Each video in this four-part series is about two minutes and, while the overview is fairly rudimentary, I hope the videos can still be helpful to those interested in producing, or just curious about the business. The math still checks out but funny how these numbers seem quaint a decade later. You’d need to double everything now.

Enjoy!

A lot has changed in 11 years, including our website. We’re now at kgmtheatrical.com.

As much as I am encouraged by Focus, however, I have encountered some unexpected behavior, and possibly bugs, in the beta versions. So, I’m starting this post to document the pain points that I, and others, are hitting, in the hopes that Apple can fix them before the final versions ship.

First, The good

• Focus is highly configurable, with the ability to create multiple custom Focus modes and fine tine what apps you see and what notifications are delivered when in a Focus.

• Focus can be set up to only display select Home Screens. For instance, don’t want to see your Mail or work chat app while exercising? Create a Home Screen with just your fitness apps, and then have Focus only display this Home Screen while in your fitness Focus.

• Focus is the closest analog to Closing Apps on the Mac that I think we’re ever likely to see on iOS.

Improvements 

• Currently, notifications from apps, people or groups must be manually toggled on, or included, when setting up a Focus mode. However, there are many times when it would be easier to set up a Focus by excluding certain people or groups. 

• As someone who is constantly stymied by my own lack of will power, I wouldn’t mind some additional guardrails that I can toggle on to hinder me from checking apps I am trying to avoid in a Focus. Even though an app’s notifications are silenced, or it’s on a hidden Home Screen, an app is still only a swipe away in App Library or search. Perhaps Apple could allow users to hide these apps from search and App Library when in Focus and, even better, prevent apps from launching if they aren’t included in a Focus. 

• The search field is missing from contacts selection. I’m convinced this is an omission, given that the search field exists for selecting apps. 

Bug or Weird Implementation? 

• My biggest gripe currently is that notifications I’ve set to be silenced in a Focus mode on my iPhone or iPad are still coming through to my watch, even though I’m running the beta of watchOS 8. Having notifications I explicitly don’t want to receive vibrate or ding the device that I’m wearing on my wrist almost entirely defeats the purpose of Focus. I am praying this is an early beta bug that will be corrected soon.

• Similarly, only two of my six focus modes are syncing to the watch, which could be related to the point above or a separate bug.

• Currently, toggling the button below on will prevent silent notifications from showing on the Lock Screen. But, shouldn’t it be the opposite? Or perhaps the toggle copy should read “Hide silent notifications on Lock Screen.”

What do you think of Focus so far? Are you hitting bugs or limitations that you’d like to see corrected before the final version of Focus ships this fall? Please let me know in the comments below or on Twitter @danielkuney.

The chief offenders of the apps that can instantly zap my focus include iMessages, my email client and our internal work chat app. Even just a quick peak and glancing at a preview, even momentarily, can throw my focus for hours, or, worse, get my mind needlessly racing about something non-urgent.

However, the Mac has long offered a simple and elegant way to combat this: closing applications. On desktop computers, the guiding principle of applications is that they can be opened and closed. For years, we had no choice in the matter. Leaving apps open would slow our computers, rendering them nearly unusable; and thus we were encouraged, if not forced, to close apps that weren’t integral to the task at hand.

But then two things happened in relative tandem. One, our computers began to be engineered with bigger and faster memory chips. And, two, mobile phones were built with solid state drives that could hold apps open indefinitely.

The concept of closing applications, whether on phones or desktops, fell mostly by the wayside. And, yet, I still regularly close applications on my Mac. If I have to engage my mind on a complex task, like a contract or a budget, the first thing I do is close any open app that I don’t actively need. For the few hours that I’m then engaged in this focused work, I experience not only no distractions, but no temptation to open these apps and allow myself to be distracted.

However, there is no way to close an app on my iPhone or iPad. Sure, I can swipe it away. But the temptation still lurks to swipe it right back. Apple has tried to give us tools to help us manage this temptation, from Do Not Disturb to Screen Time, but these tools still depend upon our own ability to control our impulses.

Yes, it’s true, I could just as easily be tempted to re-open a closed app on my desktop. But, the funny thing is, I’m not. There’s something so satisfying, so concrete, about closing an application, that I almost have to will myself to re-open it when I’m ready for less focused work.

