Ever play SimCity? It’s a fantastic city-building simulation. It teaches an incredible lesson about taxes. The experience is almost counterintuitive. By lowering taxes, you can actually make more money — and make the citizens much happier. You can’t drop it to zero, as the city still needs money for maintenance and future growth, so the trick is to hit the sweet spot. I believe that’s what Apple has announced today. Starting next year, Apple’s App Store commission rate (for small businesses) will drop from 30% to 15%. That’s huge!
Continue reading “Thanks Apple — A Response To The Small Business Program”
Ever see the Jetsons? George made sprockets. His competitor made cogs. Me, I make widgets. Fantasy has become reality, as my job is futuristic — but what is the future of the Widgets app? With the release of macOS 11… whew …it’s going to take a lot of work to figure that out. After playing with Apple’s WidgetKit and the default widgets, there are significant challenges to overcome.
That was brutal. The “Reminder” widget was supposed to be finished in a month. Unforeseen issues doubled the development time. But the result, I like it! A lot of work went into the little details. The challenge was plugging into Apple’s environment. It was worth the effort though, as the widget is quite powerful. It even works with Siri.
The progress on the Reminders widget is quite nice. As an example, the sorting is robust. By default, the reminders are sorted alphabetically and then by date. That way, the most important reminders rise to the top. Events can also be sorted by completion (checkmarks) and by category. There’s only one sort left — sorting by priority. There’s a problem here. It has to do with the numbers 0… 1… 5… and 9.
A “To-Do” list is a requested widget for the