I have a question for our regular readers here. I am being inundated by pitches from developers who want me to look at their apps and write about them in TidBITS—currently 15 to 20 per week. In a couple of cases, I have written them up, but many of the apps I find interesting have bugs and gaps that are instantly obvious to me. The developers are all wonderful about responding to my feedback (and we’re going to get some great apps out of it in the end), but particularly while I am recovering from this concussion, it’s just overwhelming. But it would be overwhelming anyway—I can’t evaluate 15 to 20 apps per week in any real way, and if anything, the submission rate is picking up in speed.
I had the idea of creating a new category here in Discourse that would let developers introduce their apps to you and let me step away from being the middleman. I’d still test and write about apps I find particularly interesting for TidBITS, but there would be plenty of others that might interest you but aren’t my cup of tea. You’ve seen a few TidBITS Talk posts along those lines, where I’ve given developers permission to post. Overall, I think that has worked relatively well, and my hope would be that these people would become productive members of the community beyond just discussing their app. Many of them are not native English speakers, so there would probably be more AI-written/translated text.
Thoughts about this? I definitely want to create a new category so people could ignore it if they wanted. I would probably also suggest (or possibly require) a specific title format to make it easier for us to scan submissions. And I would make it clear that the only way this can continue is if the developers are responsive to our questions and comments. Other things we would want to request or require?
As long as readers can ignore the posts easily if they wish, and developers are adding more than simply spam, I think it’s a great opportunity for TidBITS readers to provide their experiences and insights to the developer community to everyone’s benefit, including our own.
Any developer that creates an account here must be a member for some minimum time – perhaps 30 days?-- before they can post about their apps. That might eliminate some junk posts. Is this even possible?
I think a separate category for app developers to post in could be useful. It might need constraints to avoid flooding/spamming, but maybe that won’t be an actual issue… hard to say without trying. Seems worth a test to me.
And a good deal of us are paying members just to note that. Wanting to support a forum with the level of quality discussion and moderation that is all too rare these days. I think we all would want to protect that.
A few good suggestions as guidelines above. Worth a try if it’s a pilot I think. Might be worth a checkin with folk after a month or two.
This is your site to do as you wish, but since you’re asking, this sounds good to me. If it starts getting bad for some reason, I’m sure you’d stop it and start moderating again, and those members who don’t care about these apps can just set an ignore for the category and never see them. I say give it a shot and see how things go.
Don’t give away what you’ve built here, Adam. If you don’t want to charge them, at least screen the posts to ensure they meet some of the excellent restrictions that others have already mentioned. If I want to get swamped with ads posing as “news” I’ll read 9to5Mac.
Agree with a lot of these points, the app should have a free trial period and a discount for TidBITS members, Apple Developer certified (so theoretically some vetting).
If there are guidelines to keep the advertising and stick to true eval and feedback I think it might work. I have build a couple of iOS apps and it is hard to get feedback from family and friends, if the developers truly want testing and feedback and not first off advertising I would be willing to look at apps that fit a need I may have.
In my experience, the developers are extremely happy to get feedback and almost always turn around a new version within a day or two. It’s actually kind of fun when I have the time and interest to make comments. What’s easier than writing an app with AI is getting someone else to write the app with AI exactly the way you want.
Creating something exactly like you want even if no one uses it is fun and really satisfying. I don’t know how to program but I am doing pretty good defining features and letting the ai developers build.
If so, how many years of coding experience do you have? How many of them with the language in which you wrote the app?
Word on the street is that a lot of new apps are being written with vibe coding by people with no experience, or at least very little experience with the language in which the app is written, with foreseeable results. At the same time, vibe coding appears to be a very useful way to reduce development time for experienced (~ 10 or more years experience) coders.
As a Mac developer with over 45 years of software development experience, I’ve refrained from asking Adam to review/critique my apps because of the obvious imposition on his and everyone’s time. Suggestions presented so far to manage the content and invitees sounds reasonable to me. Hopefully it can be accomplished without disturbing the current content with essentially marketing hype. As mentioned by others, we all know where to find those Apple websites. Thank you for considering the option and soliciting feedback Adam.
What do people think about requiring Mac apps to be available on the Mac App Store? I typically don’t go through the Mac App Store for my Mac apps, but that’s because I’m usually buying apps from established developers. If we’re talking about developers without a track record, availability on the MAS at least decreases the odds that we’re going to inadvertently download a crypto mining app.
