About three years ago when Apple World Today was launching, one of our first sponsors was Typed, a simple blogging platform that was being developed by Realmac Software and funded through Indiegogo. Yesterday, Realmac’s Dan Counsell reported that “with a heavy heart…the time has finally come to shut down the typed.com servers.”
Typed has been in financial trouble for a while. Counsell wanted to make sure that the platform was not cluttered with ads in order to keep the service running, and back in August of 2017 he announced that Realmac was looking for another company that would be willing to carry Typed forward into the future. That didn’t happen, so the company is shutting down Typed.com on January 31.
Typed was an innovative, simple, and inexpensive service. It started as a Markdown editor, but then added the ability to publish to a hosting service for an incredibly simple blogging platform. Sadly, the low cost of the app and the service could not sustain the business; my personal guess is that many people may have signed up for a trial plan and then decided to either not expend the effort of keeping up a blog or decided to use free services like WordPress, Medium or Tumblr.
Counsell provided several suggestions to users who want to continue blogging; micro.blog and ghost.io are both open source/open web services. Realmac’s own RapidWeaver is a powerful and easy-to-use website development tool for Mac, and the company has offered a free license to any Typed user who responds to the “goodbye” email.
