make more if i was working as a programmer for a company but gosh it's painful for me to do that because i am really interested in exploring my own ideas and i have done some contracting. And now this is sort of the first, I'm not a very, like I say, I'm not very good at business or marketing or whatever. But, you know, I haven't released a new big app since 2016.

I just sort of do little updates to task paper. And so that might be part of it, right that might be doing yeah so you know i try but it's hard to i'm more interested in exploring the idea and trying to get something and when you have a product that in the end you fall out of love with it's tricky so with bike the launch i sort of looking back at history it's been been good, similar to what I had when things were going well. And now that I have a solution where I don't have to plan upgrades ahead and do all that, I'm hopeful that I can keep going. And since I kept going without a product that was new, things should be good, right? There you go.

My wife works, you know, We have our house paid for. Good. We have expenses that aren't too big. So when you go to purchase bike, it's sold on your site. It's not through the Mac App Store. Although it's both, but yes. Oh, is it? Okay.

I didn't see that it was. It's there, but he promotes his own because I'm sure you get the bigger cut and you get the better model that way, right? Yes. Does that mean then the Mac App Store follows where you have multiple versions on the Mac App Store and you don't put a new version there until, I guess, the year of free updates is over or something like that? The question I'm trying to get to and the point I'm trying to make, just for the listener's sake, is that the license, when you purchase it, it says it's for one year of free updates. After one year, the bike will continue to work, but you must renew your license at a discount in parentheses for future updates.

So you're paying roughly $30 for a year of, it's essentially yearly based upon that. A year of updates, but you get that software as it works forever. Right. You get that version of it for, you know, perpetuity. But, you know,

if you want the new stuff as it comes out beyond the year, you got to pay once a year. Probably $30 or a version of, you know,

maybe a discounted version of that. 50 to 70%. Yeah. Yeah. And so, on the Mac App Store, you can't do that sort of model, at least I don't know how.

But, so that's why on the Mac App Store, you can't do that sort of model. At least I don't know how. But so that's why on the Mac App Store, it's just a subscription model, a monthly or yearly subscription. And I'm not super comfortable with that model. But as a buyer, that's why I'm generally pushing my website one. But I think it's the best answer. Is it the same price or do you have to price things differently? I should. I mean, I don't know. You know, I'm sort of making it up.

I looked around at what some other apps were charging and I read some long time ago that it's better if you charge more than less. And so on the Mac App Store, it's $2.99 maybe a month or $19 a year. And so my thinking is that, well, if you're just doing it a month, you're just trying it out. So you try it out for three bucks and decide if you want it. And then $20 a year, I figured it should be less than when you buy it from my website. Right. So you don't actually take 30 divided by 12 necessarily, or you kind of do almost. Yeah, the monthly one's different,

but the yearly one is two-thirds. Gotcha. I see. So it says, even when you go, I mean, we're in the details here, but we're just curious on how the, you know, when you're a developer, you obsess over the experience of your users you know and when you have to when the hurdle is where do i buy it from and how do i buy it okay do i love the software can i try the software like all these steps in between you and the user actually enjoying all your toil all your work

and how you even maintain the indie aspect of your life, solo developer, you know, that's how you like it. Like these are the hurdles you have to deal with. And that's why we're sort of in the details of this. Cause like, even when I go to the app store, the thing I'm presented with, if that's my way, I like to buy software on a Mac, which is probably pretty common, right? That's why people buy Macs. They have the store and you can go there and there's security or whatever the reasons are they go there. I'm presented with not a price, but the button that says get. And then next to it, it says in-app purchases. So I don't even know how much it costs. So I might get into it and be like, what is this monthly crap? You know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I, I i i feel yeah the subscription stuff but one thing about

bike is it's fully functional without getting a license on either place fully functional that's not quite right it's you can use it to load save edit there's just some preference settings that aren't enabled and you can't use apple script with it, but everything else works. And so it's not a crippled app in the sense that it doesn't function until you buy something. You can try it and use it as long as you want. And then if you decide, okay, I want to script this thing. I don't know how many people decide that. But then, okay, you need a license. Or I want to change the colors.

