#iconfactory

[macmanx]

Tapestry is just $4,427 away from the stretch goal to add muting, muffling, and plugins for more feed types.

And, they intend to support [tumblr] at launch, so let’s make it happen!

[wellenklavier]

OS X Kraftwerk icons [get them from iconfactory here and here, thank you @120grad for those links]

[mitchipedia]

What if you had a universal app to access every social media platform in one screen?

I think I now get the point of what Iconfactory wants to build with the Tapestry project.

After work yesterday I laid down for a bit and did some scrolling on the phone. I checked Facebook, Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky—and I think I then suddenly got what Iconfactory is doing: One client for all those platforms and for RSS too. And Reddit, smart devices, newsletters, news sites like the New York Times and Washington Post, blogs, YouTube, Tumblr and anything else that outputs a stream of information.

Previously I didn’t get it. I thought that existing RSS readers like Newsblur and Inoreader can already do those things. Mastodon, Bluesky and Reddit emit RSS feeds, and many RSS readers can consume newsletters.

But RSS readers can’t give you an experience comparable to a native client. What if you had one stream that gave you a unified view of multiple services and the experience for each service would be just as good as a native client?

If I understand Tapestry correctly, it will be a niche product, at least at first. Most people only use one or two social platforms at most. But for the extremely online—like me—something like Tapestry could be very useful indeed.

Assuming I actually understand the direction the app is going in.

The chief obstacle to all this isn’t technical. It’s legal. Meta and Twitter are outright hostile to third-party clients, and Reddit now wants to charge big bucks for third-party access. The EU is pushing to require interoperability, but it remains to be seen whether the legal and business environment changes to permit something like Tapestry.

[cuprohastes]

Exciting software news

So, tapbots, who have a history of good software design for iOS have a new idea: an app that aggregates all your social media except facebook, twitter and other 100% evil and walled off services.

Which means mastadon and tumblr as well as RSS.

They're kickstarting it here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iconfactory/project-tapestry/

I am not affiliated with them excepting I use their mastadon client, and used to use their twitter client back before it was Elon'd.

[fahrni]

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I know this is very late today. We have our grandson today and we’ve been go, go, go, go, go since he arrived. I’m already pooped but he is such a great kid and a joy to be around. 😁

Carmel Dagan, Alex Ritman • Variety

Maggie Smith, Star of ‘Downton Abbey,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ Dies at 89

Goodbye Professor McGonagall.😔🪦

Vitaly Bragilevsky • JETBRAINS Blog

So, you’re thinking about choosing Rust as your next programming language to learn. You already know what it means to write code and have some experience with at least one programming language, probably Python or JavaScript. You’ve heard about Rust here and there. People say it’s a modern systems programming language that brings safety and performance and solves problems that are hard to avoid in other programming languages (such as C or C++).

Yes, I’m interested, but I have too much on my plate to venture into Rusty waters at this time. 🦀

Emma Roth • The Verge

Marques Brownlee, the YouTuber known as MKBHD, has responded to backlash over the launch of his new wallpaper app, called Panels. In a post on Tuesday, Brownlee says he’s going to address users’ concerns about pricing and “excessive data disclosures.”

It’s wild to see Marques, who makes super high quality video, to make something less than amazing.

Look, if you want a very high quality application full of high quality, consistently updated, you should consider Wallaroo from The Iconfactory.

Jake Trotter • ESPN

Who is Brownie the Elf? Inside the rise, fall, and revival of the Browns' mascot

I am a fan of Brownie the Elf and glad to see they’ve kept it.

Lauren Goode • WIRED

Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed out on making the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all in on computers for your face.

These look more like something you could wear everyday. Much closer than Apple is today.

F1

After days of speculation, Daniel Ricciardo’s exit from RB was confirmed on Thursday, with the team announcing that the Australian will be replaced by reserve driver Liam Lawson for the final six races of the season. With this seemingly bringing the 35-year-old’s extensive F1 career to an end, the news was met with plenty of reaction on social media, including some emotional tributes from his fellow drivers…

I suppose we could all see the writing on the wall. For as much as Christian Horner loves Daniel, he couldn’t save him.

iA Writer

In order to allow our users to access their Google Drive on their phones we had to rewrite privacy statements, update documents, and pass a series of security checks, all while facing a barrage of new, ever-shifting requirements.