On iOS and iPad OS 15, due out this fall, Apple is rolling out yet a new system for helping us focus called, appropriately enough, Focus. The key benefit to Focus is that it will help us limit the people and apps who seek to interrupt us throughout the day. But will it be good enough to limit our own insatiable need to peak, check and crack at our own focus?

Something tells me it won’t matter how many new tools Apple rolls out to help users limit distractions on their mobile devices, nothing will ever compare with the ability on desktop computers to perform the most basic of all application tasks: close.

And Word is a Big Powerful Application. There’s a toolbar that sits atop the screen, and within that toolbar are icons, many icons in fact, for performing actions. To the right of the toolbar there’s an arrow. Clicking on the arrow displays even more icons. And on top of the icons are menu bars. And within those menus are more options. Sometimes there are menus within the menus. 

This is to say that if you want to format your text in all the ways big and small, Word has your back.

But what if you just want to write text? And to focus your mind’s eye exclusively on that text? Enter the text editor: applications for and by lovers of the written word. While Word was designed to serve every conceivable market (students, researchers, lawyers, etc.), text editors are crafted for just one audience: writers. 

BBEdit, iA Writer, Ulysses, and Scrivener are perhaps the most well known. At one point I tried them all, but I keep coming back to Ulysses. For my purposes, which is namely to write short to medium length articles for online publication, Ulysses just fits me like a glove. Case in point: what you’re reading now has been written entirely in Ulysses. 

Text Editor as File Organization 

When using Word, you are actually using two different applications. One is the actual program called Word, in which you write and edit text. But the other is the system application for storing, saving and managing files. On the Mac this is called Finder. On the PC...I have no idea what this is called on a PC.

Structurally, a file is stored somewhere on your computer, and you must find, select and open that file before editing it in Word.

In Ulysses, documents all live inside the app itself. The main application window is made up of three columns. The main column is a large blank space for writing. This is your editor. The two left columns are collapsable, and are used for document organization, what Ulysses calls your library. 

The advantage here is that you can slide docs in and out of the editor with ease. And how you organize your writing becomes as much a part of the writing process as the writing itself. 

Docs in the library are sorted into groups (and sub groups if you so choose). I currently have groups for Medium Focus, Personal Notes, Client Proposals and Introductory Emails. 

I am typically working on a few articles for Medium Focus at any one time. Using Ulysses, I can slide an article into the main editor panel, and with one click (or tap on iPad OS), hide the library panels leaving me with nothing but my words on a screen.

Almost Exclusively Just Text on a Screen 

As I mentioned above, the joy of a text editor, is that there’s very little between you and your text.

The library columns can collapse offscreen so all you’re left with is the editor. There is a toolbar on top of the editor with six grayscale icons. Frankly, this doesn’t bother me one bit, but if you just want one giant editor canvas, selecting Editor Focus mode from the menu bar will literally remove everything from the editor that isn’t your text. 

Markdown

Okay, this is going to sound geeky, and I’m going to choose my words here carefully because I want to encourage non-technical writers to give Ulysses a shot.

Ulysses supports Markdown. If you know what that is, great. 

For non-technical readers: Markdown allows you to format text without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Want to bold some text? Just surround the text with two asterisks. Leave an invisible note to yourself? Surround the text with two plus symbols. 

Yes, there are some keystrokes to memorize, but you can pick up most of what you need to know in under 5 minutes. 

In short: Yes, Markdown may be new to you. But don’t be scared by it. 

Editing and Proofreading

Because Ulysses uses Markdown, there’s some neat built-in tools for proofing and editing docs. In addition to leaving secret comments, you can highlight text or even “mark for deletion.” The latter will keep text visible in your document that you are contemplating deleting, but aren’t ready to do so yet. You can still see it, but the text turns red and is displayed with a strikethrough, and it won’t be included with the full article if you choose to publish your Ulysses doc directly to the web.

For folks who hesitate to delete text, this is a great trick to keep some writing in text purgatory. 

Ulysses also has a built-in interface for checking style and grammar, which has already encouraged me to tighten a few awkwardly worded sentences in this review! 

Publishing

If I were a used car salesman this is the part of the pitch where I’d say, “But wait, there’s more.” So: but wait, there’s more!