Arbitrary little things, but if you're going to use it all day, every day, you might want those things. Then that's when you have to buy the colors arbitrary little things but if you're going to use it ever all day every day you might want those things then that's when you have to buy the license so it's not a crippled thing that you have to pay for it it's a free thing but if you want to do certain things you got to pay for it you could potentially go i'm pulling up sublime text a lot in this conversation just because they have some good ideas you know they did the deal where it was like shameware, where you could just use it in perpetuity, but every 50th save or something like that. It'd be like, hey, you're using this app a lot.

You want to buy it? Or whatever they said. That seems like another way of just nudging people, but not like, don't cripple it. Don't make it unusable, but just remind them, you're using this. It's not a free app. It's a paid app you're using it you don't have a license yet you know just a little bit of shade where maybe just throw some shade at them yeah and that's pretty much what bike does if you open it because i looked at

sublime text and actually bike on its thing if you haven't licensed it it shows a little unlicensed button in the top corner unlicensedensed in the corner. I noticed that. You don't notice it now though, right? But I mean, like you did, right? I'm still on trial. Yeah. I just got it the other day. And so I decided to do that instead of showing up the dialogue on save

every once in a while, just because I thought, but I very much copied that idea from Sublime Text. It makes you wonder though, the choices an indie Mac app developer has to make. Like you said, Jared, you've got your games and different things that have success on iOS. I just wonder if Apple has put in the thought

to design the system to work well for indie Mac app devs. It doesn't seem like it is. You don't have a lot of choice. I think it's designed to work well for Apple and hopefully on everybody else. And I think they've made steps slowly in that direction. I'm sure Jesse can speak to this because he lives there, whereas we just observe.

But I'm sure there's things, even you, you don't want to do a subscription. You'd rather apply the model that you prefer in the Mac App Store, I would assume, versus the subscription model. But that's just like the choice you have. Yep. And it's definitely, I don't know, there's a lot of people who know a lot more and have opinions on the Mac App Store than I do. I would say that for me, the two things I really hate about it is getting my darn app approved, for example with bike i submitted it you submitted

ahead of time they review it they say okay you're good and then to do something like change a screenshot you need to go through the process again but since it was already approved i'm like i'm good and then a couple days before i changed the screenshot and then whichever reviewer saw it next gave me like a list of i think it was only two but it felt like 10 it was like this doesn't working this ever and i was like ah and so that kind of thing is frustrating i can see if i was them i can see why they made a lot of these decisions and not necessarily just to benefit them. But just it's I don't necessarily think it's all just Apple trying to be good for Apple. It's a it's a weird, hard situation, but parts of it can be very frustrating.

I can assure you of that. What would you change about it? Well, that's that's the problem where I don't have a good answer and i'm not really tuned you know like i said there's a lot of people who have opinions about it i use it but really thinking about the mac app store is very low on my list of things that i do i sort of am interested in my app and then i'm like all right let's see if i can shove it through and get it onto the mac app store and yeah the changing part you, I really don't know. I wish they would support a different pricing model that would, this automatic pricing model. There's a lot of apps that do it now.

And I think it's really fair to the user and fair to the developer. And I also think it can make better software because the developer is not always having to scheme how can I get people to pay an upgrade. It's just how can I scheme to make my software better over time? So I would love it if they would support that model, but that's my only thing that I'm sure would be pretty nice. It's a shame, though, because, like, obviously, the purchase is, you know, very much part of the relationship.

And that's, like, in any Mac app, Dev is going to rely upon the relationship between them and the end user. Like it's the software, sure, of course, but there's a relationship there. And you just said you don't like to do it. And, you know, so if you don't like to do it, then you're not going to get necessarily as many sales as you could or help as many people enjoy your software. And so I feel like if there's just a bit more work to, like,

make someone like you not so much love it, like it more than you do currently right you know one it would benefit the mac platform and that would benefit you and would benefit apple financially as well if they would just listen more so like i'm sure there's somebody in apple that listens to this their developer there's somebody listening like if you could give some advice on that note, what could they change? Yeah. I guess listen more, care about indie Mac app devs. I don't know, enable more relationship.

