It’s not “justified”. I’m merely pointing out (a) hypocrisy by BaseCamp (and subsequent marketing lies), and (b) the old adage that you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
It might be nice to believe you can snip at a company’s products (and in this case, using false claims), and believe it won’t affect at all a separate issue (App Store submissions), but that’s not the real world.
Sometimes, you attract attention by antics. Maybe Fried and Co. are learning a small lesson about the real world.
Aside from all that, this whining about how Apple is keeping them from profits is a bit nauseating. Their sad product (Hey) is keeping them from profits.
Or could we get rid of ALL federal holidays and put everyone back to work?
Everyone wants their pet project/idea/ideal/personal-fetish as a "federal holiday" which then all but forces States to also adopt them (or get into name-calling and finger-pointing).
How about we abolish ALL federal holidays and decide that our tax payer dollars don't give federal workers (white, grey, or blue collar) automatic paid days off, or bankers and others?
Then, everyone just gets five (or some magic number that makes fiscal sense) paid days off per year that they can use for whatever "interest" they have. If they want it for Christmas, or MLK, or President's Day, or "save the Great White Shark Day" or whatever, go and knock yourself out.
"Holidays" will still be on XML feeds and Hallmark calendars and can be celebrated by your family, clan, tribe, city, state, or what-have-you... but no one just auto-mandates that federal workers get them off (and paid for by taxpayers) automatically.
If you want to blow your allotment all at one time (and it's possible in your business to do so), go for it.
WF&A is what federal holidays really are.
How many federal workers take Memorial Day off to go weep over the tombs of veteran soldiers, or attend parades. Maybe 10%?
The rest just go party the night before or sleep all day or mow their lawn or Netflix binge. If you aren't willing to use an allotted day off on Memorial Day, then you probably don't really care about our Armed Forces or their sacrifices. That's fine - just don't use our taxpayers dollars to watch Netflix all day; go work that day instead and take one of your allotted days off for something that matters.
When is this socialism gonna end? And why is this even related to HN and being submitted here?
Maybe because Hey/Basecamp decided to target Apple's email platform on Hey's home page as the cause of all Inbox woes?
Maybe before you go griping about technical details in Apple's App Store rules, Hey/Basecamp should have considered not blaspheming (unfairly) Apple's Email platform (among others) on their home page:
> "You started getting stuff you didn’t want from people you didn’t know. You lost control over who could reach you. An avalanche of automated emails cluttered everything up.
And Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and Apple just let it happen."
Pretty snarky of Jason Fried & Co. to accuse Apple of being the reason I lost control of my Inbox, and then beg and cajole Apple to let them have their Hey App on iOS without allowing a signup option via Apple's massive eco-system.
Typical Small Dev Thinking. "Hey is different and Apple is Evil and We have Single-handedly solved all the problems that Apple created! Oh, by the way, can we please be in the App Store so we can have access to Apple's bajillions of customers and $$$ so we can make a few $100k because the economy is tanking?".
Worse of all? Hey lied. Through the teeth.
Nearly all of their Top 20 "features" have been available via Apple's Email service for years, and in some cases decades, and most are also available via other email services like Gmail.
This is probably the lowest skullduggery that Fried & Co have attempted to foist on the unsuspecting public. I'm personally surprised and have always been a fan of their work. Don't know what's going on under the covers over there, but it can't be good.
It's 25% of 18-24 year olds, according to the story. So, basically people who would never read the WSJ or NYT or New Yorker or The Guardian, or probably even the BBC. Or read anything more than 1-2 paragraphs. That group of 18-24 year olds... you know who they are.
I actually think we should make them stay on IG for 3 years as punishment until they swear they will never go back there. Or maybe just put all the Twitter and IG users into local churches (one on each side of the aisle) and lock them inside until they agree to stop yelling at each other.
Meaning, today I write. Because what I say is necessary. Can’t just be silent.
When is he gonna give up the ghost? He’s not at Apple for a reason. Yet he’s obsessed with them.
No one at Apple sought him out before going in any direction. He’s been a non-entity there for two decades. Yet he can’t stop trying to tell us all how to think about everything they do.
Gruber is at least a little more attached to Apple.
But the two of them sound like two old cranks: one consistently fawning over all Apple decisions, the other fretting.
I don’t know what it’s like to devote one’s life to discussing a single corporation, even one as wildly successful and entertaining as Apple.
I always wonder if these guys ever wake up and think, “Maybe today I’ll just delete my blog, stop reading press releases and tech news about Apple, and go build that cabin or walk a trail”.
Maybe they’re terrified no one would miss them? Or maybe they’ll find that life is better and that they wasted the last few decades of their very precious and limited life?
I don’t know. Maybe they are so enmeshed it just never occurs to them. It just always makes me sad to see their posts. Maybe that says more about me in some sad way than it does about them. Don’t know.
I no longer support the IA. They are a few people who needed a “mission” in life. But they aren’t true librarians or historians.
They waver between flighty utopian idealism and arrogance and self-justifying activism.
It’s getting old. For every “practical” use of the IA, there are just as many concerns.
No one really needs the old internet or all the old Geocities website and first design interactions or personal blogs. There’s no market for it and no one would pay for it.
If these folks had to hand-copy items or make photocopies, they would have quit a decade ago.
They use scraping and cheap hardware to “brag” about their massive knowledge base in the petabytes. Honestly, no one cares.