Ulysses offers direct publishing to some of the most popular blogging platforms: WordPress, Medium, micro.blog, and Ghost. Without ever leaving Ulysses, writers can publish their posts to existing blogs on these platforms.

And, for WordPress users, Ulysses supports pushing changes and edits to previously published posts. The advantage here is that writers can maintain just one one master document, and updating the master can push edits to the version already published online. 

Additionally, the above blogging platforms don’t offer satisfying solutions for publishing on-the-go from iPad OS or even iOS. With Ulysses direct publishing, one could write an article on a mobile device and publish it directly to a blog. 

Missing Integration with Substack

If I have one quibble with Ulysses it’s that it doesn’t support direct publishing to Substack. In fairness though, I’m not sure if Substack offers an API to make this possible. Still, it’s the one wall that I hit on a routine basis.

Currently, when I want to publish to Substack I have to copy and paste my text into the web-based Substack editor. While most of my formatting remains intact, I have encountered at least one incompatibility: my H3 headings don’t transfer from Ulysses to Substack.

Further, if I want to make a change to a published Substack post, I have to make the edit in both Ulysses and Substack so that both documents stay current. 

Hopefully this is something Ulysses can bring to Substack as soon as it’s technically feasible. Substack is gaining popularity at a rapid clip and I suspect there are many Substack writers who would be interested in using Ulysses (perhaps writers reading this very post).

I suppose I should also mention that there’s not a direct integration with Squarespace or Wix blogs either. On the one hand, those may be two of the most popular blogging platforms online today, but, on the other, I suspect the kind of user who appreciates a focused text editor like Ulysses is the kind of blogger who would prefer a more advanced blogging solution like Substack, Wordpress or Ghost. 

Conclusion 

I’m not sure if Ulysses has made me a better writer. But it has made we want to write more. There’s something refreshing and satisfying about a tool that focuses my mind’s eye on just my words on a screen. 

Whereas Word reminds me of writing book reports and term papers as a student, Ulysses puts me in the mindset to relish the craftsmanship of writing. 

Perhaps that’s not giving Word enough credit, but, that’s also not giving Ulysses enough credit where credit is due. Ulysses is pure joy for writers. 

Now what? How do you get people to read the dang thing? That is, outside politely pressuring your friends and family to read it?

Below is my advice on how to sell a newly launched product today. I’ve started a few companies, and professionally I counsel Broadway and Off-Broadway shows on how to sell tickets, but I think you could replace “tickets” with pretty much anything: your self-published book, a new line of craft t-shirts, heck, even a car.

I’m going to give you the advice I would give anyone coming to my office in 2021. Most of this has been my standard advice since 2015, and some will of it will age out by 2025. But we can only think about what’s working now.

Like all unsolicited advice, please take this with a giant grain of salt. Did something different work for you? That’s great! And I’m sure for some products this would entirely not work. But, for 95% of what I see launched and sold today, I stand by this advice.

With that out of the way: let’s begin. It’s actually simple. So simple, I can boil it down to three steps.

Step 1

Delete your social media accounts. Okay, that’s a bit extreme, and I don’t mean it literally. Here’s what I really mean: don’t try to become a thought leader or a social media influencer. 

Some succeed at this game, but most don’t. Gaining an audience on social takes one of two things: sheer dumb luck or years and years and years of daily hour by hour content creation. The tweets, the Instagrams, the posts. Most of them will go into the dark hollow void of nothingness. 

I often like to think about Marques Brownlee who is perhaps one of the most influential YouTubers of all time and who today has 14.1 million subscribers. But Marques started his YouTube channel twelve years ago in 2009, and it took him 100 videos to get his first 78 subscribers. 

He just kept pumping out video after video. He put in the time, and he put in the work. Do you have 12 years to develop your social media profile to sell your product? 

Here’s another secret, most people who do try to become thought leaders or who build popular social media profiles have spent a lot of money to do so. They have teams scheduling their posts and ghostwriters writing their blog posts. And even then it doesn’t translate to sales. See below. Dollar for dollar, minute for minute, it’s the worst return on investment. 

But here’s why you’ll be tempted to keep at it. The metrics! Ohh, the metrics. Yesterday you got one like, today three. Last week you had 425 followers, this week 437. You’re growing! You’re getting hotter, just keep posting and that 437 will turn into 10,000 in no time. But you’re being played by the social media companies. They are hooking you in. It’s addictive. The only ones winning here are Twitter and Instagram, so they can keep serving you ads. 