I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I really don't have too much opinion. I will say, I said the thing that i hate is when you go through the apple review process well if you'd asked me a couple years ago i would have said that and i would have said what do they even call it you know getting the encryption right on your app was always a nightmare process and would always break and well that works now for me i'm

sure every once in a while it breaks, but they sort of automated some things. So they are listening somewhat. Another thing recently they did, and actually a reason why I'm doing subscription is because previously they would only pay you 70% of profit with, if you do a subscription, you get 85%. So that's another nice thing that I am happy about.

Oh, right up front. Uh, I have no idea. Yeah, I don't I don't I don't get that detailed. I know there was a rule change when they went from 30. They went from 30 to 15. But yeah, they have a year. So it's like the second year.

Oh, yeah. No, I think I think now it's up front, especially for somebody, an indie developer i think i'm under some program i make less than a million a year and so i think i'm gotcha under something so what percentage of sales for bike i know it's early days but what percentage would you say the mac app store is compared to direct is it 10 30 two percent i don't know it's very low two percent so like then it's kind of like well why do i even worry about this thing you know right so that's kind of that's kind of the position you're taking if it was 40 now i gotta think more about the mac app store right but it's less of a factor

yep and i'm sort of i'm very surprised i guess the thing is is that all the traffic i had a couple of like the whole launch process i I'm not an expert at the launch process. I got lucky and hacker news liked me. And the same day I did product hunt, which I thought before I'd had traction there, like five years ago before and product hunt, nobody cared. And it drove like hardly anything. And so just complete luck. Um, anyway, all that traffic went to my website and then I have a mailing Anyway, all that traffic went to my website and then I have a mailing list and all that traffic went to my website. So that's what generated all the sales outside the Mac app store in the Mac app store. I'm still sort of mystified

that it's not getting, it's featured on their discover page, which is really nice. And I'm happy about what it is, but it's like, like i don't know maybe had a thousand downloads or something like that total which that's kind of embarrassing for them honestly like you're featured on the mac app store and you got a thousand downloads yeah i don't know i mean is anybody using the mac app store and maybe just no one uses it and that's not sales either that's just downloads right so that is not good what about the one thing i always see a lot of in the mac community which i appreciate is like there's a very passionate blogosphere if i still call it that there's a lot of people who are covering the blogosphere yeah yeah the blogosphere in the mac world is nice like there's a lot of

like productivity people you know mac rumors rumors etc uh i more which i think covers more than just mac but you know gadget people did you go out and reach out to reviewers you know you got the jason snells of the world and say hey sx colors yeah i got my memory is terrible and i've had a whole fire hose of email and stuff, so I can't remember the exact ones that reviewed, but Byte did get reviewed. Sometimes, you know, a short little just reposting, it's here. And like I remember Max Stories did a nice review. Sure. Sort of, you know, more in-depth than the pluses and the minuses.

I remember that one in particular. There was lots of other blog posts kind of things, but I don't want to start listing because I'll then forget. But I have a list in task paper of people who I contacted 10 years ago, and so I try to send out those emails again. Many of them still work. That's good. You said embarrassing, Jared.

I think that's embarrassing too like the two percent of his audience is going through the mac app store like yeah and let me say two percent is completely made up but it's roughly yeah i mean let's it's a good arbitrary number it's anecdotal of course but like yeah i mean it's like a single digits yeah percentage wise i wouldn't worry about two percent no. I wouldn't optimize for 2%. Right. So there's no encouragement. The point I'm trying to make is less about dwelling on the number

and more like you have no incentive to optimize for the Mac App Store on arguably the best computing platform for consumers. That boggles my mind. Right. Let me give another perspective on that. Though that task paper, for example, that does about 50, 50%. So right now things are skewed pretty high

by the fact that I got a lot of traffic sent to my website. You just launched. Right. Okay. So maybe over time, maybe a year from now, it's a better number. Right.

