Manton Reece

On the latest episode of Core Intuition, we talk about Daniel’s trip to Paris for dotSwift, the state of podcasting after the recent Spotify acquisitions, and then we close talking about Angela Ahrendts leaving Apple. Reflecting on the progress of the Apple Stores, I was thinking back to 11 years ago when I was waiting in line to buy the original iPhone. Here’s a photo of me from Damon Clinkscales while we waited in line.

Back in 2007 when that photo was taken, there were 2 Apple Stores in Austin. That was before the iPhone shipped. Today, after Apple now has 900 million iPhones in use, Austin still only has 2 Apple Stores. The stores are bigger and better than they were in 2007, but there’s no escaping the fact that you can’t scale to supporting so many millions of customers without adding new Apple Stores.

I have no major complaints with the Apple Store experience. It’s crowded, of course, and not everyone who works in retail has the right answer to every question, but they do a good job and I think most people leave the store happy. Getting support directly in person is a great perk of being an Apple customer.

But you can’t design your way out of this problem with more efficient stores or even bigger stores. At some point, Apple needs to add more stores. I doubt there’s a major city in the United States that wouldn’t provide a better experience by adding 1-2 stores.

Could they overdo it, weakening their reputation by opening too many stores of lower quality? Dominic Williams writes on his blog:

In my local city of Cardiff, they are placed directly in the middle of St David’s shopping centre. Short of repurposing Cardiff Castle, I couldn’t think of a better spot. They want their stores to be shining beacons in the cities they are in. Having one on every corner takes away their allure.

There’s a balance here. Apple Stores can be beautiful and practical without every store planned as an architectural marvel. Perfection on the design of each store might be holding them back from better serving customers.

Daniel and I go into more detail on this in the latest episode, with a discussion that eventually leads to answering the important question: why did Daniel go to a Starbucks in Paris? Enjoy!

I added a new API endpoint to Micro.blog for getting recent photos for a user. This is something we’ve been wanting for Sunlit, and hopefully it will be useful for other developers as well. It works for any Micro.blog user, even if they are hosting their blog somewhere else. For example, a request to Micro.blog for my username would look like this:

  GET /posts/manton/photos
  Authorization: Bearer ABCDEFG

The response is JSON Feed, and includes the photo thumbnail URL in addition to the HTML for the blog post and full-sized image. Here’s an abridged version of a response:

  {
    "id": "12345",
    "content_html": "Test photo.<p><img src=\"…\">",
    "image": "…",
    "_microblog": {
      "thumbnail_url": "…"
    }
  }

For blogs hosted on Micro.blog, there’s also a feed of all your photos hosted at your own domain. Mine is here:

• manton.org/photos/index.json

And there’s a special photos-only feed for the Discover section of Micro.blog. Here are a couple of the URLs:

• micro.blog/feeds/photos.json — good for showing thumbnails in a grid
• micro.blog/posts/discover/photos — good for showing posts in a timeline

Basing our API on JSON Feed has helped keep Micro.blog open by default. The URLs that don’t require authentication can even be dropped in a reader like Feedbin to use outside of the Micro.blog apps.

We’re working on an updated version of Sunlit that will use this new photos endpoint. Anyone can join the beta on TestFlight here and you’ll be notified when the app is ready to test.

Today Substack announced support for sending audio episodes in email newsletters:

Subscription podcasting through Substack works in the same way as publishing newsletters. Once the feature is enabled, you can create an audio post that is just like a normal post and can go out to everyone or only to subscribers. After receiving the post by email or accessing it on the web, subscribers can listen to the audio through the Substack web player.

This looks like a great feature for Substack customers, but it’s not a podcast. As the podcasting industry grows, with everyone trying to monetize podcasts or build new businesses around podcasting, it’s really important that we keep using the right words to describe it. A podcast has to have a feed so that it’s available in podcast players like Overcast, Castro, and Apple Podcasts.

Michael Zornek said it well earlier this week after Spotify acquired Gimlet and Anchor:

It is not a podcast unless there is a RSS feed.

