iA Writer 5 is scheduled to be released at the end of September, and there’s one feature that they’ve already announced, and I love it.

It’s a configurable keyboard!

Above the iOS keyboard on an iPhone, you usually get the little keyboard row where apps can add shortcuts to functionality, and also for basic things like undo and redo. But iA have gone a step further, and not only added some cool features like the ability to search through actions, files, and text in a document, but a customisable keyboard that opens up when you tap the ⌘ key.

You get the standard markdown syntax for things like headers, links, footnotes, lists, etc. But also the ability to swap and rearrange them.

You can see for yourself some of the available keys in their video, but I imagine there will be a load more when it’s released.

If you’re a programmer, you’re probably aware about version control and Git, and maybe even what a .gitignore file is.

If you don’t:

A gitignore file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git should ignore. Files already tracked by Git are not affected; see the NOTES below for details.

Anyway, creating these files can be annoying to write manually, and there a bunch of templates all over the internet to make this much easier.

I however, found a much better solution for creating these files, and it’s gitignore.io. It’s a website that you can use to generate a .gitignore file, but also a command line tool that you can use, so you never have to leave your terminal.

It has support for operating systems, IDEs, and programming languages. So my standard file will be generated from macOS, Xcode, and Swift, since that’s how I roll.

You can type (with autofill of course) whatever templates you want to make use of straight into the website, and then hit ‘Create’.

For the command line, you’ll have to first install it, and then the gi command will be available. All you need to do is type gi followed by a comma-separated list of the same items you would use on the website.

So mine would be:

gi macos,xcode,swift.

The command would of course, output this out via the standard output, so you can direct it straight into your .gitignore file by writing something like:

gi macos,xcode,swift >> .gitignore

It’s super easy, and it saves a lot of time.

As a little bonus, there’s also a quick video on how to install and use the command line tool.

Jonas Gessner, developer of ProTube:

I am very sad to announce that ProTube was removed from the App Store by Apple on September 1, 2017. This comes after multiple requests and threats by YouTube which ultimately led Apple to suddenly pulling the app from the App Store. ProTube and many other 3rd party YouTube apps on the App Store have been targeted by YouTube with takedown requests.

YouTube first requested Apple to remove my app well over a year ago, initially just stating that my app violates their Terms of Service. This was a generic takedown request they sent to many YouTube apps at once. They later started going into more detail, even stating that I could not sell the app as that alone violates their ToS. They basically wanted me to remove every feature that made ProTube what it is – that includes the player itself that allows you to play 60fps videos, background playback, audio only mode and more. Without those features ProTube would not be any better than YouTube’s own app, and that is exactly what they want to achieve. YouTube wants to sell its $10/month subscription service which offers many features that ProTube also offered for a lower one time price, so they started hunting down 3rd party YouTube apps on the App Store.

This is very sad news. ProTube is far better than the official YouTube app in nearly everyway, and now YouTube have finally got their way and forced it from the App Store.

My favourite parts of ProTube was the option to get an audio only version of a video, support for iOS Picture-in-Picture, and background playback, just to name a few.

I’m going to keep the app installed on my iPhone and iPad, but I’m not sure what (if anything) will happen to them because of the removal. Whatever happens to them though, there won’t be anymore updates, and when YouTube make changes to the API, the app will sadly stop working.

I doubt there’s any point in finding an alternative, as no doubt if anything is as close to the quality of ProTube, it will be shut down in the same manner.

Read the full statement

It’s now almost midway through my holiday in Tenerife, and I’ve been noticing a few ways I’ve been using Twitter differently, seeing as I’m not constantly being updated.

As most people would expect, I haven’t been constantly stuck to my phone (with the exception of music and podcasts), so I haven’t been able to be 100% caught up with my timeline. Whereas I’m usually a maximum of 1 hour behind, given that I’m awake. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, or whether it’s good for productivity, but that’s what happens.

But instead of my usual Twitter activity, I’m hardly posting anything, but I still want to keep an eye on anything significant that’s going on.

I actually have three Twitter clients installed on my phone at the minute, and they’ve each gained a temporary place in my daily usage. My client of choice was previously Tweetbot, but I was getting bored recently, and was checking out the current state of Twitterrific, so that’s the reasons for the first two. The last one is the official Twitter app, and that’s purely for keeping up with what updates are being added, and also so I can see a poll if I need to.

So seeing as I just want to see the most essential/interesting content from the day, my Twitter usage normally consists of:

• Checking the official Twitter app for the “What you’ve missed” section (I’ve 99% got the actual name wrong, but you get the idea). I may read some related tweets, but I feel this gets me updated.
• I use Tweetbot every now and then for push notifications, and also to check out the Activity section. Which shows follows, likes, and mentions, all in the same list, so that’s how I make sure I’m up to date on anyone interacting with me.
• Any “normal” use of Twitter where I want to search for someone, specifically see a users timeline, or just checkout the most recent tweets (not particularly often, but when I’m bored), I do all of this in Twitterrific.

