Jared Nelson (Hacker News):
Many of you who have followed TouchArcade for a long time are well aware that we’ve had financial troubles for many years now, and to be frank I think it’s a miracle that we’ve been able to last as long as we have. The truth of the matter is that a website like ours just doesn’t make money anymore. To our own detriment we’ve resisted things like obnoxious in-your-face advertising, egregious clickbait headlines, or ethically questionable sponsorships, which sadly are the types of things that actually still make money in the internet of today.
There are a number of other reasons that have contributed to us reaching this point, but I’d rather not get into all that right now. TouchArcade was an institution for many millions of people over the past 16 years, and it was my full-time job for the last 14+ years.
[…]
The job market is not great anywhere, and finding new work is tough, especially in the games industry. If you are reading this and you have a need for very capable game industry veterans such as ourselves, please reach out.
[…]
If there is some sort of silver lining to all of this, it’s that for the foreseeable future all of the content that has ever been posted to TouchArcade will remain online and accessible to all. More than 33,000 published articles, including more than 4,000 game reviews, not to mention all of our yearly Best Of content and Game of the Year picks. These should hopefully all continue living on into the future for reference purposes and just to look back and see how drastically the mobile gaming landscape changed over the last decade and a half.
Michael Love:
Just saw this - pretty sad reflection on the state of iOS gaming that the marquee iOS game review site couldn’t afford to keep the lights on.
Previously:
Advertising App Store Business Game iOS Sunset The Media Web
AppleScript support with popular Mac calendar apps is surprisingly limited. With Apple Mail, it’s easy to write a script that operates on the selected e-mail messages, and I’ve written many such scripts. I’d like to do this same with calendar events. For example, sometimes I want to make the same change to one of the fields of all the selected events (since there’s no bulk edit inspector). Other times I want to reschedule by shifting all the events by the same amount of time. Sometimes I have a group of past events (e.g. for cooking a Thanksgiving dinner or traveling to a familiar location) and I want to start planning the next iteration by duplicating and shifting them to the future. When traveling east-west, I would like to check that the time zone information is entered consistently.
But this just doesn’t seem to be possible to script. With Apple Calendar and BusyCal, the scripting dictionary does not even let you access the selected calendar events. Readdle Calendars, which recently switched to a subscription, is not scriptable at all. With Fantastical, the dictionary looks promising but mostly doesn’t work:
You can get the selected events, but key properties such as the containing calendar and the repetition and alarm info are missing. So I can’t just copy by making a new event based on the selected one.
I usually want the copied event to keep the same calendar, so how about just letting Fantastical copy an existing event and then edit it with the script? There’s a duplicate command, but it doesn’t work.
OK, how about if I have the script pick the calendar and create a new event using the properties of the selected one? It turns out that creating new events via AppleScript doesn’t work, either.
How about if I duplicate the events using the menu command and then use AppleScript to edit them? The properties are shown as editable, and you can set their values, but this seems to just mutate a temporary object. The changes are never reflected in the user interface or saved to disk.
I contacted support, who said that, despite what the dictionary shows, none of this is supported. All you can do is read (some) of the properties of the selected events and create new events using the parse sentence command. They suggested exporting to ICS, processing the file, and re-importing the ICS. The Export… command exports an entire calendar and so isn’t very useful for this purpose, unless you first copy the events to a temporary calendar. However, you can export individual events via drag and drop.
Some other partial solutions that I found:
You can click here to set a hidden Fantastical preference to make the event editor popover always open in expanded form. This saves a lot of clicks when editing a sequence of events.
You can Option-drag a selection of events to copy them to a particular day. I mostly don’t find this useful because the source and destination days don’t usually fit on screen at the same time (and it doesn’t let me open multiple windows).
Similarly, if you can manage to view and select a bunch of events in the week or day view, you can drag and drop to reschedule them all at once. This is in general rather awkward, but it can work if you’re doing something basic like shifting them all an hour later.
Although there is no command to Duplicate the selected events to a particular day, you can Copy them, then click on the desired start day, and Paste, and it will preserve the relative times between the events. (This also works in Apple Calendar.)
Previously:
AppleScript BusyCal Calendar Esoteric Preferences Fantastical Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Readdle Calendars
A reader shared a story about the confusing and unfortunate situation with Qbix’s calendar apps on the Mac App Store. There are two separate apps: Calendars (which used to be called Calendar 2, previously discussed) and Calendar Plus.
Calendar Plus hasn’t been updated in 10 years but is still for sale as a $9.99 up-front purchase. The reader first purchased this one, but then he found that it doesn’t work on macOS 10.13 and got a refund.
He then purchased Calendars, which is free with In-App Purchase. He purchased the $17.99 IAP called “Unlock All Features Permanently,” rather than subscribing for $1.99/month or $15.99/year. Unfortunately, the IAP “expired” after exactly one month. Reviews say that support is only available via Facebook and that the developer is unresponsive to questions. He tried to get a refund from Apple but was told:
After reviewing your account details Apple decides no.
So the Mac App Store, which is supposed to protect customers, failed twice: the purchase didn’t work as advertised, and Apple didn’t make the customer whole. Nor did it do anything to protect future customers: nearly a year later, the app hasn’t been updated, and the broken permanent unlock IAP is still available.
Previously:
Update (2024-10-24): sundevil671 (via Jeff Johnson):
I purchased [a different] app that doesn’t work how I need it to. After exhaustive troubleshooting attempts with their helpful support staff, it became clear I wasn’t going to be able to use the software as intended. When I requested a pro-rated refund for the annual subscription I’d purchased, I was told the request had to be made through Apple’s process since the purchase was made through the App Store. Apple denied the request so quickly it almost had to be automated, and the appeal of that decision denied almost as fast. I’m not sure how much weight such an appeal could even be given since they provide a tiny field for an explanation and no way to include supporting documentation of any kind. I was prepared to include transcripts of my interactions with the software’s support staff that acknowledged the malfunction & suggested I submit the request through Apple. The last resort was to try and dispute the charge through my credit card company, which I’ve discovered to be a fool’s errand with Chase for many years now. On that front it was denied immediately as well.
So my question is - is there any recourse whatsoever if you purchase an application that ends up not working in an essential way? Now I have a $100 application I can’t use, and am going to have to purchase another one for the same purpose.
As far as I know, there is no solution, even if the developer wants to help. Disputing the credit card charge—which, incidentally, was harder with an Apple Card—can work in other contexts but is not a good idea with Apple because it can endanger your entire Apple Account.
App Store Scams Apple Card Calendar 2 In-App Purchase Mac Mac App Mac App Store macOS 10.13 High Sierra macOS 14 Sonoma
