Well, I had a busy week.

How busy?

I haven’t recorded an episode of this show yet.

It’s because I was in Manhattan on Monday and Tuesday, and that’s a 10-hour day at a bare minimum before any of my extra currics, which include the show I’m rehearsing.

So no episodes yet.

Until today.

Today there’s an episode.

This is it.

You’re listening to it right now.

Your Daily Lex.

The big news, of course, you know if you follow me online, is the release, or the re-release, of Strategery, Strategery 4.

I told the story online, but here’s the short version.

I loved the game Strategery.

It came out in 2009.

I found it.

I reviewed it.

That review did pretty well, in part because John Gruber picked it up on Daring Fireball, and the app blew up and became this big thing.

And the last time they updated the app was about nine years ago, and it doesn’t work on iOS 27, or it didn’t work.

So I made my own version.

And then I reached out to the developers, which was hard, and I was like, Hey, I’d love to keep this game alive.

Can I?

And they said yes, which was great.

So the app is alive.

I released my version on Monday to coincide with the release of iOS 27.

And the downside of that was some people didn’t know that the app would have died without me, right?

So they just opened their phone one day, the app had a new icon, and they load it, and the game looks different.

It is the same game.

Like, the algorithm of how the dice rolls work and how the maps are drawn and how they’re the same.

Like, because they shared the original codebase with me, I could recreate it.

But folks who didn’t realize that, hey, without Lex doing something, this app would have just not worked anymore, were like, Why change?

And I get it.

Change is hard.

I want to be clear.

I’ve gotten way, way more positive feedback than negative feedback, but the negative feedback, of course, is vitriolic, and I was gonna say hurtful.

I guess it isn’t tiny bit hurtful.

Like, it doesn’t offend me because I know.

I was talking to one of the original developers, Cortland, and he loved the most vitriolic message I got, where this person calls me scum and talks about how horrible I am.

And he’s like, Listen, obviously that guy’s no good, but isn’t it great that we inspired that much passion with this game?

And I’m like, That’s all you.

But— Yeah.

What’s funny is if you tap and hold on the logo in the game, it launches the original version, which I got working again on iOS 27 with some hard work and some help from Claude.

But yeah, the angry people don’t like that it’s different.

Now, just today, it’s Wednesday, September 16th, just today I released an update that makes it look a lot more like the original.

And I’ve been talking to various people, including my pal Jason, who’s done a lovely job of helping me promote this app with Six Colors and with his appearance on MacBreak Weekly.

I’ve been talking about, and my pal Ben has also been helping me with this, but I have to rethink a little bit of how some of the per-game settings work because people aren’t looking.

Like they’re saying, Hey, you don’t have this feature, and I do.

It’s in the per-game settings, which I call fiddly little bits.

And the fiddly little bits are a little bit too hidden away for most people.

They don’t notice them.

So I got to figure that out without making things more complicated.

What else can I tell you?

My oldest, you know, as you may recall, is in college, and a couple weeks ago my parents visited Ani at college, and now today my grandparents— nope, that’s not true.

My grandparents are dead, may they rest in peace.

Today my in-laws visited Ani at college, Ani’s other grandparents.

So basically, if you are my or Lauren’s parents, you visited Ani.

How great is that?

But anyway, strategy has been all-consuming because I just get so many messages about it.

It blows my mind that people are using the in-app tipping thing to send tips my way.

It’s very sweet.

That’s because I updated the app for free.

So anybody who adds just gets this updated version for free.

And I’m working on other app stuff all the time.

I love working on apps.

It’s really fun.

If I could do it full time, I think I might stop the consulting because that’s how much fun I have making apps.

Anyway, that’s all I got.

Hope you’re having a wonderful Wednesday.

And yeah, there’s more, I’m sure.

When I’m not tired, we’ll have more episodes.

That’s how it works, right?

Right.

Goodbye.

Lex.