This is a wild story from the iA Writer folks and I thought being an iOS developer was fraught with peril. Come on Google, work with these folks.

iMore

Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore.

Another publisher, gone. It’s been a rough year for tech blogs and magazines.

Matt Mullenweg • WordPress

It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion.

This is some kind of weird fight that I’m sure has way more to it than we’re privy to.

Matt Mullenweg • WordPress

WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free.

So, Mullenweg has gone completely nuclear on WP Engine. Thing is, WP Engine can take a cut of the code and do whatever they want with it, right?

It’s probably not that easy but I thought that was one of the benefits of open source software?

Google took a cut of Safari who took a cut of KHTML. It’s the way open source works.

It’s all a confusing mess to me so I don’t have a real opinion on the matter except to say I hope this doesn’t end badly for Matt and WordPress.

Maggie Boccella • Fangoria

The Crossing Over Express garnered over 500,000 views on the service that shall remain nameless in its first seventy-two hours — not too shabby for an eleven-minute short. Even more so, it must be cathartic for its creators, as it was inspired by a moment in Barnett’s young adulthood, where he had a chance to reflect on his own grief after losing his mother at seventeen, as he tells it

I still haven’t seen this but I plan on finding it later. I just won’t watch it on Space Karen’s platform.

The emphasis in the quoted bit from the article is by me. I replaced the name of the service with “the service that shall remain nameless.”

Rachel by the Bay

Late yesterday, I put up a post about how to get into colocation in about the crappiest way possible. I skipped a bunch of details just to get it out there. The inspiration was based on finding out just how many people have no idea that this business model even exists.

Just a little history less for those too young to know about these things. I once had a Windows 2000’server running in a co-located rack at a friends ISP. It ran my blog for at least a year.

Casey Newton • Platformer

Ever since Platformer left Substack in January, readers have been asking us how it’s been going. Today, in keeping with our annual tradition of anniversary posts (here are one, two, and three), I’ll answer that question — and share some other observations on the state of independent media over the past year.

Just a Platformer update. Go check it out and see what it’s like out there for indie publishers like Platformer.

FractalFir

Instead of using LLVM to generate native code, my project turns the internal Rust representation called MIR, into .NET Common Intermediate Language. CIL is then stored inside .NET assemblies, which allows the .NET runtime to load, and execute the compiled Rust code easily.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this project.

John Sculley • apple.fandom.com

The Copland Project was an effort by Apple Computer to create an updated version of their Mac OS operating system. Begun in earnest in March 1994 and named after American composer Aaron Copland, it was abandoned in August 1996.

The best thing that ever happened to Apple was purchasing NeXT and Steve Jobs returning to the helm.

[havnblog]

The Idea of Marques Brownlee's App Panels is OK

But I Have Several Problems With It

With the review of the latest iPhones, Marques Brownlee/MKBHD also revealed his latest project: The app Panels.

And I don’t mind the idea:

He’s hinted at expanding it in the future, but currently the app is an app to get wallpapers. You can get some of them for free (and by watching ads), but you can also buy packs of them, or subscribe to the app to get access to everything. The money is split between the app and the artists.

Wallaroo, by Iconfactory, is already a paid app for wallpapers, and Walli is an example of an app with a model where artists can upload their work.

In general, I feel like people’s expectations of stuff being free online is too high, so I don’t mind a new paid option in the market.

But these are my problems:

The name

The price

The split

The privacy

I want to mention that, in general, I quite like Marques and MKBHD! So this criticism isn't coming from hate.

1) The name

I get that it’s difficult to come up with an original name, as there are so many apps and companies out there. And, yes, “panels” can refer to screens – but it can also refer to comic panels. And the name Panels is already taken, by a great app for reading those!

