Graham Miln asked “What does The Life mean to me?”

I think Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire and MarsEdit put it best in an interview with Jeff Harrell of The Shape of Days blog. Unfortunately, the link has been obscured by an interview with Andy Hertzfeld and is also on hiatus. I found the quote of the Brent Simmons interview that I was looking for on Daring Fireball though:

[Brent Simmons]: But the main thing to remember is what Walt Disney said, “I don’t make movies to make money. I make money to make more movies.” We went into this business wanting to make software. Money allows us to continue making software.

When I read that, a bell went off in my head: ding! Exactamundo! That’s pretty much what The Life means to me: its a sustainable way to make great Mac apps and keep making them. And hopefully that make a lot of Mac users happy.

A lesson learned this past week: I need to pace myself better. One night I stayed up until 5AM and only got about 4 hours of sleep. The end result was that the next night I had to sleep much earlier. So I ended up losing at least 2 hours of working time.

So I’ll stick to my schedule and consider the long term perspective instead of trying to be a hero on any given night.

Big thanks go out to one of my favorite writers on all things Mac-related and inventor of the term “The Life”, John Gruber. He put me on Daring Fireball’s Linked List, resulting in a big avalanche of folks coming to see this blog and WebnoteHappy Lite. If you’re one of those folks, thanks for coming and hopefully you checked out WebnoteHappy Lite. I’ve got the full version of WebnoteHappy in the works and I’m furiously working on it to finish it up.

It’s people like John who make you glad you were savvy enough to be a Mac user – Daring Fireball is sleek, Mac-focused, elegant yet packed with useful info. Plus its obvious that he’s passionate about Macs and is a master of prose. The Macworld 2006 Review is one of my favorites.

What’s more, John is trying to live The Life in his own way, as a blog writer. Interestingly, he’s not doing it via the traditional putting up the stack of Google Adsense ads, but instead via a membership model. Jason Kottke proved that that “micropatrons” model is indeed possible.

I’ll be buying a membership after I figure out if I want to start lifting weights again and get a medium t-shirt or just get the large. It’s good to support aspiring Mac Indies, whether they’re writing software or intensely engaging blogs with in-depth reviews, news and interviews.

Sometimes I tell people about my dreams of living The Life and they ask, “Isn’t that risky?” “Don’t 99.9999% of businesses fail within the first 10 years?” “Shouldn’t you be thinking about your children’s future?” Basically they’d probably rather have me working at one of the local government contracting firms that have 3 or 4 letter acronyms that are sort of the anchors of the Washington DC Tech Economy. Not that that’s bad or anything. But it just is not that exciting.

…

Today a group of us had lunch with an old friend and co-worker, Ana. She is leaving on a trip to go sailing with her boyfriend. Around the world. Well, not exactly in a race sort of way, more of a meandering and exploring way. She just sold her condo and has some additional savings to fund her trip. Along the way, she probably won’t have much medical care, will probably face some stormy seas, has the chance of facing pirates, won’t be making much money, and worst of all (in my humble opinion), won’t have reliable internet access! Oh and did I mention that they’re planning to live with minimal expenses which means they shouldn’t have to work for at least a year, probably more?

Next to all that, saving up some money, quitting your job, and then living The Life full-time seems almost like a safe choice. At least you’ll have good internet access. ;)

Day 8 was a wash, since my dentist appointment really knocked me out cold. I was actually in the dentist chair for over 2 hours! Then asleep in my bed for another 12 due to the pain medicine. Very uncharacteristic of me, but quite refreshing.

Day 9 has turned out to be much better. I’ve been finding a lot of link love for WebnoteHappy which is really exciting. Plus I made some improvements and put out another private beta.

Earlier, Graham Miln wrote in and asked:

Do you see your living The Life as a new goal?

Yes, it is a goal. But it is a long term one. Gus illuminated us how long living The Life full-time can take in his “How to become an independent (Mac) programmer in just 1068 days“. I figure I’ve been at this for 9 days (more actually, but I’ll have to count those days later after looking in my personal log) so that means I really only have 1059 left. Maybe Gus should make a calendar. :)

What would that mean for your family?

I think they would see me more often. OK, they’d see me all day. Unless I decide to live The Life in a local coffee house. But really I like soda better than coffee and I’d probably gain a 100 pounds if I just sat in the local McDonald’s all day drinking Coke and eating burgers.

Seriously, the biggest problem I see now for people aspiring to live The Life is health insurance. Especially for those of us who have families. Its expensive here in the United States and it just seems to go up and up and up. So I’ll probably be blogging about that in the future.

And spending time with your family, especially with small children is wonderful. There’s something about seeing your children smile, play and grow up that is much more satisfying than anything in your office, even your smiling co-workers faces. :)

I’ll answer Graham’s other question “What does The Life mean to you?” later when I have some more energy.

How do you know when you’ve got too many unread RSS feeds?

…

When your wife asks “I tried to open Safari, but I accidentally opened 16191. What’s 16191?”

Thinks hard… but stumped. Then I lean over and laugh. “Hehehe… that’s just NetNewsWire, honey.”

Yesterday I had some serious dental work done, including extracting an impacted wisdom tooth. Ouch! Fortunately my dentist prescribed Tylenol 3 for the pain and after that, I caught up on a lot of sleep. :) I’ll be back working on WebnoteHappy tonight.

