I am a fan of the open web, and also a fan of people asking their audiences directly to pay to support content they find worthwhile. A List Apart announced yesterday that they are pulling away from their advertising-based funding model, which apparently was not working well for them anymore, toward a volunteering and patronage model, which will draw from the community that reads and loves the site. I think this reflects a trend that is starting to separate “the open web” (community-based sites) from the big commercial sites (Google and Facebook, mostly), based on funding models and even content types.

I learned so much from A List Apart over the years. As a publication, it means an awful lot to me and my professional career. I am somewhat sad to admit that I stopped reading it after I shifted away from its core topics, web design and development, and moved toward finance, data analytics, and audit. I am not longer part of its core audience or community, but I wholeheartedly wish them, and the site’s readers, writers, and editors, well.

There is news today that Apple’s next-generation iPhone—the rumored high-end one—is not only going to remove the physical home button (everyone has assumed that for a while), but it will also not replace it with an on-screen simulacrum (people like me have expected a circle icon to act as the home button). The plan, apparently, is to kill the home button entirely, and replace it with a dock of icons, like the iOS 11 betas have on the iPad. That is a bit surprising to me. Whether it is true or not, this news made me want to pause a minute and reflect on how brilliant Apple’s home button was.

Simplicity

As the one, single button on the front of the phone, it was the ultimate escape key. Can’t find an exit app button onscreen? Did an app hang? Does an app confuse you? Is the screen black for no reason? Just press the only physical button on the front of the phone and return to the home screen.

It sounds so simple and obvious, but no one else had anything quite like it. (OK, Samsung copied it soon afterward, but that barely counts.) Most Android phones came with “soft buttons”, onscreen buttons or tap-able areas below the screen. But there were more of them–remember back, home, menu, and search?–or they had weird, almost meaningless icons-square, circle, triangle-that you had to figure out.

Physical orientation

A side benefit of a physical home button was that you could feel it with your thumb, and always know which way you were holding the phone by touch alone. When it inevitably goes away, I will miss the familiar sensation of finding it when the phone is in my pocket, to orient my hand and to use as a pivot as I swing the phone around to use it.

Consistency

Over time, the home button was overloaded to do multitasking and Touch ID, but it always served its original purpose, and Apple never screwed it up, even with its non-moving, Taptic Engine-driven style in the iPhone 7. (That phone’s haptic feedback feels incredible.)

Obviously, Android’s early move from physical buttons to soft-buttons approach worked out all right, but, to me, Apple’s stalwart refusal to ditch the physical home button over many generations of iPhone reflected, in my opinion, a design ethic centered upon simplicity and humanism, which I really respected.

I’m not sorry to see (presumably) the home button go, but it was definitely one of the reasons I admired the design of the iPhone, and ditched my Android phone for one years ago.

I just spent $30 on an annual subscription to Ulysses, my favorite writing app (it is not quite a "text editor") on macOS and iOS. It was a relatively expensive macOS and iOS app for years, and I thought of it as the best buy I ever made on the platform, because I always bought it on steep discount the day it was released, and upgrades have been free ever since. As much as I love it, I have never used it enough, mostly because I spend time programming rather than writing. That may change now, however, because I am paying now a lot more for the privilege to use it. Overall, I decided it is worth my money to continually support the software I love. That said, the much higher cost of Ulysses and other apps I rely on probably means I will be trying and buying far fewer alternatives.

There is a limit on how much I want to pay each year, total, for software. I am not sure what that limit is, however. It is over $100, I guess, based on my spending history. But it's not that much higher than that—and I am a person who loves software. I will have to choose my apps with way more discipline and effort now that many will be an ongoing cost to me. I will be choosing just one text editor for $30 per year, rather than buying the top six of them for $5 apiece and maybe upgrading one or two of them to new versions, for another $5 apiece, after a couple of years.

I hope this arrangement will lead to better software, and more well-supported software, overall. It looks like it will have the side effect of reducing the number of apps on my home screen to an essential, more costly, more sophisticated few. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But it further raises the bar for new indie developers—those without venture backing—who are working on the next new thing.

Why did I start a blog in 2017, when nobody reads blogs anymore?

Simple: I want to own my content.

I want to write posts, and to have something that reflects myself and my work on the Internet. Plus, it’s nice when Google Searches for my name turn up something more interesting than my LinkedIn profile.

I care more about writing right now than reaching the largest audience. I’ve found from blogging in the past that people eventually find your best content; you just have to put it out there. So I’m not going to worry about social networking and search engine optimization. I’m just going to write.

Somewhat to my surprise, I have started coding a new text editor for iOS. I usually have no ideas for new apps. This month, however, I suddenly have ideas for a galaxy of related projects, all of which support the concepts I developed and wrote about several years ago in Plaintext Productivity.

My goal is to write an app that is very simple, configurable (by normal people, not JavaScript programmers), and rock solid, which will be useful for me for planning and tracking things at work. In some small way, I wonder if I am working on something that will end up like Drafts or Editorial, only specialized for people who don’t want to configure anything too much. Even if that’s the case, that’s not such a bad thing to create.

First posts are often hopeful paeans to blogging, and promises to post regularly. This isn’t such a post. This blog is a project, or small set of projects, and that is all. Like all things, this stream of thoughts will eventually run its course.

I was inspired to start a new blog by Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut, who discuss blogging and Apple programming on their excellent podcast “Core Intiution”. I hope to tie it to Micro.blog sometime soon, once that service launches.

So, here it is. There is more to come.