2) The price and 3) The split

Panels (the wallpaper app) splits the income with artists – kind of like what music streaming apps do. So let’s compare it to, say, Spotify:

With Spotify, you get access to all* the music in the world, for $12/month | $144/year.1

And they get a lot of flack for “only” giving 75% of revenue to artists.2

Panels also cost $12/month – but has a heavily discounted yearly price of “only” $50/year. But that’s still far too much. 1-2/month | $10-20/year would be fair, IMO. I’d value “all music” more than three times higher than “some wallpapers”…

However, the worst part is the split: Where Spotify gives 75% of revenue to artists, Panels give 50% of profits. The difference between “revenue” and “profits” is important here! And in what world is that a fair assessment of how much value the app maker and the artists provide!? What would the app be without content?

He might say (or secretly think) “Pff, my name is so big – and if you want access to my audience, you have to pay up.” But anyone who thinks that, has forever lost the right to complain about Apple’s 30%, or YouTube’s cut, ever again…

If the app took about 20% of revenue, I’d say that seems about right.

4) The privacy

This The Verge article touches on some of the criticism of the app, including on privacy. And it also includes a post from Marques addressing some of it.

In short: It collects more than it should and needs to. But the data disclosures were also a bit overzealous.

For me, his answer to the criticism is far from hitting the mark. In terms of pricing, he only talks about improving the free version. But in general, the free version is challenging to combine with decent privacy – as the ads are tracking. And he doesn’t address the two things I’m most offended by at all: The pricing of the paid version, and the slap-in-the-face ratio of the split.3

Both prices, and if they have a yearly plan, varies from country to country. ↩︎

I’m not quite sure that’s fully deserved, though. I’ve written more abut that here. ↩︎

And had the split been better, I would have less issue with the high price – as it at least would mostly go to artists. ↩︎

[daveg65]

291 - Is that a Touch Screen on your HomePod? - With Guest Bob Fairbairn Jeff Gamet, and Ben Roethig

The latest In Touch With iOS with Dave he is joined by guest Bob Fairbairn, Jeff Gamet, and Ben Roethig. Bob joins us for the first time is 4 years and we talk about the release of iOS 17.4 beta 1 that fixes bugs. Apple releases their earnings results The Company posted quarterly revenue of $119.6 billion, up 2 percent year over year, we review all the results in the main categories. Vision Pro available tomorrow 2/2 we discuss what the influencers have said and will we buy it. Jeff and Dave pledged to the icon Factory and discuss how this could be a great app. Plus much more.

The show notes are at InTouchwithiOS.com


Direct Link to Audio 

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Give us a review on Apple Podcasts! CLICK HERE we would really appreciate it!

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Topics

Beta this week. iOS 17.4 Beta 1 was rereleased Apple Seeds First iOS 17.4 Public Beta With EU App Ecosystem Changes, Re-Releases Dev Beta 

iOS 17.4 beta 1 gets rare mid-stream update

Apple Seeds First Beta of watchOS 10.4 to Developers

References to 'homeOS' resurface in tvOS 17.4 beta

iOS 17.4: Using Apple's New Podcast Transcript Feature 

Apple is updating one of the oldest apps on your iPhone

Apple releases their earnings results The Company posted quarterly revenue of $119.6 billion, up 2 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.18, up 16 percent year over year. 

Apple reports first quarter results

Apple's Q1 2024 Earnings Call Takeaways 

Apple reports nearly $120B quarter: Full charts 

Apple Now Has More Than 2.2 Billion Active Devices Worldwide 

Cook 'incredibly excited' about generative AI coming to Apple gear later in 2024

Vision Pro available tomorrow 2/2 we discuss what the influencers have said. Vision Pro Reviews: Surprising Battery Life, 'Weird' Personas, and More

What Reviewers Have Learned about Apple Vision Pro 

Vision Pro won't let you save web apps to your home screen 

Jeff and Dave pledged to the icon Factory and discuss how this could be a great app. Makers of Twitterrific want to defragment online media with Project Tapestry 

The Iconfactory Launches Project Tapestry, a Kickstarter Campaign to Create a Universal Inbox for RSS, Social Media, and More 

Will carriers start advertising their logo on every call? AT&T seems to be. Android phones on AT&T will now show brand logos on incoming calls

There are more details on the EU changes with iPhone and iPad. Apple's EU App Store Changes: iPads, TestFlight, Default Stores and More 

Apple Further Explains iOS 17.4's New Default Browser Prompt in EU

Here Are All the iPhone Changes Coming to EU Users by March 6

News

Rumor: Apple's Touchscreen HomePod Coming This Year: Everything We Know

Apple Extends Modem Licensing Deal With Qualcomm Through March 2027

Apple Savings Account Interest Rate Increases to 4.50% APY

Apple Card Users Earned More Than $1 Billion in Daily Cash Last Year Apple  Press Release. 