Almost every ad meeting I’m in begins with a recap of the new follower counts gained in the last week, or the top-performing social media post. And then we spend the next two hours pondering why we aren’t selling.

Even if you do succeed at this game, it very rarely translates to sales. I’ve seen artists with social media followings that make me jealous. They tweet, and it’s as if the whole world responds: likes, retweets, comments. Everything they write is pure social media gold. 

And yet: they can’t parlay those retweets and likes into actual sales. Maybe a small handful of sales, but not enough to create a sustainable business. 

So why do people still do it? One: It’s easily seen. There’s an old joke in advertising: make sure to get at least one ad placement near the client’s home or office, they’ll think their ads are everywhere and that you’re a genius. This is what social media is today. Clients are on it, and they think if they see traction on social it will translate to sales. They are wrong, and yet they will endlessly obsess over these metrics. Vanity metrics? I’d say so but read on.

Two: It looks so simple. How long can it take to tweet? Much longer than you think. Now multiply that by the five or six tweets or Insta posts you should be making at minimum each day. Suddenly, this is a full-time job.

Three: If you are a hit, and have a best-selling product, your competition will assume it’s because you have a massive social media following. But it’s the inverse. It’s because their product sold so well in the first place that they could build a social media following. The sales came first and then the social popularity, not the other way around. 

Take a look at the social media account for the Broadway musical Hamilton. The account has 1 million followers and nearly everything they post has hundreds of likes and dozens of retweets. But the social media account didn’t make Hamilton the show a hit, Hamilton the show made their social media account a hit. 

In other words: hit products can produce popular social media accounts. Popular social media accounts do not produce hit products. 

Step 2

Create a basic website on Squarespace, Wix or Shopify. Do not pay a designer thousands of dollars to do this. Also, do not obsess over this website. You will be tempted to obsess, but try not to.

Add the following to your site:

• some text about your product

• an image of the product

• your headshot 

• some testimonials about your product

• and, most importantly, some big buttons for folks to directly purchase your product on your sales channels 

That’s pretty much it. If you want to blog, blog. But don’t focus on page views or SEO. See above on metrics. 

Your site should be your elevator pitch. Someone should be able to look at it and within just about 30 seconds understand what you’re selling and be able to click on a link to buy it. 

Step 3

Create an ad that links to your site on Facebook. 

Facebook ads, and perhaps also Instagram ads depending on your product, offer, in 2021, simply the best return on investment full stop. I’d rather see someone spend $50 on Facebook ads than tweet five times. 

This is where you may want to consider hiring an agency to help you. And you’re welcome to call us if you like (you can find my email on this site). A good agency can help you install a Facebook pixel on your site, target the right audience and perform effective A/B testing. You can probably figure out most of it yourself, but, if you’re busy or just don’t want the hassle, an agency can be your friend here.

But don’t let the agency sell you on a host of other services. They are here to help you execute on Step 3. 

Clarifications, Modifications, Exceptions

If I’m going to make a minor exception to most of the above it would be for visual artists who are selling their artwork online. I have seen native Instagram posting to be somewhat effective for visual artists. And, obviously, I would add a photo gallery to the website in Step 2. 

Nevertheless, photographing artwork is time-consuming and costly to do it well. I’d still save most of the resulting photos for the ads in Step 3, but if you have them, you might as well post them.

The above is where I would spend my advertising time, money, and attention for launching a new product. A communications firm can also be useful for products at the right stage for engaging with the press. 

Bringing it all Home 

This is what I would recommend to almost any new book, product, or Broadway show today. If a product is already a hit, I might throw in some outdoor, but I’m a believer in the K.I.S.S. principle for pretty much everything in life, including advertising. Could all of this change by 2023 or even 2022? Maybe. But big shifts like that occur gradually. So, my guess is you can bank on this approach for the next few years. 

Now that I’ve shared my advice, feel free to let me know in the comments if you agree, disagree or if you’ve seen other tactics be successful for you. 