Because I mean, why do you want to be on the Mac App Store? It's because of Discover, right? Right. Unless you don't want to do any of your own payments, which clearly you've already done all that work. Like that's what it saves you, I think, is like, I don't want to do my own payments and I don't want to do my own marketing, quote unquote. And so I want to be on the Mac App Store for discovery. So all those Mac users can just find me and Apple can handle that. And Apple can handle the customer relationship with the payments. And if neither one of those things are doing it for you, it's just not even worth it.

Now, I think we should withhold some judgment because you just launched. You got a whole bunch of direct downloads and purchases. And maybe over time, that discovery engine churns and churns inside the App Store, and it moves up. But man, I mean, after a year, I'd be surprised if it's 15%. I mean, it's sitting at 2%. Come on, Apple. Well, since you mentioned 50-50 for Task Paper, how then is the business model different?

I see that when I go and search for Task Paper, it's $24.99 to purchase through the Mac App Store. I'm assuming that's... Oh, flat price versus subscription. Right. Right. And so that very much might be a part of it is that it's a bike is selling for subscription.

But even the download numbers, like I said, are somewhat... I mean, I don't know what good numbers are. You know, I have no window into what real apps do. But 1,000 for the launch week is what i'm getting yeah but and task paper you know things definitely are skewed by the fact that i got a huge amount of traffic of people who already know about me and want to buy outside the app store so we'll see so one thing i wanted to touch on with you which probably should have been done earlier but here we are

and i still want to ask is that you've been very supportive of open formats, of extensibility, of letting people extend and play with your software and export and share. And I'm curious if you've ever considered going full open source, considering that most of your purchasers are not going to be compiling and running it. I don't think there's a huge business downside for you on an open source maybe even on your older apps you're not working on anymore have you thought about doing that maybe it gets a community built around that side too

i mean i definitely have thought wow that would be neat but i don't really dare like it's kind of the thing where bike for example would i want to open source it oh i i have all kinds of visions of you know i've got this nice outlining text component that could be plugged into all kinds of more specific scenarios i would like to do that but i can't really risk it in the case that uh if somebody more energetic than me all of a sudden has a program that does everything mine does i become less interesting really quick and so that's where i am right now too risky not so much on people not buying it like compiling it themselves but on people putting it in their indie mac apps right right yeah i don't you know the buying aspect and i have in the past did i do do shared? I don't know. I feel like I've shared source code with users sometimes for, you know, but it's like the 1% of the 1% who actually want to change the app.

I'm not real strict about that. I have, I'm very make it up as I go with all that kind of stuff. But just as far as making it open source completely. Yeah, I don't know. what about right room or task paper like these are you're done right maybe um but again they're sort of they're generating money i a little bit makes a big difference sure and i still i mean well not with task paper with right room i have visions of a new one that does have some more features, but, you know, that's still way down the road, and maybe it will never happen. Yeah.

If you open sourced it, it might remove your ability to make those future possibilities possible. Yeah. Right. And probably Right Room's, you know, it's a very simple app that has a thousand clones. It itself was, you know, I didn't invent the idea of a full screen writing thing. I sort of invented the idea of a small one that only did that. You know, there's other apps that were doing it before. So probably its biggest feature is the fact that it's called Lightroom and it had its day in the sun.

If I was going to make a new one, I wouldn't want the source code to this old one. I would just start with something. It's a simple enough app. I would start on my own anyway. You'd keep calling it Right Room? Same name? Oh, if I was going to make a new one, yeah, I probably would. Just because that's what people like.

Name brand. Yeah, something. So since you said to Right Room how it sort of got to a place where if you add a more to it, it kind of, I think I'm paraphrasing what you said, but it kind of went against its virtues or however you described it. Let me say, it's Right Room 3, which is the current one. I did add, but when I look back, everything that I added, I wish I could take away. And so... You should release Right Room 4, but it's actually just Right Room 1. Right, exactly. I could see myself doing that.

