FlickinAround

Best selling author Ridley Pearson wrote a blog post about my novel writing app StoryMill. He likes it. :-)

Blue Ridge Country magazine has decided to feature my pet project, the Waterfalls of Western North Carolina. It's a GPS-enabled iOS hiking guidebook to some of the most beautiful areas in WNC.  The [iPad](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/waterfalls-western-north-carolina/id434699475?mt=8) version is free and the [iPhone](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/waterfalls-western-north-carolina/id383953193?mt=8) is only 99c. Check it out. If I've done my job it will make you want to get off your couch and go see something pretty.

Tiny Worlds

Great video from Trey Ratcliff about one of Steve Jobs' favorite subjects, the intersection of technology and the humanities.

Upper Catawba Falls

Hidden Falls Autumn, Panthertown Valley

[FoldingText](http://www.foldingtext.com) is one of my favorite tools for keeping notes, checklists, todo lists and other random bits of productivity detritus. [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) is just a ridiculously efficient way of creating loosely structured text and FoldingText implements markdown in a brilliantly simple way. It allows you to collapse entire sections of your document, as long as they are marked as headers via the markdown syntax. I suspect the syntax for markdown originates from widely practiced but rarely recognized syntax for handwritten lists, with things like links grafted on using the same "it should be obvious" mentality. Who hasn't jotted down a list with dashes in front of each item, then put a vertical strike through the list items as they were completed? And Markdown supports both + and - characters for lists. I think the obvious thing to do is to allow clicks on either the + or - list delimiters to toggle between the two. That way I could use my old handwritten list syntax, with a - by each item and a + for the done ones.

I don't know why everyone assumes Apple kicked Google out of iOS6. Seems to me Apple is getting getting the worse of the bargain. iOS with lesser maps and no native YouTube app is a downgrade. You really think Apple would downgrade its user experience over a petty rivalry? Show me one other time they have done that in the past and I will believe it.

Dash then goes on to list these categories: - IP practices - Content censorship - Roadmap for third parties - Competing with developers But Dash fails to mention the one category that matters, the category that renders all those he mentions irrelevant. **Can I build a successful business around this platform?** The answer with Apple and the app store is clearly yes. The Twitter API announcement made it impossible to run anything more than a one or two man business around their platform. So while Dash makes valid points about each company, those other four points only matter if you can build a business around the platform in the first place. That prevents me from ever exploring Twitter as a possible platform for my business.

Desktop software is about to fall off a cliff