Well today is the end of my vacation where I worked on “The Life” full-time. But I’ll go back to my regular schedule of doing “The Life” part-time late at night when my family (and most of the DC area) is asleep.

So the big question is: would I want to live “The Life” year-round? I’d answer now, but I’m about to pass out and dream some more dreams. I released another private beta tonight with improved drag and drop support between other apps and WebnoteHappy. Also, I’ve started taking “Pro” out of the interface, since I’m pretty sure I’m going to go with just “WebnoteHappy” for the full version. It’s shorter and makes a good combination of App / App Lite, with App being the shareware version and App Lite being the freeware veresion, which several popular Mac apps use, the chief being NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite.

Oh – back to the question – in short, yes. But I’ll provide a longer answer later.

Ah – you thought perhaps The Life was a 5 day – 40 hour work week? No, not quite. To me, The Life is at least a 6 day week with how ever many hours you can fit each day. I’d say take a day off or at least take it easy one day because I’ve heard from other Mac Indies that they wish they had paced themselves a little better and gotten more rest and relaxation along the way. I think I heard Steve Gerhman, who writes PathFinder, say that actually.

This morning, I presented at the local Mac user group, the Washington Apple Pi. At 9am. Not exactly the time I like to get up on a Saturday morning, but this was a special occasion: the first time I presented WebnoteHappy (the full version) to a live audience. It went well and the beta didn’t crash. Then again, it doesn’t really crash when I’m running it normally, but I’ve seen so many presenters crash and burn on stage in my life.

I sort of felt like the rookie. Or the 16 year old they bring along to the Olympics for ice skating just to see if they might have a chance of medaling.

Matt, who does Booxter, a personal library management app, I think won the award for most gadgets on-stage showing off iSight scanning, CueCat scanning, Bluetooth scanning, and my favorite: drag and drop from Amazon.

Steve, formerly of Apple (he programmed for the Mac even before it was released) and AOL (he had the chance to get steve@aol.com but is glad that he didn’t because other people who got their_first-name@aol.com eventually had to change due to an avalanche of spam), showed off RollCall Directory which creates directories of people as well as address labels, name labels and other sorts of labels. I thought that was a really good use of the AddressBook API. Now if only Apple would release good APIs for all the other built-in apps on OS X.

Jon finished with Golly Gee Blocks, which is a 3-D modeling app for students. Pretty cool stuff, especially if you have young kids. I’ll probably be picking up a copy in a little bit for my kids.

Even though I didn’t sell any licenses, I think it was well worth it to present. I had a chance to explain WebnoteHappy and how can help people to a wide range of Mac users and get their feedback. Plus I got a chance to work on my sales and marketing skills, which is probably my weak point (and the weak point of most Indies actually.) Even better, the other Mac Indies and I got together afterwards and talked shop.

I think that helps a lot in trying to live The Life. You see, there’s no “The Life U” like they have for people who want to run McDonald’s Franchises. There’s not a MTLA (Masters of The Life Administration) you can get. Not even a 6 week “The Life” certification! No – it’s more like a “street smarts” sort of deal where you learn things through the school of hard knocks. Or perhaps the school of trial and error. But when a bunch of Mac Indies get together, it feels more like an old-style Guild where you share techniques and experiences.

BTW, I actually didn’t get a chance to scan people’s eyes for “the click”, but several people asked questions – which is good. And more people came up to me after the meeting to ask more questions and give me feedback. That’s always encouraging to an Indie trying to live The Life.

I’m off to continue improving the drag and drop integration between WebnoteHappy and other OS X apps and then get some sleep.

I’m presenting at the local Mac user group, the Washington Apple Pi tomorrow, actually in about 8 hours. I demoed WebnoteHappy Lite as a brief intermission during a presentation on Macworld that I gave three weeks back at the Tysons Corner Apple Store.

This time, I’m going to demo WebnoteHappy Lite as well as the beta version of WebnoteHappy. Its part of a Shareware and Freeware session where we’ll also see other Mac apps from local Mac Indies:

• Booxter by Deep Prose
• GollyGee Blocks by Golly Gee
• Roll Call Directory by Midnight Mage Software

I know the guys behind Booxter – Matt and GollyGee Blocks – Jon. Jon and I actually go way back. He was a user of my first BBS back in the late 80s when we were teenagers. I’m looking forward to meeting Steve aka the Midnight Mage. It’s good to be friends with other Mac Indies, I think. They’ve probably hit bumps that you’ll hit later on and vice-versa. I’ve found the Mac Indie community to be really supportive.

Unfortunately, I’m not shipping yet like my fellow presenting Indies. I had hoped to be shipping by the meeting so I could take orders. But I think more important is that setting the goal of shipping by the meeting made things more urgent. So WebnoteHappy will ship a lot sooner than it would have if I wasn’t planning on presenting.

Hopefully WebnoteHappy will receive a good reception. I’m a little nervous about demoing a beta app, but I’ve seen so many people crash and burn on much larger stages (JavaOne 2004 was pretty harsh for on-stage demos) that I’m not too worried. You just pick yourself up and keep going.

I’m really interested in seeing what my fellow Pi members think. My beta testers are pretty cutting edge though they are quite discriminating. So I’ll be scanning the audience carefully to look for the “click” that people get in their eyes when something makes sense to them.