Yeah. Many people would be mad. But you'd be happy. Would you consider iWriter a competitor to Right Room? Which came before? I don't recall the history. Right Room came first, but I don't recall the history. Right. Room came first,

but I do not compete with them. I think I'm a small little bug on windshield and comparison. Yeah. I mean that, you know, uh, I have very few sales and I write room. I'm just sort of keeping it at as is.

It doesn't even like apple right after i made version three they cut a technology that it's based on so i have to rewrite it anyway like it was garbage collected objective c which you know probably if you're a smart person it would take you a week to fix it all but i'm less smart so it would take me a month and it's just sort of why bother i was going to ask you your opinion on on iwriter like if you since you have strong opinions about you know a simple interface like that do you agree with the direction they've taken i read because this started out pretty simple too very similar right not so much the same but similar simplistic virtues virtues as Rightroom. And obviously it's gone to iOS and beyond the Mac and

iCloud and tagging and folders and all sorts of stuff. I mean, I think it's well done, definitely. And I even use it sometimes. It's one of those things where I I tried it out for a while like you and then I don't use it, but I have stuff in it. So I want to go back and look at it. I do very much have this feeling of really liking 1.0 apps. And then like if you launch the old version compared to whatever the current version is, you're like, ah, that was nice. And again, I'm not super familiar with what they're doing now, but I think they have a file side thing, and I dislike that, although that's the only reason why I have it anymore, right, is because I have files in it. So it makes sense of that. It's less to talk crap about somebody, but more like this.

I'm talking about, I'm thinking the reason why I asked your opinion was less to say, what do you do and don't like about them and like bad mouth them or even praise them necessarily. But more of this idea, because you said I have to add value, right. To kind of get new sales, to get you to, you know, give me another years of your money. I have to keep adding value. And you start from a simple place, but yet to add that value, you have to add complexity because, I mean, features come and they add complexity and things like that. And so you're almost forced just by way of making money because, I mean, you can't add users.

Maybe your total addressable market might not ever grow because it's a pretty simple app. The Mac is only so big in terms of user base, and there's only so many people who need write room, task paper, iWriter, bike. I mean, at some point, you're going to run out of an addressable market. It's just interesting how you take something very simple

that you love, like you said, version one, and you get to version four, five, or six, or whatever the number is, and you're like, you know, it's kind of bloated. It's kind of like I don't like this app anymore. And iWriter for me was very much like that. I still like the app. I still think it's amazing.

The team behind it is still amazing. It's a beautiful, well-done piece of work. Nothing wrong with it whatsoever. But the complexities just sort of drive me away, really. But I go back because I have things there. Yep. And I don back because I have things there, you know? Yep. And I don't have a good answer.

One idea that I fantasized with with bike is, like I said, I have this, the Cora outliner part is just a text editor. And that's pretty much the app right now. And I very much have been conscious of the fact that I always love my 1.0 apps. And then, you know, you got to fix bugs and then you got to support some features and you do that for a couple of years and all of a sudden it's not the 1.0 app anymore. And so one idea, and I do not know at all that I'll do this,

but it's sort of something I wonder about is to make other apps based on that that are using the same license. So, you know, right now your people are either paying a subscription or they're upgrading once a year how do i add value to that outliner without ruining the outliner and so one idea might be to make a bigger you know this is where it gets hard because each time you make a new app it's complex and you have to make a new name and all this stuff. But, for example, make an outliner that's dedicated to calendaring.

But since I'm just a one person show, it's still I can do it under the same license. And so you'll just you won't have to pay again. You'll be getting new features, but you won't be having the version ruined. And so with with bike i still have a lot of basic things to do that i do not think will bloat it but once i start pushing up to those features where i'm like uh that might be one approach i take i don't know at all if i will but i kind of like that idea one killer feature for document tools which adam mentioned earlier, that certainly bloats it technically, but doesn't have to bloat it in the UI necessarily, is collaboration.

