Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

So following the footsteps of TextExpander and Day One, the writing app Ulysses is now moving towards a subscription service.

I've wrote in the past about subscription services. I get why people and companies are doing it. Subscriptions provide a more stable revenue stream and allow consistent development of the product.

If I was a keen writer and I used Ulysses on a daily basis then I imagine that I would take out the Ulysses subscription. For just under $5 a month I'm getting a great writing tool that I can use on all my devices.

$5 isn't a lot of money, but when you're working on the Internet on a daily basis, it won't be the only subscription service you'll have. You'll have other subscriptions for other products and services that you use and these all add up. With all these subscriptions, they can quickly mount up.

I used TextExpander for a few years until they announced that they would be moving to a subscription plan for their users. Many seen as it as a good move for TextExpander to support the business and I agree with that. What I don't agree with though is the pricing. Paid monthly, TextExpander is only 83 cents cheaper than Ulysses. Two vastly different products, but very similar in pricing. Are they priced right? Who knows. All I know is that I refuse to pay a monthly subscription service for a product that I only use on a single device.

I'll be interested to hear what Curtis has to say on this. I know he's been a long time user of Ulysses but we emailed each other recently and he did say he was cutting back on subscriptions. Will he cut back on this? I'd like to say he'll stump out for the subscription, but I'm not entirely convinced.

Lastly I also just remembered that Ulysses is available on SetApp. It will be interesting to see if Ulysses remains on Setapp as it only costs $9.99 per month and for that you get access to an increasing number of apps for OS X as well as Ulysses.

Update 2017-08-10: It looks like SetApp user's don't need to worry as Ulysses will be unlocked on your other iOS devices if you have already picked Ulysses using SetApp. Good to know!

In addition to those “big” arguments from above, there are bunch of smaller advantages, too. One example: if you use Ulysses via the Setapp subscription, we will now automatically unlock the iOS app as well. And the way we modeled and priced our subscription plans, now much closer resembles the value each plan provides, than a “pay once” model ever could.

— Why we’re switching Ulysses to Subscription by Max Seelemann

Hello Ghost 1.0

It's been a long time coming, but it's finally here. A couple of weeks ago the first major update to the publishing platform Ghost was released.

I was on holiday at the time so I decided to leave upgrading until I got home. It's been a few days now since I got back but this morning I decided to upgrade the two sites I have running on Ghost, this one and my DigitalBothy website. The upgrade process itself was straight-forward. Warnings were provided to indicate deprecated helpers in the themes for each site, but aside from that I didn't have any trouble upgrading.

The new UI is a welcome change and includes a number of beneficial changes but perhaps the most important change is the editor itself. Gone is the side by side editing and preview panes (although you can still use this if you need to) and instead there's a single pane for writing that is editable and displays your writing in a better format. Bigger, bold text for headings, links highlighted and many other improvements.

This is a welcome update to the publishing platform and I look forward to spending more time writing for my blog than I have done recently.

The least loved great sportsman?

On a day where a Brit has won his fourth Tour de France, the focus seems to be more on Jordan Spieth's win at The Open. Why isn't Froome's success more of a talking point then?

There is no fluking a yellow jersey. Three weeks of physical attrition, of relentless mental calculations and stress, of staying ahead of a shifting mass of rivals ganging up to unseat you, of managing egos and efforts within your own team, of high mountains and cruel cross-winds.

And yet when Chris Froome won his third Tour last year, having run up Mont Ventoux in his cleats on his way to victory, he failed to even make the 16-strong shortlist for the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year.

— Tour de France 2017: Is Chris Froome Britain's least loved great sportsman? by Tom Fordyce for BBC Sport

I was a long time fan of cycling. Ever since I first seen Miguel Indurain capture his Tour wins, I was hooked. Every year I would watch the Tour. Then I started watching the Giro and the Vuelta too. I love watching the big cycling tours. It was the highlight of my sporting calendar. Only the Super Bowl rivalled it in terms of how much I looked forward to it.

Then there was the Armstrong period, and then after that a number of incidents involving other riders. That's when I started losing interest in the sport. Despite those many years of following it, I just couldn't watch it anymore.

I tried watching a stage of the Tour this year but I couldn't keep my focus on it.

