Well, I guess we're fast approaching Christmas again...

Last week saw me missing the weekly update as I've been mainly busy with client work, and also some things I've been working on with a friend of mine — more on that later.

Gluon and personal apps...

A few weeks ago I announced that Gluon is going to be discontinued and that I am no longer going to concentrate on native app development for anything personal ("personal" — key word, doesn't affect client work). I wrote about this topic over the past few weeklogs so I won't link to it here.

The long story short — creating apps for the two platforms (Google & Apple) is just not worth it for me anymore. I don't like either company, they both alienate me, and they always add roadblocks to just shipping software.

I grew up around Apple hardware and software for the past 38 years... and the last 5 - 10 years have just been sad with no end in sight. I miss Steve.

Don't get me wrong, they still make great hardware, even though my keyboard doesn't work at times, and my TouchBar flashes at me (which I have fixed by putting tape over the top of it). However, something is amiss and my interest and hope has passed. They had plenty of opportunities here.

So... I am out.

My Apple developer account is now fully expired as of the 1st of August. Google will follow in October because I won't fill out the required forms. Apple was quick to remove my apps from their store, which solves the "30 days grace in case you change your mind" period (not). You can still use Gluon if you've have it installed (I think). Funny enough, I can't re-download it now even though I previously did — so that answers the question if you're able to download it again at a later stage — nope :(

Some people have asked me what will happen with it. Will it still run? I guess it will run, but I can't tell you for certain because I can't install it anymore — so I have no idea. It's a shame really.

Gluon relies on server sided components, that I run, for example pushing some of the feeds to a CDN (Bunny) so it's super fast to grab discover feeds and some others. That also includes push notifications. I built that because I wanted to better control it as Micro.blog doesn't (yet?) support webhooks when you receive a mention, which I could then work on. I don't know if they still work and get delivered. I do know that the server is still working to make that happen and they all seem to be delivering nicely.

Right now I don't know how long I will support the server side component. Maybe until the new year... maybe longer. I don't know.

Saying all that, this has been great for me because I can use my time elsewhere... like...

Micro.blog

Yesterday I wrapped up a major rewrite of the app to use the new navigation library. I'm happy with the way it has gone although there were some steeper learning curves than anticipated, but it's all good. Life is about learning and that's why I love coding.

Because now I don't have to worry too much about Gluon anymore I can fully concentrate on the MB apps. Having this rewrite done gives us all a level playing field without too much difference between say Strata, Epilogue and the main MB app.

Once the PR is merged I'm going to work on some little finer details around composing.

A new major task that I want to explore is around deployments around the web app, and also getting some sort of docker based local dev environment going. It's been on the list for a while and is way past due.

Scribbles

This week I worked on adding support for comments using David's excellent Komments system. I really love what he's done and you should check it out. The documentation is here if you're interested. It's super easy to add and just works as you expect it to.

Expect a few more things around comments. I'd like to add the Micro.blog conversation.js integration at some stage soon too.

I do have a few things planned for Scribbles, and they're in my head for a while, so hopefully will get to them soon.

Sublime Ads -> Shameless Plug

When I created Gluon I wanted a super simple way to implement ads in a way that I controlled, so I created Sublime Ads. It worked great and felt good to work on it. It had its ups and downs though with interest strongly tied to "ads" in general. The last time I did anything new was last year October, 2023. But it has been stuck since. This was a product for myself and I hardly did any sort of marketing around it. I really dropped the ball on this, but I can't change the past.

My friend Michał approached me several times over the past years about Sublime Ads and wanted to work together on it. I always said many things which then never came true (a character flaw of mine). This year though, things were different. I finally committed and let go (I hold onto projects like they are my children) and let Michał handle it.

So what's going to happen? Sublime Ads is still running, but will not get any more updates and will eventually be shut down. I will send an email to all that use it before the year ends telling them of this.

I practically gave the codebase (NOT DATA) to Michał. A new lease of life. We're going to work on it on the basis that I will keep working on the code bits and improve the product and add features as he sees will benefit the platform. He'll manage everything, including me. We talk about many ideas in general and also what I wanted from the original Sublime Ads.

Rest assured, no personal data or database has been given during the process and only the code has been handed over. We both didn't really ask or talk about it — because we're on the same page on these matters (even though we are friends and try to meet in person when we can).

It's still super early days but hope that I'll be able to blog about it more as we add new features and make the app better. Can't wait to see where this goes.

It's called Shameless Plug and if you're interested in creating your own ad network for your apps, I suggest you check it out. There are things that need doing, like implement billing and some other things before it's officially ready.

We felt a total new start and name was the only way.

I want to thank Michał for saving this project and believing in me over the years.

Other stuff

I added support for the ?ref parameter on Tinylytics so that they show up under sources. Thanks Jamie!

Sublime Feed is humming along, although there are issue where the background jobs just seem to fail — keeping an eye on it. Truth be told, I probably won't work on anything new here until after the holidays.

As always, I have a lot of things I'd like to do, however it's the summer holidays and I have been mainly concentrating on the freelance side of things — keeping me busy.

August will most likely be quiet on the blogging front, however feel free to e-mail me. Hoping to keep the update blogs lively though, so let's see.

Until next time.

— Vincent