And it seems like that's where a lot of things go, is collaboration. And to a certain extent, the web has made this really feasible and has kind of been a killer app for people. We just had Zach Lloyd on the show a couple weeks back, and he's building Warp, a modern futuristic terminal, and they want to bring collaboration to the terminal. He worked at Google on Google Docs for a long time. And just the fact that that shareable URL that you can just pass to somebody and then instantly be collaborating on a shared

document was so awesome with google docs that like we just didn't care that everything else kind of sucked for a long time and to this day i mean it's slow in the browser for me at least and i'm curious what your thoughts because you seem to be very counterculture in that way like you're very much like personal software for you on your mac store it on your documents folder um now i know apple has provided some stuff and they've started to you know i can share a note in notes app with my wife and we can both edit at the same time and apple's like bring in collab to native apps they've struggled to do that it doesn't always work i know there's some framework stuff but what are your thoughts on that Bring in collab to native apps. They've struggled to do that. It doesn't always work.

I know there's some framework stuff, but what are your thoughts on that as kind of like a big piece that is probably missing in the long run, but could potentially ruin the app if you don't do it very well? Yeah, so not my skillset. You know, to do collaboration right now, I would have to run a server

and it would vastly complicate the application i sort of i i did think about it ahead of time but for example my mobydick workout thing maybe google docs can handle it but with me i tried a number of these uh they do all the work for you frameworks for collaboration and it did not work and it bloated the memory you know from 50 megabytes to 500 or something like that and so it's slows it way down yeah i would have to focus on that you know i'm sure i could learn it but it would require you know a year of work and then i would have a server that i have to manage which maintain scale and so i just think it did you try apple stuff like cloud kit or

whatever it is that like their first party quote-unquote stuff no i i didn't and i i don't know very much about them i would say that for example hopefully i will get around to doing a bike for ios one and they do have a dropbox like icCloud and that together with bike documents are unique ID'd. So you could do some pretty intelligent merging. And so that would be how I handle that is just a file service and then merge on conflict. Big undertaking can definitely slow down the app i know my shared even in notes.app my shared notes tend to have little things where like the text disappears and then comes back or you know the cursor hangs where it didn't previously so once a note becomes quote-unquote shared you know inside notes app

which is apple's probably best you know crackpot team of programmers working on notes app uh even that gets slowed down and if you therefore you kind of lose what what makes bike bike right is the fluidity the animations the instant response and the locality of it all go out the wayside if you don't execute like perfectly and you got network problems which are never going to be perfect. Right. Yeah. I think it, I mean, it'd be interesting to know, I'm sure there's lots of one person companies that run a website app, but I think trying to do a native app and a website service that all syncs it too hard for me. I don't know. I was just thinking here as you were sharing that Jared and Jesse,

to your point that you said before, like this, since you're the holder of the license, you can create a brand new app. Maybe a future version of Bike might be called Buddy Bike. And the tagline for it isn't tool for thought. It's tool for thinking together. And so maybe the future version of bike could be buddy bike where you it's a collaborative version of bike and it's a whole separate app but bike stays bike yeah it's got a different tagline you can use either right and it's like hey you know what are the names of those multi-chair bikes where you can put like three people on them they're tandem

they're called tandem bikes tandem bike there you go I think the chance of it happening is very, very, very tiny. The collaboration, what I would like is, the other thing with these collaboration services is all of a sudden, the truth, I mean, I think there's different, but generally the truth is in the cloud and it's in some file format that is not, you know, your data is not an XML file on the disk. It's the sequence of instructions that you're sharing back and forth. Right. And so another thing that you get with bike, which you don't get, I think with most

collaborative services is hackability that like, you know, the people in my forums are interested in, all right, I got this bike file. How do I generate a website or mark down or extract something from it? And if all of a sudden the truth is on the web service, it's possible, again, by writing APIs and stuff. But it's different. It's not right there that you can touch. Sure, yeah. right there that you can touch sure yeah those kind of folks in your forum that want a script like what's the how big are they in comparison to like the addressable market for bike like do they

the one percenters the two percenters that want to script and do unique things like that or is it a majority or a small minority i have i have no idea i i don't know how i would research that because it's new right you don't know yeah I would research that. Because it's new, right? You don't know yet. For me, they're probably the 10 percenters of people who comment in my forums. But how many people comment in my forums, I have no idea compared to the actual people using it. Is that who you're making Bike for? Those kind of people who want to script and do unique things with? Yeah.