Honda launches wireless CarPlay retrofit option for select 2018-2022 cars

Apple TV+ viewers watched 17 billion minutes of 'Ted Lasso' in 2023

Apps

Arc Search Review: My New Default iPhone Browser

Orion Web Browser from Kagi

https://kagi.com/orion/

Our Host

Dave Ginsburg is an IT professional supporting Mac, iOS and Windows users and shares his wealth of knowledge of iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and related technologies. Visit the YouTube channel https://youtube.com/intouchwithios follow him on Mastadon @daveg65, and the show @intouchwithios

  Our Regular Contributors

Jeff Gamet is a podcaster, technology blogger, artist, and author. Previously, he was The Mac Observer’s managing editor, and Smile’s TextExpander Evangelist. You can find him on Mastadon @jgamet as well as Twitter and Instagram as @jgamet  His YouTube channel https://youtube.com/jgamet

Ben Roethig Former Associate Editor of GeekBeat.TV and host of the Tech Hangout and Deconstruct with Patrice  Mac user since the mid 90s. Tech support specialist. Twitter @benroethig  Website: https://roethigtech.blogspot.com

About our Guest

Bob Fairbairn Does Technology and Audio systems consulting and most of his work is around what he calls “end-user computing and mobility 

Websites: http://SmarterCaTS.com Bob's Tool Shop KE9A https://www.bobonstereo.com Land and Lens Mastodon: @bobfa

Here is our latest Episode!

[jkottke]

Excited to see where Iconfactory’s Project Tapestry goes. “Weaving your favorite blogs, social media, and more into a unified and chronological timeline.”

[blast0rama]

The Iconfactory Looks To Launch PROJECT TAPESTRY via Kickstarter

Kickstarter:

Online media is fragmented. Your news, info, and updates come from countless sources. Blogs, microblogs, social networks, weather alerts, webcomics, earthquake warnings, photos, RSS feeds – it’s all out there in a million different places, and you’ve gotta cycle through countless different apps and websites to keep up.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

What if you had one app that gave an overview of nearly everything that was happening across all the different services you follow? A single chronological timeline of your most important social media services, RSS feeds, and other sources. All of the updates together in one place, in the order they’re posted, with no algorithm deciding what you should see or when you should see it.

That’s what we’d like to build.

With Project Tapestry, we’ll create a universal, chronological timeline for any data that’s publicly available on the Internet. A service-independent overview of your social media and information landscape. Point the app toward your services and feeds, then scroll through everything all in one place to keep up-to-date and to see where you want to dive deeper. When you find something that you want to engage with or reply to, Tapestry will let you automatically open that post in the app of your choice and reply to it there. Tapestry isn’t meant to replace your favorite Mastodon app or RSS reader, but rather to complement them and help you figure out where you want to focus your attention.

I’ve been an avid fan — and in recent years, direct supporter — of the work of The Iconfactory since I bought my first Mac in 2007.

Whether it was their amazing wallpapers (which have become their own app, Wallaroo), a really awesome Twitter client in Twitteriffic, or any of the other apps and programs they provided their polish to, there is a true love and care that resonates from their work.

Project Tapestry, as it’s laid out, is kind of a dream app for me. I spend so much time in my RSS Reader (Reader), and my Mastodon client (Ivory), and I’m sure that there are countless other sites (BlueSky for one) where having those feeds as RSS as well would be an excellent win.

Suffice to say, I backed immediately. If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to as well. Lets get them funded, gang.

[borismann]

WorldWideWeb is a new to me app by Iconfactory written in #Swift that runs a full web server on #MacOS #iPadOS #iOS.

[macmanx]

Project Tapestry is our way of embracing the return of fragmentation and the messiness of a more open Internet. We’d like to create an app to help you weave a new fabric of diverse services and protocols together into a unified and chronological timeline, so you can see what you want when you want it. We believe that rather than demanding all of our friends and family move to the same gated neighborhoods, it would be better to visit them where they already are.