Outside of the circles of other digital borders and some tech circles, everyone else is playing with their kids, mowing their lawns, reading books, and such. Try to get your neigbor to go look at an IA website from 1996. They’ll just go watch Netflix instead.
TL;DR: He relies on 3 different online services to scan business receipts and track expenses. None are needed.
He spends hours (days) trying to automate what he himself claims is only a few expenses per month (and shows a photo of a very thin folder of receipts).
I can’t imagine his business will be ever very successful. He wastes too much time toying with simple things.
But aside from that, if one wants a “no code” solution to tracking expenses, along with imaged receipts in case later proof is needed here you go:
1. Take pic of receipt. If you need multiple pics per image, you can combine images post de facto via something like Apple’s Preview app (save as PDF), or you can use Apple Notes to do for you. I assume other competing platforms have similar options. Worst case scenario: simply add “page-2”, “page-3”, in the file name.
2. Save image file in a directory called “business-receipts”.
3. Name file with receipt date, vendor, amount, and maybe description or anything else. Date comes first for easy finding later. “2020-06-15 ATT 63-00 USD Monthly business cell bill.pdf”
4. Enter transaction into appropriate tab of business finances spreadsheet (cash, bank, credit card, etc.)
5. Add a category for the expense, if you want.
6. Get back to work.
Benefits?
1. No code necessary (unless you count your initial spreadsheet setup and the use of VLOOKUP for reporting). Call me crazy but if you’ve been going through all the gyrations outlined in the article, I assume you’ve mastered VLOOKUP or can do so in 10 minutes and that you’ve also graduated Junior High school.
2. No trusting OCR “auto-populate”. Most of us can type faster than these things can think. Also, if you trust those (without verifying each time), I have some perfectly safe driverless cars to sell you.
3. Almost no technical debt. No API depreciation. No risk of anyone being bought out.
4. Offline. Works without the internet. As did most all business processes 25 years ago on PCs. Amazing. No clunky browser needed either.
5. Secure. Your data is kept Local First. If you choose to backup online, so be it. Encrypt and Backup. But all your prior processing between multiple “services” (with your unencrypted data being manipulated on their ends) is no longer necessary.
Counter-Arguments:
1. Excel is now also a “service”: True but it’s more popular and has more staying power than any of the ones you’re using. If you really think you don’t want to pay monthly for Excel (not sure what business can avoid this), there are plenty of free options. And for the purposes of this method, at least, you could do this on Excel 97 (buy once, use ‘forever’).
2. Still have to deal with online storage: Well, no you don’t, but let’s pretend that you only trust hard drives in the cloud and not the $100 4Tb one you can get at Walmart. So what? Encrypt and send it on up. If you use Macs or Office365, you likely have plenty of room already. Why involve another third-party? But anyway, this is a part of the “no code” process you added as if it was unique only to that process. It’s a bigger part of a different decision on how you store, encrypt, and/or backup your business data. A single line CRON job would take care of this, unless you count that as “code” since it involves typing a line of text instead of 47 mouse clicks.
3. This isn’t multi-user: True. Based on the 2 receipts per month statement, and the thin Lemonade Stand folder of receipts, it didn’t seem worthy of that functionality. If multi-user is needed, and the free WaveApp is costing you sleep, Quickbooks is your solution. Welcome to the world of Big Boy Businesses where the owners work hard and underlings do data entry into complex software.
Most WP site owners are average Joes and Janes. Probably 95% of them. They get a ‘dev’ (college kid) to help them here and there, but most are being ‘run’ by complete amateurs.
On the other hand, SSGs are a hot mess. You have to know ‘deployments’ and ‘libraries’ and how to break down your site into partials and a ton more.
And that assumes you are familiar with CLI, the O/S, and sometimes various ‘template’ languages.
Go read the “first blog post” tutorials by any SSG. No mere mortal stands a chance.
If I see one more “so easy! First type ‘npm install yummy-blog -ldx’ and then clone my repo theme into your blah blah blah’.... uh, what? Do you think your kid’s fourth grade teacher has a chance?
But they can sign up for a free WP.com account and post something in 10 minutes. Or if they are slightly more techie and know how to buy a domain and setup a hosting account, they will have a “one-click install”.
WP will (eventually) be “performant enough” as PHP advances and they ditch legacy code. Even a lot of more techie websites and companies use it when they have the ability to use SSGs because it’s just rarely worth the hassle for the trade-off in performance. Inevitably, even those companies want Tina in Marketing to write posts and if she saw a code editor or a command line she’d quit. (And not being sexist - could just as well be Dylan in Accounting who needs to post about his company’s ‘transparent’ finances to show how hip the company is with their 27 employees.
SSGs might never take off. Even ‘easy’ ones that can have a web-based login or ones like Publii have a very limited audience.
What amazes me is that... people keep building more! StaticGen must list 100+. And it seems ne’er a month goes by on HN where some lonely dev doesn’t announce they are building yet another one.
I personally don’t get it. The new ones have all the same friction and nothing innovative over the existing market of SSGs. And no, using Rust or Go to speed up build times by 12 seconds doesn’t count.
It might be nice to believe you can snip at a company’s products (and in this case, using false claims), and believe it won’t affect at all a separate issue (App Store submissions), but that’s not the real world.
Sometimes, you attract attention by antics. Maybe Fried and Co. are learning a small lesson about the real world.
Aside from all that, this whining about how Apple is keeping them from profits is a bit nauseating. Their sad product (Hey) is keeping them from profits.