When I released the first version of Ohai a few months ago, it had a simple goal – to have a simple, beautiful place to keep track of memories. As with all first versions, it was limited; you could only capture location-based check ins with a comment and a photo. And as it was released shortly after iOS 7’s announcement, it quickly looked outdated and needed some visual touch-ups. Today I’ve released the first new set of features for Ohai to make it a better and more beautiful journal, with some of the most heavily requested features.

Much ado has been made about the idea of App Store apps getting discounted upgrades, where you buy an app once, and then pay a discounted amount for an upgrade. This idea is not new; for many years, developers sold apps under a model known as shareware. In an era when software was harder to use and people feared viruses, this model thrived among technically-savvy people who tended to spend more money on technology. The generally-accepted model in the Apple world has a fair bit of complexity, involving trials (some time-based, some feature-restricted), serial numbers or license files, and periodic requests for more money. Then the App Store came and replaced it outright with a new, simpler model that favors a traditional retail-style system of cheap software that you pay for once. It’s far more straightforward and easier to understand; if you want the app, you buy it, and then you own it.

Developers who have thrived under the old model have complained for a long time that they want discounted upgrades to make a return to iOS. Along with it comes the added complexity of managing different tiers of ownership, both technically and mentally. Apple has not offered this, instead opting to make major updates available as a separate, standalone app that existing users pay for in full, as was done recently with Logic Pro X. To me, this is far and away a better and simpler approach to handling upgrades in an era when non-technical people buy software.

In 2013, developers rely on web-based services to get much of their work done. Whether it’s looking up server API documentation, provisioning iOS devices, or registering API keys, a part of a developer’s day involves going to a website and looking something up. And that means keeping track of how to find all of these disparate websites. The problem is that there’s no real standard way or schema to get to them. Each service has a different URL for their developer site. Some examples:

• iOS: http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/
• Android: http://developer.android.com/
• Chrome: https://developers.google.com/chrome/
• Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/developers
• Twitter: https://dev.twitter.com/
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/developer/
• Windows: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows
• Heroku: https://devcenter.heroku.com/
• Twilio: http://www.twilio.com/docs/api
• Amazon Web Services: http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/

There’s 10 different examples, each with completely different URL structures. If you have to interact with more than a few of these, it becomes impossible to keep track of them all in your head. Now, you could rely on bookmarks or web searches, but these aren’t as fast as just typing a URL into your browser or using a shortcut in an app like Alfred. Speaking from my own experience, for the sites I can keep in my head, I’ll type part of the URL and hope that the browser’s URL autocomplete will finish the job, simply because it’s usually more efficient. But as a human, sometimes I’m wrong, which wastes time. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple, consistent URL structure for all these different sites?

So I built DevCenter.me to do this. DevCenter.me is a directory of developer sites that can be accessed via consistent URLs that either you or your browser can remember. Each developer site can be accessed via one or more shortcuts (for example, ios for the iOS developer center, or app.net or adn for App.net) through either of two different URL structures: shortcut.devcenter.me or devcenter.me/shortcut. These shortcuts are designed to be memorized. Frequently used shortcuts will end up getting persisted in your web browser’s URL field (the service sends a 302 temporary redirect, not a permanent one, so your browser will probably still cache it). After a few uses, you can just type fb into your browser’s URL field, and it will automatically recognize you’re typing fb.devcenter.me, taking you to the right site in just a few keys.

DevCenter.me was designed to be a productivity tool for developers. There’s a full list of sites and their shortcuts available in JSON, as well as on the website (with shortcuts shown by pressing the option key). You can even download an Alfred extension to open a site via one of these shortcuts (shout out to Will Smidlein for writing this, as well as providing the motiviational tweets to write this service). And if a site is missing. you can fork the project on GitHub, add it to the list, and submit a pull request. When I initially published the project, there were 10 sites. As of this writing less than 12 hours later, there are 56, and undoubtedly more pull requests for me to merge in. That’s really cool to see, and I hope people keep submitting requests for more sites.