The irony was I actually was in shape for most of my 30s. I routinely went to the gym and ate what I would call a mostly healthy diet. That is, save for the giant bags of candy I was known for bringing back to the office in the middle of a stressful workday. I look back now at some of the photos from even my late 30s and I think, damn, what happened to that guy?

If I’m being honest, my life is still full of anxiety and uncertainty. The pandemic has taken its toll. But I’m trying to breathe more and stress a little less. Therapy is helping too. 

I stepped on the scale this morning and I’m a touch under 183. At one point I was hovering at 163. But I was running more then. 

In five and half weeks I turn 41. I know that’s not the round milestone one usually pegs a weight loss goal to but these are pandemic years. And 175 isn’t exactly abs material but so what? It’s a moderate goal for moderate times. 

Hopefully by holding myself publicly accountable I can make a dent. And fit into my jeans circa January 2020. 

Alfred Matthew Yankovic grew up not in Los Angeles proper but outside of it, near Compton, in the working-class suburb of Lynwood. He was an only child, a miracle baby, born late in his parents’ life near the tail end of the baby boom, in 1959. Weird Al’s mother, Mary, loved her son nearly to the point of suffocation. She would devote her life to protecting him from all the many dangers of the world, real and imaginary.

Although Alfred’s grades were perfect, and he could solve any math problem you threw at him, his social life was agonizing. Imagine every nerd cliché: He was scrawny, pale, unathletic, nearsighted, awkward with girls — and his name was Alfred. And that’s all before you even factor in the accordion.

Mary Yankovic was so overprotective that her son spent much of his life alone in his room. He never played at friends’ houses, never had sleepovers, never explored his neighborhood on his bike. The farthest he was allowed to ride was half a block, to his Aunt Dot’s house, and his mother would stand on the lawn and watch. For Alfred’s protection, she would censor the mail, sifting through catalogs page by page with a black marker in hand, scribbling out anything inappropriate: bra ads, pictures of women in bikinis.

At 16, Alfred Yankovic graduated high school. He was valedictorian, and his speech at the ceremony was dutiful, serious and formal. And then Yankovic finally escaped his lonely bedroom: He packed up his things, loaded up the junky old family car and drove off — alone — to start a new life. He would study architecture at California Polytechnic State University, about four hours north of home. As he drove off, Alfred’s parents got in their new car and followed directly behind him. Alfred watched them in his rearview mirror. As soon as he hit the freeway, he gunned the engine and lost them.

If, in the superhero narrative of Weird Al Yankovic, there is a radioactive spider-bite moment, it has to be open-mic night at Cal Poly in 1977. Imagine the scene: a bunch of longhaired idealists with banjos and acoustic guitars, ready to shock the world with the beauty of their fingerpicking. And then Weird Al steps onstage. He brought with him not only his accordion and his large glasses and his little mustache but his whole awkward chaotic energy. Miller set up his bongos, and together the pair launched into the exact opposite of earnest folk music. Yankovic played “Wipeout” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and a 10-minute medley that he claimed covered every song ever written in the history of the world.

Before that night, Yankovic’s public performances included childhood accordion competitions and a cousin’s wedding. Now he was sharing his own music, the essence of himself, with a roomful of strangers. The odds were high that he would bomb, then disappear back into his tiny room forever.

Instead, the opposite happened: The crowd went crazy. Weird Al’s ridiculous music got a standing ovation. The applause would not stop. People hollered for more.

Weird Al has spent basically his whole life making his music for exactly these people, which is to say for his childhood self. For many decades, he has been trying to delight Alfred Yankovic, the bright, painfully shy kid who grew up alone in his tiny bedroom. For the benefit of that lonely boy, he reshaped the whole world of pop culture. His ridiculous music sent out a pulse, a signal, and these were the people it drew: the odd, the left out. A crowd of friends for that lonely kid. As I watched him with his fans, sometimes I felt as if Weird Al was multiplying all around me, multiplying inside of me. We were one crowd, united in isolation, together in a great collective loneliness that — once you recognized it, once you accepted it — felt right on the brink of being healed.

Feels like a Broadway musical to me. 

Adding to this anxiety about where we rate, or how we stack up, is our online presence. Ironically, we do it with the notion that being so online may actually help our careers. We feel like we need to be on Insta, or Twitter, or read the industry newsletter first thing in the morning. But how often do these sources bring us useful information compared to how often do they just make us feel a little shittier?

