outcoldman

App Store and CloudKit Public Database

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There are many discussions about the 30% fee Apple charges for the App Store. This fee is significant, and its benefits are not immediately clear. The complaints primarily come from large companies like Epic Games, Spotify, and Netflix, which have the resources to challenge Apple. However, what about indie developers? What do we receive in return for this 30% fee, and are we genuinely upset about it?

In practice, when I price my applications, I understand that charging $10 means I will receive $7. To obtain $10, I would need to set the price at $14. It’s as straightforward as that.

Vision Pro - Productivity

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

First 24 hours with Vision Pro. It feels like a generation 1 product. Similar to how I felt with Apple Watch or Macbook M1, when they just came out. A lot of small issues here and there, but overall very impressed with the potential.

Issue 1: Glare from very bright light on lens.

Watching movies or playing games on Vision Pro is very straightforward. The screen does not have a lot of white lights, so it does not reflect on the lens. However, the first time you try to open Apple Books or connect to your Mac, or open a website with a lot of white backgrounds, you will notice a glare. It took me a while to recognize that this is a glare, and not dirty lens. I have wiped the lens so many times, and it did not help.

Playing Diablo IV on macOS

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It is incredible. You can actually play AAA games on your Mac that require DirectX12. Diablo IV is one of them. I am able to play Diablo IV on my maxed-out MacBook Pro 16" 2023 with M2 Max 96Gb of RAM.

Don’t want to get credit on that, as I have found an almost working for me solution on r/macgaming.

Prerequisites

I am running the latest macOS 14 (Sonoma), but some people mentioned that it might work on macOS Ventura as well. You need to have an Apple Silicon Mac, as it will not work on Intel-based Macs.

Review of Macbook Pro 14 (M1 Max, 32GPU Cores, 64GB Memory) - Performance, Windows, Parallels and more

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have been using Macbook Pro with M1 since the release of the MBP 13" M1 in 2020. And I am huge fan of the new Apple CPU - M1. Time to time I need to do some work on my 2019 16" MBP with Intel Processor (all maxed out), so I keep experience the difference between using those two.

On MBP with M1 I can definitely see that the macOS works way more smooth. No more glitches or frozen screens for a few seconds, less heat, less time I hear the fans work. And a lot of work you can do on just single battery charge.

My apps were listed at the top of Developers Tools (iOS and Mac App Stores), I made around $60

Tue, 18 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I love building developer tools and utilities. And, I believe the reason is simple, because I am a developer, and those tools I make, I create first of all for myself. I worked for Microsoft before on Visual Studio.

I worked in Splunk on some work related to the developers (App Platform). I can say that I had some experience building developer tools by learning from large corporations.

For the last 3-4 years, I work for myself. Build a successful B2B company, and now I have the flexibility sometimes to explore other options.

ShellHistory - Full Text Search, Backup, Synchronize and Organize your shell history

Mon, 17 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am excited to show my new application, ShellHistory. I can say that I started working on it four years ago when I published my little shell script dbhist. That script was convenient. It kept shell history from many macs for the last years (close to 100,000 records). But it was a time for an upgrade.

Running multiple macOS side by side (no Flash Drive required)

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In the last three and a half months, I kept enjoying my MacBook Pro 13" M1, battery life, performance; everything is on the top level. But I also have an MBP 16 2019 that I have been using for development before. This Mac is a top-loaded MBP that I could buy at that time with the price of close to $5,000. I tried to sell it, but most folks are trying to lowball me to 2,000. The Apple Trade-In program is also willing to give me $1,750 for the laptop I bought a little over a year ago.

CloudAnalytics for AWS Amplify (Analyzing AWS Amplify Access logs. Part 3)

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote two parts about how you can analyze the Access Logs from AWS Amplify. And it was a time to write a third part of the series.

But after touching AWS QuickSight again (I use it for Outcold Solutions) I realized that I don’t want to go through configuring it. As it is purely drag and drop way of building dashboards, and I am not very happy with that. Another option was to use AWS SES with lambdas to run SQL over Athena and send reports as CSV or nicely formatted emails with AWS SES. But if you have ever built yourself an email template, you know that it is not an easy task as well. HTML is limited in emails, and you have to be very careful with what you use.

Printing personal bank checks at home

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Really short and simple life-hack.

Sometimes we have to pay for a few things with personal bank checks. Some banks charge you like $1 per one check, some banks give you 100 or 500 checks for free. And both options don’t really work for me. To get those checks, you have to go to the office or order them online and wait. Or if you get those 100-500 checks, I usually use only 5 of them before I move to a new place, and have to reorder and burn an old batch. What a waste!

Spotlight, Automator and Siri as a replacement for Alfred

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have been using Alfred for a long time. If you have not heard about Alfred, the short description is a Spotlight on steroids. It can do a lot, but you have to write your own Workflows or find if somebody already built it to use some of the really cool features. And I wrote some a long time ago, but to be honest, lately, I noticed that I don’t use it much, except to open applications and a few workflows. And the Spotlight improved significantly with the last few versions of MacOS. So I have decided to achieve almost anything I need with the Spotlight (Siri and Automator) instead of Alfred.