[gamesatwork]

e408 — Lunar Data Mining

#GenerativeAI #RoomGPT #LoTR #MiniMac #MacOS #SimCity #Skylines #LunarDataCenters #LCARS stories from @nutlope @mergesort@macaw.social @dustin@pdx.social @Lonestar_Space @iconfactory@iconfactory.world

photo by Michael Martine, Moon over Hatteras, NC, June 2011 Published 13 March 2023 Michael, Andy and Michael start things off for this edition of Games at Work with a new generative AI.  RoomGPT allows you to remodel an existing room and see what it might look like.  There is an option to specify the kind of room, and Andy suggests that his studio is in fact a bathroom.  The results are in the…

[mitchipedia]

Hours before the deadline, I just pledged to back the Kickstarter for Tapestry from Iconfactory. I said I wasn’t going to do it, but then I figured why not. It looks like a very appealing and intriguing project, if it comes to fruition.

[fahrni]

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m still really enjoying the project I’m on at WillowTree and I hope we’re able to extend it further down the road.

I’ve been thinking about a way to fix my completely broken layout of Stream for Mac table view cells. For some reason the same layout I used on iOS isn’t working on macOS? Are the layout engines that different between UIKit and AppKit? No idea. But I do hope my new idea fixes it once and for all.

Then I need to get back to adding async await functionality to my feed adding code. This whole time it’s been synchronous because you really can’t mess with the UI during the initial get of the site data. When you select the feed you’d like to add everything becomes asynchronous, just like feed updating is.

This little change is the fire step in moving all of Stream’s asynchronous code to async await. I still need a much deeper understanding of how it works and why I need it. The code isn’t broken as is today but if Apple requires using async await at some point in the future, it will break.

Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, amirite? 😁

Chris Quinn • cleveland.com

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

It’s extremely difficult to write about Donald Trump as an equal to Joe Biden. Trump is a narcissist, rapist, twice impeached, criminal former President with desire to be a forever Dictator of the United States of America. He wants to end democracy as we know it. He’s only in it for his own gratification, to be cruel, and as a means to enrich himself.

Joe Biden is a leader who believes in helping people and he supports the Constitution. He’s been an effective leader.

Look, no President is perfect. President Biden is no exception to that rule. I’m a liberal and don’t agree with everything he’s done, but he has done great work for the people of the United States.

Vote for democracy. Vote for Joe Biden for President.

Craig Hockenberry • Iconfactory

This post will explain the technology behind Project Tapestry and how we tested it as a prototype. We’ll keep this discussion at a fairly basic level: if you’re a web or app developer, you’ll have no problems following along.

I just love everything Iconfactory does. Yes, I’m a software developer, yes Tapestry will somewhat compete with Stream, but I don’t care. I love this idea and I’m a little green with envy I didn’t think about it. 😃

This is the way to open up your app and make it more easily extensible internally in the process. There are lots and lots of great JavaScript developers out there.

I backed it as soon as I heard about it and I’m really looking forward to the final product.

Matthew Haughey

I’d like a hosted, centralized web app that is akin to early-era Blogger.com that lets me save new posts into a system, then it’s up to me where the output goes.

By blog began life as a Blogger blog. I published this site from 2001 to 2010. It generated static HTML and would FTP the generated HTML to my site. I loved it and it was extremely easy to move my site when I changed hosting providers. I just zipped up the directory and expanded it in its new home, updated Blogger to point to the new location, and went back to posting.

Today I publish this site using Micro.blog. It also generates static HTML but it’s all hosted on Micro.blog’s hardware. If I ever leave it’ll be easy to move.

I have been considering a move to a completely hand written blog. 😃

Of course once I started thinking about doing that I thought up some tools I’d like to write to help me out. 😂

Max Tani • Semafor

The shift, Apple wrote in a blog post, was technical: The dominant podcasting platform had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks.

This is a piece from January but it is interesting. Like blogging I believe it’s safe to say the idea behind Podcasting was never about monetizing, it was about freedom of expression. But, in the end, you can’t and shouldn’t, stop folks from monetizing it. That’s part of the freedom.