It’s been a devastating year and a half. I suspect many of us are navigating mental and emotional health issues, perhaps for the first time. Right now, more than ever, we have to pay attention to what sources are making us feel good about ourselves, and what sources, even if it’s unintended, have a propensity to make us feel a litter sadder than we need to be.

Is your industry newsletter making you feel like you’re the only one not landing new clients? The business section making it seem like you’re the only one without the corner office? Your friends on Twitter and Insta always seem to be going from one success to the next?

I’m going to let you in on a secret. It’s okay to unsubscribe from that newsletter, remove those sites from your bookmarks and mute those folks on social. Will you miss some important industry news? Yes. Will your life go on? Yes. You can always re-subscribe in a few weeks. But if opening up these sources every morning is giving you anxiety, it’s okay to take a breather.

In another lifetime I ran a few marathons and, on race day, our coaches would remind us to run our own race. The runner whooshing past us may be clocking 6 minute miles, but that’s their race, not ours. Most of us were never going to be elite athletes, it was all about our PB - our personal best. Not another runner’s PB, our PB.

In this time of rebuilding and restoration it’s okay, maybe even necessary, to focus on our own PBs.

We think sometimes that we have to follow all the things and be in the know about everything. But I’m calling bullshit on that. For most of us there lies the road to anxiety and self doubt. It’s time to run your own race. Try to nail your next audition or client pitch meeting. Stop wasting precious emotional resources on everyone else’s race.

Around the same time my weariness about Twitter began to peak. The algorithmic timeline and the alerts about suggested trends and topics was giving me more anxiety than joy each time I opened Twitter.

And so HEY World popped into my life at the perfect moment and I found myself dipping my toe back into blogging. I wrote some long posts, but most were no more than two paragraphs. If I had a quick thought, I could write it down and hit send. It was like Twitter but without the pressure to get likes or retweets. I could share a few thoughts and it was merely calm. 

Blogging once again fit neatly into a certain place in my life and my desire to share some thoughts occasionally. But then HEY’s parent company had a public meltdown and I no longer felt comfortable using their blogging service. 

Enter Substack.

Substack is a blogging platform disguised as a newsletter platform. Metaphorically speaking, they put the emphasis on the other syllaBLE. Whereas platforms like Squarespace, Wix and Wordpress promote their “get up and running fast” blogging tools, Substack markets itself first and foremost as a platform for newsletters.

And I think they were right to do so. We’re at peak newsletter and Substack is hands down the easiest way to launch a newsletter for either personal or professional use. I dabbled with Ghost, which is a great platform as well, but it’s not for the faint of heart. 

But, while Substack promotes itself as a newsletter platform, it’s a damn good blogging platform. The text editor is robust, there are just enough options for customization, and the resulting website for reading newsletter posts is easy on the eyes. Like I said: a blogging platform designed as a newsletter. 

Within an hour I had a blog running on Substack. Only, I was using Substack “off-label” so to speak, or putting the emphasis back on the first SYLable, by using it primarily as a place to blog. The good news is that I can see myself continuing to Substack for the foreseeable future. With that said, there are a few minor improvements I’d love to see come to the platform sooner rather than later. 

Email Digests

As I mentioned, most of my posts are short musings. They really don’t deserve their own email. Also, I’m not writing about anything timely. I’m not every day Inbox material, and I’m quite content with that arrangement. 

As such, it would be great of Substack offered a way to select a few posts every now and then, say, once a week, and automatically assemble a digest that I could blast to my subscribers. Maybe I could write a quick preamble and then Substack would pull the post headings, links and excerpt text into a nicely formatted email. 

API for Third-Party Text Editors

I have to imagine that a number of Substack users, especially those who have been publishing online for years now, are quite particular about their writing tools. Whether it’s BBEdit, iA Writer, MarsEdit or Ulysses, writers are persnickety about their text editors. Personally I’m all-in with Ulysses. 

It would be great if I could draft my posts in Ulysses and then publish them directly to Substack. This would also make publishing on the go even easier.

Tags or Categories Behind the Scenes

In general, I’m not a big fan of tags. They just look clunky and add extraneous UI. That said, Substack currently displays recent posts below the main blog entry. Because I tend to write about a diverse set of topics, it would be great if I could surface there other posts of mine that readers may find relevant. A behind the scenes tagging system would be a simple way to implement this. 

