Yesterday afternoon, I opened up my RSS reader and saw an article that, uh, shot my heart rate waaaaaaaaay up.

250528_NetNewsWire DF

I was linked to on Daring Fireball by John Gruber.

While this isn't quite "Steve Jobs sending your article in an email" levels of recognition, I still wanted to call it out and share this because the effect has been remarkable.

And because I want to remember someday.1

Here is how Max Frequency has performed so far in 2025 before the fireball—roughly 2,100~ unique visitors.

250528_Plausible Stats_250101 thru 250526

And here is just yesterday's performance.

250528_Plausible Stats_250527

By the time I publish this article, it will be my most viewed page I've ever written on my blogs. You can see it for yourself.

One link from Gruber sent over five months of traffic my way in five hours. Looking at his sponsorship page tells me that the Daring Fireball RSS feed alone has an estimated 200,000 subscribers. I can't fathom that kind of reach and I am just getting a tiny, tiny, tiny taste of it.

I have received sign ups for my Memory Card newsletter. I have gotten multiple emails about a RSS feed (link now on the home page).2 It has been a delightful stretch of time. Daring Fireball readers are, in fact, an "audience of Mac nerds, designers, nitpickers, perfectionists, and connoisseurs of fine sarcasm."

I didn't open the actual article from Gruber for a spell. I was too nervous that he would disagree with my assessment of the Puzzmo app for some reason. Thankfully, he seems to agree.

If your perusing the site, it should be no surprise that Daring Fireball and The Talk Show with John Gruber are design/style influences of mine. To be told that we are on the same page was validating to a degree. I just hoped he liked my joke at the end.

If there was one thing I wish I had put in the article, it was a mention of and emphasis of how Puzzmo on iOS is not a "iOS-assed iOS app." While different than a Mac-assed Mac app, there is an undeniable feel and joy to a superb iOS app—even more so for a superb iOS game.

I’ve taken to calling these apps “Mac-assed Mac apps” recently, but we need a better term. Je ne sais quoi means “a quality that cannot be described or named easily” — it’s no surprise it’s hard to categorize these apps with a term. Panic just introduced their splendid new programming editor Nova as “an extremely Mac-app Mac app”, which captures the sentiment (and sound) of “Mac-assed Mac app” in a purely joyous way. I like that. Whatever we call them, they’re worth embracing and celebrating, and Sketch sure as hell is one of them.

Zach Gage games have that. Going through the Games folder on my phone, holedown has it. Alto's Odyssey has it. The Monument Valley games have it. Threes! has it. Tiny Wings has it.

I know all of those are "old" now. But that doesn't make em have any less joy.

Puzzmo could become one—I hope it does—but it has a long way to go.

Footnotes

  1. Which should be easy given my new Previously On Max Frequency feature. Seriously, my favorite thing I've done on the site in a hot minute. You can read more about it in the 2025.5.21 changelog entry. ↩

  2. The short answer is yes. The long answer is that the RSS feed is not as featured as I would hope. The feed only pulls in the new articles titles and none of the body. You may still click on the link in the feed to go to post online, but it isn't readable in a RSS reader. This is a limitation of Obsidian Publish and is probably the shortcoming that bugs me the most. I have tried a few times to figure out if I can turn it into a proper feed, but haven't had any luck. ↩