Reliance on a single centralized source of podcasts is a mistake. Apple has been so gracious in sharing their feed directory with the world for nothing it’s difficult to call it a mistake. The fact that it exists isn’t a mistake. The fact that so many podcasting apps and podcasters rely on it is.

There are now many podcast networks, from Indie to BigCo, and some apps and networks have their own directories but Apple is still the dominant player.

Oh, not to mention they have their own player that ships with their OS’es. That’s where the hit to podcast download numbers originated. Apple’s podcasting backend and their distribution front end in the form of the Podcasts app.

Hurubie Meko and Michael Wilson • New York Times

A magnitude-4.8 earthquake sent tremors from Philadelphia to Boston and jolted buildings in New York City. An apparent aftershock was widely felt around 6 p.m.

It’s strange to hear about a quake on the east coast. It was a topic of conversation at work yesterday in our weather Slack channel, of all places.

East coasters aren’t used to this. Here they’re accustomed to cold and snow and hurricanes, not earthquakes.

ROB BESCHIZZA • Boing Boing

Amazon is to end the AI-powered “Just Walk Out” checkout option in its Amazon Fresh stores. It turns out that “AI” means “Actually, Indians” and it isn’t working out.

So now we know what AI actually means! What a complete failing on the part of Amazon. It would’ve been so much better to have failed using AI than to move the jobs of cashiers to India where a bunch of overworked, underpaid, Indians are doing the same job.

Just hire some real people to manage the store.

Matt Birchler • birchtree

You probably got to this post because you Googled some question about what exactly “the fediverse” is, what “ActivityPub” actually means, or what would happen if you turned on federation on your Threads account today.

I still hear about folks struggling to understand how to sign up for Mastodon. The Join Mastodon site should just present the user with a signup form and host everyone on mastodon.social or a new instance and let folks decide what to do next. Most will probably be perfectly happy to stay on that instance forever. 👍🏼

Zack Sharf • Variety

Christian Bale Transforms Into Frankenstein’s Monster in First Look at Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Bride’

I’m diggin the look of Bales monster. Sign me up for the finished product.

Anthony Bonkoski

Ref-counting is garbage collection.

But is it really? I can see the point but it’s a tough sale for this old curmudgeon. 😂

I wrote a tiny sample to explain reference counted objects to a co-worker years back — 13 years at the time of this writing. It still illustrates the point fairly well, I think.

Today C++ developers get a lot of great reference counting and other newer memory management techniques through the stl.

Sarah K. Burris • Raw Story

Judge Cannon ‘basically inviting’ Jack Smith to ask for her removal in new filing

This judge seems to be incompetent or in the bag for Trump.

Look, the dude took too secret documents home with him. Probably not a big deal if he’d returned them when he was asked to. But no, not his Orangeness, he hold onto them, claiming they’re his through the magical process of declaring them his through mind control or some crap.

The trial is all about that. Not the Presidential Records Act.

[transienturl]

Twitter’s kneecapping of third-party clients didn’t just mean that their future revenue was gone — it meant revenue they’d already collected from App Store subscriptions would need to go back to customers in the form of prorated refunds for the remaining months on each and every user’s annual subscriptions. Consider the gut punch of losing your job — you stop earning income. It’s brutal. Now imagine that the way it worked when you get fired or laid off is that you’re also suddenly on the hook to pay back the last, say, 6 months of your income. That’s where Tapbots and The Iconfactory are.

These offers are more than fair. Any paid subscriber who doesn’t know what’s happening will simply get their prorated refund automatically. The money will just appear in their App Store account balance. But close to 85 percent of that money will come from the pockets of Tapbots and The Iconfactory. That is perfectly fair, but I do not think it is at all clear to people that that’s how it works. 

If you are a subscriber to either Tweetbot or Twitterrific, I beseech you to decline these prorated refunds. It’s a couple of bucks for you, but in the aggregate, this amounts to an existential sum of already booked revenue for these two companies, both exemplars of the indie iOS and Mac community. Reinstall the app if you’ve already deleted it. Tap that “I Don’t Need a Refund” button and feel good about it. We have a month. Spread the word.