I’m not splitting hairs about this. If we accept calling “any audio on the internet” a “podcast”, we undermine what makes a podcast unique: not just the convenience of delivering audio directly to your device, but the openness that ensures that podcasts work in a variety of players, without a single company with too much control trying to lock down the format.

Luckily, I think the Substack folks probably know this. In their announcement post, they also added:

We may soon add the ability to add a private feed of episodes to podcast players, but we like the web solution for now. (Give us your feedback, etc.)

Here’s my feedback: please don’t call it a podcast until you have the feed ready, whether it’s a private feed or public. When we added audio uploads to Micro.blog, we had full podcast feeds and everything was available from your own domain name. The web will be better if we encourage the same support of open formats in all new platforms.

We’re changing the official Micro.blog user accounts so that they are easier to follow. It used to be that everyone automatically followed @help, where we posted occasional announcements. From now on, @help will mostly be used for replying to questions, with a new default account @news.

You can unfollow @help if you don’t want to see those replies in your timeline. New users will no longer automatically follow @help.

Here’s a summary of the different accounts and blogs:

• @help: help.micro.blog
• @news: news.micro.blog
• @monday: monday.micro.blog

And for the Micro.blog team:

• @manton: manton.org
• @macgenie: micro.welltempered.net
• @cheesemaker: jonhays.me

In addition, Micro.blog user @simonwoods maintains 2 blogs with updates about Micro.blog and “Today I Learned” for tips:

• @til: til.micro.blog, updates.micro.blog

Email is still a great way to get an answer to a question, but by splitting out these accounts we can be more responsive on @help as well. I think this setup will work better as the community grows.

We released version 1.5 of the Micro.blog app for iOS today. In addition to a couple bug fixes, it lets you pick a category for new posts. You can create categories on the web under Posts → Categories for blogs hosted on Micro.blog.

Tap the gear icon when composing a new post to view your categories:

We are launching several major new features for blog hosting on Micro.blog today. Any one of these features alone is a big change, and together I hope they will serve as a great foundation for years to come. The goal was to make blog hosting faster and more flexible for new features.

Custom templates: All the themes have been rewritten with extensibility in mind. As some of you may know, Micro.blog-hosted blogs were originally built on Jekyll. They now use Hugo. There’s an interface in Micro.blog for editing any of the built-in templates, or adding new ones for your own HTML or CSS. Click Posts → Design → Edit Themes.

Categories: You can create a new category for your blog under Posts → Categories, and those categories will appear when editing a post or when creating a longer post with a title. We hide the category options be default when you are composing a short post, but in the new macOS app you can show the categories by choosing View → Categories. A list of your categories will appear at the top of Archive on your blog for readers to browse.

Auto-filter photos into a category: If you create a category like “Photos” or “Photography”, Micro.blog will offer to automatically assign this category when posting a new photo. Behind the scenes this is based on a new filtering system that will enable more features for other types of content in the future.

API for categories: I’ve added categories support to both the MetaWeblog XML-RPC API and the Micropub API. This means that categories work great with MarsEdit. Categories are also included in your default JSON Feed in the “tags” field.

Sharing themes: When creating a new custom theme, you can choose to clone it from an existing GitHub repository. This will allow someone to create a completely custom theme and share it with other members of the community. There’s a “Blank” design if you are starting from scratch with your own templates.

New theme: I used the open source theme Arabica when testing these new features, and it’s now an option under Posts → Design. It’s a clean, simple design ported from Ghost.

Open source changes: All our themes for Micro.blog are available on GitHub. I have decided to keep the forked Jekyll repositories and completely replace the files with the Hugo version. I have mixed feelings about this, since the themes have diverged so much that they are no longer useful to the original authors, but I felt this was the best way to give credit to them for the designs, in addition to our credits page on Micro.blog.

Moving special pages: Micro.blog has some special pages like “About” and “Archive”. You can now re-order or even delete these under Posts → Pages. Combined with custom themes, this gives much more flexibility in customizing the navigation for your site.

We’ll be writing more about these new features in blog posts and the help site. If you notice any problems, please let me know. Thank you!