So, yeah, one week into my Substack journey and I’m quite happy with the platform. Oh, and if you like this post please consider subscribing to Medium Focus. 

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Spotify’s adding another big name to its list of exclusive podcasts: Dax Shepard and his show Armchair Expert, which is one of the most popular podcasts running. All past and future episodes will be available exclusively on Spotify starting July 1st. Along with the exclusive distribution rights to Armchair Expert.

A key component of Spotify’s podcasting moves is that it makes shows available to both free and paying users, and also includes ads for both of them. This means that Spotify makes ad money on every podcast listen. With Armchair Expert, the company can bring more people to Spotify, offer another popular show exclusively, and sell more ads, all in a quest to become the dominant place people consume audio.

Do I subscribe and listen to Armchair Expert? Yes. Will I download Spotify and switch my podcast listening to Spotify to continue subscribing to Armchair Expert? Absolutely not.

For me, how I consume media is just as important as what media I consume. I may be in the small minority of people who feel this way, which, if so, is great news for Spotify. That means most listeners will happily download a new app to continue enjoying Armchair Expert. 

But I equate podcast listening with Overcast. If I can’t fire up my favorite podcasting app to listen to a show, then that show simply doesn’t exist to me. Some folks will see U2 anywhere they play, others will wait until they come back to MSG. I’m in the latter camp. 

First there were the promoted tweets: ads disguised as tweets that are appearing with ever more frequency in our timelines. Then, at least for me, the timeline went from exactly the way I wanted it (reverse chronological order) to what the fuck kind of order is this?

The rot quickly piled on. Over the last couple of years all manner of annoyances crept into the timeline: What’s Happening, Who to Follow, Topics to Follow, Suggested Topics, something called Spaces, and, now, a new thing with audio. All right there in the timeline when all I want…is my timeline!

On a lark, however, I recently downloaded TweetBot, a third party Twitter application created by the indie development firm, Tapbots. There are TweetBot apps for both iOS and macOS, although the iOS version has a slightly newer coat of paint. Fundamentally, though, both the iOS and desktop versions share the same feature set and may help make your Twitter timeline spark a little joy again.

I’ve been using both versions for the last couple of weeks and, thanks to TweetBot, my Twitter is Twitter again. When I open TweetBot I see just my feed and nothing else. It’s the difference between being stuck on crowded subway and riding the Amtrak quiet car.

The main UI of TweetBot is simply and “just” one’s feed in reverse chronological order. There are no ads and nothing is promoted, hawked or suggested. It’s literally just the tweets from the people you’ve chosen to follow, in exactly the order they were posted.

There are plenty of other nice touches as well. On iOS, images can be playfully flicked away after opening them. And, on both platforms, a small number appears on the top right corner of the UI to let users know how many tweets are new in their feed.

On macOS users can display multiple columns, TweetDeck style, to simultaneously show any of one’s lists, mentions or searches. However, I’ve been rocking the single column feed these days. More simplicity, more joy.

I do have a few fiddly nitpicks, but nothing close to a showstopper. For one, searching, something I do quite regularly, isn’t quite as robust as it is on the native Twitter apps. A neat trick on Twitter is to limit searches to “people you follow.” This is handy if you want to search for something but make sure you’re only seeing results from trusted sources.

Also, on TweetDeck, I am able to create a column that displays one user’s tweets and replies. If it’s possible to do this on TweetBot I haven’t discovered how. Speaking of columns, it would be great if TweetBot allowed more than two on iPad. This would give TweetDeck users a compelling reason to switch to TweetBot.

But, like I said, these are just minor nitpicks that may also stem from limitations with Twitter’s API. Overall, if you want a Twitter experience that puts your timeline, and nothing else, front and center, then you’re likely going to love opening up your timeline in TweetBot.

Yes, it costs money. And, yes, it’s two separate purchases if you want both the iOS and macOs apps. The iOS app is $5.99 per year, while the macOS version is currently a one-time purchase for $9.99. That’s a small price to pay for if you want nice things, or, in this case, a timeline that takes you back to the simple days of 2017.

[Bonus: I made a quick YouTube walkthrough of Tweetbot for macOS.]