Looking back on my usage, it seems pretty standard. Apart from the use of three different apps of course. I’m going to try and force myself to use Twitterrific a bit more, and then make a decision on that, so then it’s only the two.

The biggest plus for me for the last few days has been the official Twitter app, because it’s pretty quick to read the curated list of tweets that apparently I’ve missed out on. I’ve found to be a pretty well curated list, and unless there’s some big thing that I just haven’t seen, I feel as up to date as usual.

Maybe this will prompt a change in how I use Twitter when I get home, but I’m not putting any importance into that idea.

I will be off on holiday tomorrow (Thursday) for two weeks in Tenerife!

Therefore, there will be no content (I’m 99.999% sure of this) posted here, unless I’m super bored and need something to do 🤓.

As always, I’ll be posting far too many photos on my Instagram, and probably more boring content on Twitter.

There’s a lot of occasions where I’m checking the specific iOS icon sizes, and I remember I made a document a few years ago with some references. However, there’s been a huge amount of changes since then. So I decided to create a new reference document from the Xcode 9.0 beta.

It’s hosted as a Gist on Github, or you can view it below:

I’m going to make an effort to keep this updated, and I’ll probably create one for the other platforms as well. Anyway, I hope people find this useful!

(This video is from last year, but everything in it is as true as it always has been).

Manuel ‘Manny’ Lopez and Daryl Dominguez aren’t just good mates, they’re two of the gnarliest skaters coming up in London. Always looking for a new challenge, we captured their night-long skate through the heart of The City.

In the first episode of our Own the Night series, created with Samsung, VICE Sports joins Manny and Daryl as they talk flow, creativity and skating – in a deserted, nocturnal London.

I spent a lot of my time growing up, skateboarding in London. And I can say I agree with everything said in this video. Skateboarding is more than a sport, or a basic hobby, it enables you to think differently about nearly everything in the world, and it’s such a creative thing to do.

I’ve noticed a lot of similar traits in skateboarders, whether it’s the determination to get that trick, get back up after you’ve injured yourself, or to just think about stupidly innovative ideas, and turn boring city structures into super interesting and complex playgrounds. There’s also the added benefit of a broader perspective on things, as skateboarding usually takes you all around the world (including some locations that may or not be locked, closed off to public, or just in the middle of nowehere), and therefore you get to meet so many people from all sorts of backgrounds.

Plus, London at night is pretty cool all by itself.

It’s the fourth issue of the new format, and it’s time to introduce another small section that will be happening every now and then (Ideally every 4 weeks), Podcasts! I listen to loads of Podcasts every day, and I thought it would be a good idea to share a few of my absolute favourites.

There’s nothing new on the blog this week, so I can’t link to anything there, but I have a variety of interesting links and videos for you.

Interesting Links

A subway-style map of the Roman roads of Britain
This is pretty interesting, as most of the places still have similar names!

Random Shopper — Randomized Consumerism
A project that started way back in 2012 by Darius Kazemi, that purchases random items every month from Amazon! It’s giving me some ideas.

Developing for iPhone Pro – Allen Pike
Very interesting ideas about the new layout that is surely going to take some shape in the rumoured iPhone pro.

747-8 Captain shared pics with Singapore… – Jamaica Aviation Spotters
Pilots used AirDrop between planes! In the sky!

Videos

The Right Way to Pop Your AirPods Out of the Case

Beme News Update #3: This Is Not A Film Review
An interesting video on the background of the Dunkirk film, and what things were like around that time.

Podcasts (All links for Overcast)

• The Infinite Monkey Cage: Oxygen: A Matter of Life and Death
• AppStories: 14 – Pick 2: Ulysses and FullContact
• Immutable: 97: Shapes and Colors: Trend of the Year
• Cortex: 53: Worst Business Decision Ever
• The Infinite Monkey Cage: Are We Living in a Simulation?
• Cortex: 54: An Episode Out of Time 3: Time Strikes Back

What I’m Up To

I would say this week has been a partially productive week, in that I finally started my mini web analytics project. I won’t write up too much technical details here, that will be written up in full and posted to my blog within the next few days I hope.

But essentially, I wanted a super minimal way to track how many views my blog was getting, and whether another url referred it.

The only data that’s stored is the title and url of the webpage that was loaded, so just a url to a blog post of mine, and also the referrer url that is stored in the DOM. I’ve already noticed that this is usually blank, and therefore is only partially useful, and then of course the date and time it was loaded.

It’s live now, so all visitors on my blog will be logged (I wouldn’t call it tracking), and while I have a way to look at the raw data, the next step will be to create some kind of dashboard for myself.