I admire Froome's success, I can't help but think though that perhaps there are other factors in this. Is the UK is falling out of love with cycling? Do we have success fatigue with cycling? It's a terrible thought considering a British rider has achieved his fourth win of the Tour, but with all the recent success that Great Britain has had with cycling, perhaps it just doesn't have the same appeal it used to have.

Perhaps the Tour de France needs a change of format to make it more interesting? One thing that usually happens in the tour is that the winner of the yellow jersey holds onto the jersey for a number of days before the last stage of the race. The last stage of the tour is frequently a foregone conclusion. Does it need to be changed up a bit to make it more difficult for riders to hang onto the yellow jersey?

I don't know why Froome isn't getting more spotlight in the media for his success.

All I know is that my preferred sport to watch on the day is golf rather than cycling. So I settled down today to watch what I could of the golf and enjoyed every minute of it.

It's a tribal thing. I used to be part of the cycling tribe, but recently I started enjoying golf more. I still cycle every now and again but it just no longer has the pull that it had in the past.

Open source Medium

Dave Winer ponders on the possibility of an open source version of the popular blogging platform Medium.

What if Medium had been designed from the start to be the Mother Node of a network of clones. The basic software would be available for installing on your own server, but if you want, there's a place you can put your document today, now, quickly, where everyone will be able to read it, now and for the foreseeable future.

— What if Medium were open source by Dave Winder

This is the kind of thing that I can get behind. I like Medium's approach to easy publishing but I dislike the fact that everything is on their network.

Exploring alternatives to GitHub

I've been a user of GitHub for a long time now. Ever since I started my career in Ruby on Rails I've had a GitHub account.

I'm looking again at alternatives to GitHub mainly out of curiosity. There's been some improvements to GitHub over the last few years and new features are gradually coming out but there are other options out there.

I did move some private repos to BitBucket a few years ago, but due to the lack of any extra features I moved these repos back. BitBucket just didn't have anything of added value that would keep me using it.

I tried GitLab a few months ago but I didn't really give it a fair go. I spent a couple of weeks using but I didn't really dig into it too much. I created my account there again to give it a try. I've been using it now for a week and I've moved a number of private repos over from GitHub. The nice thing is that as well as my repo GitLab has moved over my issue list for each repo. Another thing I don't have to worry about moving it across.

It's still early days to make a final decision on this but I've been impressed with not only what GitLab does at the moment, but the pace in which they are releasing new features.

The best thing and worst thing about GitHub is its community size. A lot of developers use only GitHub for source code hosting and although some people might see this as a good thing, it's like saying that Facebook is the only social network platform out there. Yes, there are a lot of people using GitHub but there are alternatives to it and I'm always willing to explore the alternatives to any development tool that I use.

Once I've spent another few months using GitLab I'll probably have a final decision on where I'll be hosting the bulk of source code. I won't be closing down my GitHub account if I do decide to use GitLab for hosting my source code. I still need a GitHub account for client work, but that's all it will be used for.

Time to read

Just as it is important to set aside time to think, it is important to block out time for reading. If you believe that such time will be available later in the day, it is likely that you are mistaken.

— Reading Time by Michael Wade

I'm slowly getting back into a lot of things in the last couple of weeks. Blogging, writing and even reading. Churning through a few books at the moment, but plans are in place to make reading a bigger habit of mine in the future.

A sobering read about the future of the planet and what climate change effects could result in in a hundred years time.

Heat is just one of a number of problems we face in the future.

Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today.

— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

And the problem of pollution doesn't get any better

Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. In 2013, melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the natural ventilation systems it had come to depend on, which blanketed much of the country’s north in an unbreathable smog. Literally unbreathable. A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks and tops out at the 301-to-500 range, warning of “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and, for all others, “serious risk of respiratory effects”; at that level, “everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.”

— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

And finally there's the problem of the rising oceans.

Barring a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the world’s major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high. At least 600 million people live within ten meters of sea level today.

— The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

I've read about the recent attempts by scientists to create devices that trap and process carbon dioxide emissions but everything so far as been on a smaller scale. Reading this article on the NY mag website, I immediatley thought of the Aliens movie and the massive terraforming plant that features in that movie. Nevermind terraforming other planets, perhaps we'll have to terraform our own planet first in order to survive.