I built DevCenter.me because keeping track of all these websites was a thorn in my side; wasted memory space in my head. Accessing developer sites may not be a world-changing problem, but saving a few seconds a few times a day adds up over time. A better solution keeps you focused on what you’re actually trying to do rather than requiring you to keep estoeric URLs in your head. I hope it finds value as a tool for lots of developers.

About three years ago, I had a simple idea. I wanted an app to keep track of the places I’ve been. Naturally I’ve tried all the services for this, jumping from Gowalla to Foursquare to Path. But they all want you to broadcast your location, all the time. They’re focused on the experience of letting other people knowing where you are. There’s certainly value in sharing your location, but I wanted something that benefited me first.

I built a prototype of this app a few years ago, but it didn’t go anywhere. The secret sauce behind any check-in app is a database full of points of interest (or POIs, meaning places like businesses, restaurants, tourist attractions, etc.), and mine was no different. I didn’t want to rely on a free API of places that could evaporate at any time. Buying API access to one was prohibitively expensive. And shipping without one meant checking-in became a huge data entry process that was not fun. The project got shelved.

Then, a few months ago, my friends over at App.net announced a new API for finding POIs, and attaching metadata about places to posts and private messages. A few months before, they released an API for, among many other things, creating a private timeline of posts for individual accounts. I saw both a way to get a sustainable POIs database and cloud storage for check-in data.

And thus, Ohai was born.

As I’ve stated before, your app needs to sync. This has not gone unnoticed by the startup world, who are offering more and more options for developers to build sync into their apps. Today, Dropbox announced a new datastore API, a system for syncing application data (that isn’t file-based) into and out of Dropbox.

At first glance, this looks like a wonderful solution. You get a drop-in component on iOS, Android, or the web to put your app’s data into the cloud, with very little thought by you. Data gets stored offline automatically. It even handles merging and conflicts quietly in the background. Pretty great, right?

I hope that the Dropbox Datastore API can deliver on these promises. I don’t think they’re necessarily impossible problems to solve. But these are the exact same problems that Core Data + iCloud claims to solve, and between iOS 5 and iOS 6, iCloud hasn’t been able to deliver on that promise. This certainly doesn’t mean Dropbox can’t, or that the Datastore API has problems. Dropbox is certainly well versed in the concept of syncing blobs of data between multiple systems, silently and effectively, as that’s what they’ve been doing for the last five years. But this solution should be approached skeptically and carefully.

Before you ship your app built with the Dropbox Datastore, these claims should be tested thoroughly. Test data sync across 1, 2, 3, 8 different devices. Test it offline. Introduce conflicts. Save data offline. Try multiple conflicts. Create conflicts on one machine while offline, etc. There’s a lot of ways a magic sync solution can fail.

Of course, the benefits to a drop-in solution are immense. You don’t have to write sync logic. You don’t have to wake up at 4 AM because your MongoDB process randomly died, taking your server API out with it. You don’t need to handle the differences in online and offline state. You know there’s a company whose goal it is to solve this problem for you; that’s their job.

Just be careful. When it comes to any tool that claims to be a cure-all, make sure it does the job.

In the last few years, an interesting alternative to paper currency has risen in the form of Bitcoin. I started paying attention to Bitcoin two years ago, and have owned some ever since. I’ve purchased physical and digital goods with it, as well as traded it for cash. It’s particularly intriguing to me because it maintains the core properties of economic models while creating a system of inflation guided by encryption algorithms rather than humans. And it’s grown in huge popularity over that time, with a net worldwide worth of over $750 million USD at the time of this writing.

Many people have asked me about Bitcoin, so here’s a basic introduction to what Bitcoin is and how it works.

Note: I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant. This should not be construed as legal or financial advice. If you use the information in this post, you agree that it is at your own risk.