Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic Software, wrote an excellent 2014 year in review on their company blog recapping their successes and some of the issues Panic dealt with throughout the year.

To be honest, I was pretty nervous to be pulling Coda from the Mac App Store. But when we finally did it, I felt an incredible, almost indescribable sense of relief — mostly because as we began to wrap up bug fix releases, we were able to immediately post them to our customers within minutes of qualifying them. My god. That’s how it should be. There’s just no other way to put it — that’s how you treat your customers well, by reacting quickly and having total control over your destiny. To not be beholden to someone else to do our job feels just fantastic. (Also to not pay someone 30% in exchange for frequent stress is a fine deal.)

Despite selling more than half of our total units, iOS represents just 17% of our total revenue.

I’ve been using several of Panic’s apps on the Mac for a few years now and Transmit and the new version of Prompt on iOS this year were both excellent apps. If Coda 2.5 on the Mac and Panic Sync were results of pulling Coda from the app store then I 100% agree it was the right decision. We now get Coda updates faster than ever and Panic Sync works awesome, so there is absolutely no downside for me as a customer.

I was disappointed to see the breakout of units sold vs. revenue between Panic’s Mac and iOS apps. Panic’s iOS apps are some of the most powerful and beautifully designed productivity apps I’ve ever used on iOS and in many cases I am able to complete web development tasks that previously would have required being in front of a Mac to complete. I really want to believe that this is simply an issue of figuring out the right pricing model to make building high quality, well-designed iOS productivity tools worthwhile and that iOS users like me are more than willing to pay a premium for desktop quality tools on their mobile devices.

Panic Apps: Transmit

Panic Apps: Prompt

Panic Apps: Coda

Marco on Apple’s yearly software release schedule:

The problem seems to be quite simple: they’re doing too much, with unrealistic deadlines.

We don’t need major OS releases every year. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features. We need our computers, phones, and tablets to work well first so we can enjoy new features released at a healthy, gradual, sustainable pace.

I fear that Apple’s leadership doesn’t realize quite how badly and deeply their software flaws have damaged their reputation, because if they realized it, they’d make serious changes that don’t appear to be happening. Instead, the opposite appears to be happening: the pace of rapid updates on multiple product lines seems to be expanding and accelerating.

I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, when I started working at the Apple Store when I was in college I loved telling customers about the Mac and showing them all the ways “it just worked”. When the iPhone came out, it was absolutely amazing and to this day it is the easiest phone for almost anyone to pick up and start using right away. Apple products usually still “just work”. But there are undoubtably more problems than their used to be and it is certainly a result of new features being added faster than the issues can be properly tested and resolved internally. The reason the original iPhone “just worked” so well is because it didn’t have to do very much and the features it had were the best of any device we had ever seen. Now we are getting more features faster than ever, and as a nerd I’m excited about the ability for developers to do new things that haven’t been possible on iOS before. But these features being implemented at such a rapid pace is coming at a cost. And its hard to say “it just works” with the same confidence anymore.

Bradley Chambers over at The Sweet Setup put together a great list of holiday tech support tips while you’re home for the holidays. Family tech support is something on my holiday to-do list every year when I’m home–I’m just glad its more iOS updates these days than Windows clean installs.

The Christmas season is a magical time of the year for our families. This is the time of year when we get to provide in home technical support for all of their products. They’ve got you as a captive audience for a few hours, and they’ve been waiting all year to ask you a number of questions. We decided to make a list of things you need to do to be proactive in taking care of your family members’ iOS devices and Macs.