I’m retiring Later. As of today it’s no longer available for sale in the App Store. If you’re one of the 198 excellent people who have purchased it, it’ll continue to work (until it doesn’t). It didn’t require much upkeep, a few hours a year when the latest version of macOS inevitably broke something. But its very existence feels like a burden as I try to narrow my focus. So it goes.

Later was created to serve a number of purposes. The first, it’s raison d'être, was my aversion to using the JavaScript bookmarklets that were the sanctioned way of getting content from the web into the popular “Read It Later” services like Instapaper and Pocket. When Share extensions were introduced in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, they were quickly adopted on iOS. But without existing applications on the Mac, none of the companies bothered to create a native Share extension there — I aimed to fill that void. The landscape is different today. Some combination of Catalyst, SwiftUI, and Safari Extensions have finally made this easy enough to be worth the trouble, apparently.

The second reason was that at the time I was still writing a lot of Objective-C at work and was looking for an opportunity to write more Swift, the new programming language that had been introduced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in 2014. Final count: 10 files, 624 lines of Swift code.

The final reason was that I needed a project with limited scope. It was accomplishable, shippable, a valuable link to put on my resume, a showcase of my skill working as a developer on Apple’s platforms.

Almost 7 years later I’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of Swift across jobs at five companies while happily saving content to read later from Safari on my MacBook and pocketing a tidy $846. I’d consider that to be a massive success.

// Created by Peter Zignego on 10/3/15.