However, the few bits of data that I mentioned, will be the only ones that are ever collected. So I’m not looking to invade anyone’s privacy. Plus, the data isn’t being anonymised when I store it, because there’s literally no personal data even being sent to the server.

Looking back at the past few paragraphs, I probably did explain it in more depth than I was going to, but oh well.

Another week, and one full of content again!

Interesting Links

Jeff Bezos Briefly Tops Bill Gates as the World’s Richest Person – Bloomberg 
💰💰💰

Apple confirms iPod nano and iPod shuffle have been discontinued – The Verge
Will anyone except tech journalists notice this?

I haven’t heard anyone speak the name iPod in a long time.

MacPaw acquires The Unarchiver and commits to… | MacPaw Blog
The Unarchiver app for macOS is probably the most popular one of its kind (that isn’t a System app), and MacPaw are a great bunch of people! So this can only be a good thing (Unless I’m missing something?).

Videos

iPhone 7 — The Rock x Siri Dominate the Day — Apple
I like it!

Make time: Why we spend our most productive time on the wrong things (Google Cloud Next ’17)
Super interesting video here, packed with some great tips and lots of data!

(Don’t tell anyone, but Android from these kind of perspective looks really intriguing)

Tesla Project Loveday Contest Entry!
I’m not sure what this Loveday thing is (I’m honestly not that interested), but this video from Marques (MKBHD) is really good!

The bizarre physics of fire ants
Weird

On the Blog

• Unordered Lists in Markdown →
• My Latest Development Project

What I’m Up To

Over the past week, I have done a few interesting things, mainly working on my app Hydrate, and a few other meta tasks.

I can’t remember exactly what was finished this week, but the main thing was the history view. So you can now see your water intake for the past 21 days! I was meaning to do this right from the start, but I really couldn’t be bothered! However over last weekend, I was away in Norfolk with rather bad internet, so I forced myself to get on with it then.

As for what else I was getting up to, Ghost (the blog platform this runs on) was updated to v1.0! Which meant (what I thought would be huge) migration task, as it used MySQL instead of SQLite, and also a few syntax changes for themes. The whole process actually only took me about an hour, so that was done in one lunch time at work.

It did get a bit bad though, as I got a bit trigger happy with linux commands, and ended up completely destroying the permissions. So everything slowly stopped working. In the end I realised I had everything backed up perfectly, so I created a new droplet on Digital Ocean and put it all back to normal! Lessons were learned!

The second week of the new format, and I’m really liking it! It’s more manual collation at the minute, but I’m going to start investigation different ways to try and pull the data into one place easier.

In the initial format, I just used a tag on Pinboard, and while that is still serving me well for the “Interesting Links” section, I know I can do more.

Anyway, here it is:

Interesting Links

Rocket
A brilliant way to use Emoji on Macs that aren’t cool enough to have a Touch Bar.

Monzo – The Monzo Current Account Preview!
You can register interest for the Monzo Current Account! Wooooo!

We Are Still in Notification Hell
My thoughts exactly.

Apple’s Risky Balancing Act With the Next iPhone
Scale isn’t always a good thing.

Facebook’s secretive hardware division is exploring modular smartphones – The Verge
Is this the latest "cool idea" in Silicon Valley?

Videos

Why It’s HARD To Land on Mars
Not impossible, but hard.

The hidden oil patterns on bowling lanes
This is random, but super interesting. I’m definitely going to think about this next time I’m bowling.

Un albero un anno – One tree one year
We all tend to forget what goes on around us.

See Hummingbirds Fly, Shake, Drink in Amazing Slow Motion | National Geographic
It’s incredible how slow motion can help bring a new understanding to things.

Real-time Mixed Reality ARKit/Unity rig driven by HTC Vive | @normalVR
Maybe on of the best examples I’ve seen of Apple’s AR Kit, this time combining the experience of AR and VR.

Meet the Thirteenth Doctor – Doctor Who
So the next Doctor is a woman. Big Whoop. Whether she’s great for the role or not, it’s nothing to do with what’s down her pants.

On the Blog

• You Can Now Use PayPal on the App Store, iTunes, and More! →
• The Next Form of Do Not Disturb →
• AirPods and Magnetic Strips
• Apple Machine Learning Journal

What I’m Up To

This week hasn’t been super productive for me, I’ve mainly been at work and playing games.

One thing I have been working on though, is a very minimal Swift framework called “CHEssentials”. It’s not a big open source project or anything, but there are a bunch of things I always do when writing Swift apps, that I just want to stick in one place, so I can reuse them.

It’s quite small right now, but as I’m writing Swift, I’m always updating it. The most beneficial ones for me are the String/Date parsing, and rounding numbers.

You can find it on GitHub, and feel free to do whatever you want with it!