Because this is a simple outlining tool, and at some point the tool doesn't do more than it could because it's just an outline right so you eventually want to take this thing and do something else with it yeah i'm trying to one create something for myself that is visually and behaviorally very elegant and what i'm trying to create and then i'm trying to answer questions in the forms from people. And often the best way to answer it is, so I'm trying to meet them where they are. And so those are the two main factors sort of. Gotcha. I'm not very good at thinking about whoever the, an everyday Mac app store user who downloads it and what their experience is going to be like.

I, I hope I cover most of that under what I want the tool to be, the simple tool that just works. But I never talk to them. I don't really know what they want. We've asked you a lot of questions. We've gone deep into the business side of things, how you think about software, why you keep your team very small, which is one person, how you actually make it sustainable.

You know, I guess we've sort of grokked to some degree through the tea leaves, whether you like it or not, because you keep doing it. We haven't asked you directly if you like it or not. It seems so. I do. You're sadistic because you keep going. But we haven't asked you, what have we not asked you that you can share?

Like, is there anything else that you're on your mind you want to share before we tell the show? I wish there was, but I don't think so. I guess try bike maybe? Yeah, try bike. He's not good at the marketing part. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sunday, Sunday, try bike. I got one last topic.

This will be real fast. Okay. One of the things that's great about Mac apps are the cool icons. And you have a very cool Mac app icon for bike. It's bright yellow. It's a silhouette of a head with a bicycle in the head. And you said you're visual and you like art and stuff. I'm wondering,

did you make this yourself? Did you contract it? Tell us the story. Cause that's a lot of what the branding and what the feel of an app is is like when i when i command tab over and i hit bike like that has to have a certain look and feel i think it's a pretty cool icon as uh let's see i bought two pieces of clip art and then i jammed them and i actually i i think i it's in the well played yeah, I think I actually traced over them, you know, they weren't quite right. So I had to maybe redraw them, but using the two pieces of clip art as the template. And so, but that's people take pity on me and submit better ones.

Although this one, I think I like it as well. I did intentionally try to make it flatter. It looks different than a normal Mac icon. I'm trying to harken back maybe to make it a little bit old-fashioned looking. Vintage. Yeah, vintage. That's what I'm looking for. Yeah.

I think it's cool. It definitely stands out in my list of apps. I think Mac apps have gotten less and less interesting as Apple has in their guidelines made them very kind of uniform. Even Apple's own apps have gotten more and more uniform over the years to where you're kind of like, is that the Slack app or is that the Photos app? I don't know. They're both like the same shape and have similar colors. Yours stands out, man. On iOS, I would often click on my Photos app versus Slack.

It happens all the time. They're near identical. That and like Google Maps. Google Maps, Photos, and Slack are pretty similar. It's like, am I going somewhere? Am I talking to somebody? Am I looking at my photos? What am I doing here?

Gosh. What am I trying to do? Yeah. Well, the old smash the clip arts together, that's both good work and the frugal way of doing it. You really are a solo show. You just do it all. Yep.

That's how it works. Awesome. Well, Jesse, thanks very much for sitting down with us and sharing so much, being open with all that you're doing. And I think it's cool. You've got your niche. You've got your thing that you care about and that you love. And you're willing to make some money or make less money and just do that because that's what you're interested in. I think that's pretty cool.

Thank you. We'll put links in the show notes, everybody, to Get Bike. Check it out. Try it out. Watch the video at least. Pause the show back when I told you to pause it and go check it out. Links from the show notes. Jesse, appreciate you. Thank you for your time. Thank you. That's the end of the show. Thanks for tuning in.

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