Chris Hannah
My sister has started blogging again, and I thought I’d just post a link here, for anyone that may be interested.
It’s called “Books & Crannies“, and as you can imagine, it’s all book-related. Or as she puts it:
The Ramblings of Someone Who Likes Books More Than People
Her most recent posts:
Joe Cieplinski, on the way iOS handles review prompts, and the way developers have to implement them:
While working on my latest update of Fin, I spent a bit of time playing with Apple’s new SKStoreReviewController API.
For those unfamiliar, this new API was announced with the early betas of iOS 10.3, and it went live with the 10.3 release last month. Though it isn’t the only approved way to prompt a customer to rate your app on the App Store yet, that is Apple’s ultimate intention. Like it or not, you’ll have to learn to work with this thing eventually, in other words. Unless you never prompt for reviews.
If you’re interested in the way apps now ask for reviews on iOS, or maybe just want to find out a developers perspective, Joe explains the pros and cons very nicely.
There’s been a load of hints about something new coming to the MacStories family for a while, and it’s finally been announced. It’s called AppStories!
AppStories is a new podcast by Federico Viticci and John Voorhees, which focusses on apps, notable updates, and also the stories behind them.
I actually listened to the first episode a day early, due to me doing a bit of preemptive searching on Overcast, and actually finding out the secret project before it was announced!
From the first episode, I can tell that it’s going to be a podcast for me. With Connected currently being my absolute must-listen show, AppStories is going to be joining it. I’m super interested in apps, as you can probably see by my writing here, and also from the fact that I am also an app developer.
Hopefully this new podcast can lead me to more of the great apps, that are constantly being released on Apple platforms. And I can also see it being beneficial from a developer perspective, as AppStories will also be featuring interviews with developers, which for me sounds amazing! It’s not often I get to hear how other developers work, so that’s one segment I’m looking forward to.
However, if you’re still thinking that this big announcement was a new podcast, you’re only half correct. Because the podcast also has it’s own website, that has been custom built to allow for the best podcast experience. Which is evident when you see the custom audio player, that can also be embedded rather easily. I have embedded the first podcast below, so if it’s enabled on your browser, you’ll be able to see it.
I’ve also been told that, in true MacStories fashion, the website has it’s own API, and therefore there is a lot of automation happening. Which isn’t really a surprise!
You can find more information about the AppStories podcast, the first episode, and also links to subscribe on the many podcast apps, directly on the AppStories website. And in usual fashion, Federico has written an introduction article, “Introducing AppStories“, which details how the idea has finally come to fruition. It’s been around for a lot longer than you may think!
AppStories will be a weekly show, lasting around 30 mins each, and will be published on Mondays, starting on the 24th April. Except of course this first episode, which was released as part of MacStories 8th birthday celebrations! 🎉
It’s been reported by MacRumors, that the Workflow team have confirmed there will no longer be any updated for Workflow, however bugs will still continue to be fixed. It was in a customer support email, where they wrote the following:
But just so you know, we have no further planned updates for Workflow. That being said we are continuing to support Workflow’s current functionality and have no plans to end support, so let me know if you run across any bugs or crashes.
This news comes under one month since Apple acquiring Workflow, and the team working on the app.
When news initially broke of the acquisition, there was various different theories, and ideas on what would happen to Workflow. Whether it would continue, be integrated deeper into the OS, or just slowly killed off.
With Workflow being such a fundamental part to many professional users, that get their work done on iOS, I’m still trying to see the good side of this. Especially as I can’t imagine Apple buying an app that is so vital to people, and then simply getting rid of it.
As David Sparks writes for MacSparky:
Whatever Apple is working on, I find it highly unlikely that it will ship with iOS 11 that gets announced in just a few months. So my guess is we’ll wait until iOS 12 to get the Workflow replacement, which is most likely 14 months from announcement and 17 months away from release. Will Workflow still function up until that time? I sure hope so.
I agree with the timing aspect, it’s not really a perfect fit for any big iOS update. It’s obviously too soon to see any integration in iOS 11, but there’s a huge amount of time until iOS 12.
I can only hope that Workflow in it’s current form, is slowly going away. And that there is either a deeper version of Workflow being worked on, or that the automation features are going to be implemented at the system level, while also building a much better automation system for iOS.
The best outcome in my opinion, would be that there’s a significant update to how automation, and communication between apps on iOS happens. Because if you boil Workflow down, it’s simply an interface, for super complex URL schemes, and maybe a bit of computation in between. You can kind of tell when you’re pushing these a bit too far, when you have to convert images into Base64 encoding to transfer the data to a new application.
What I want to see are better ways apps can communicate with each other, and open themselves up to a more generic automation system, similar to Automator, that everyone can make use of.
The Hubble space telescope has spotted a huge shimmering region on Uranus – and it’s caused by powerful bursts of solar wind.
The best bit is – it’s not even clickbait.
I’m currently on the way home from a little trip to Ireland 🇮🇪, where I have been in Killarney for this years Úll conference. It’s the first ever conference I’ve been to, and from what I’ve heard (and seen for myself), the bar is now set pretty high.
If you haven’t heard of Úll, then it’s best by described by the little introduction on the website:
Úll is a conference for people who build and love great products. We focus on great product stories, presented through an Apple-shaped lens. We treat the conference itself as a product: with a deep emphasis on the attendee experience.
It’s not exactly a tech conference, with the content focussed on personal stories, and thought provoking sessions, that do in-part relate back to technology.
This year the theme was “The Future”, and we certainly experienced that in the Banquet dinner. Where the dessert was a Deconstructed Apple Pie, with the Crème anglaise (yes I googled the spelling) served in a toothpaste-like tube, and some very vibrant Green Apple juice served with dry ice. It certainly all fitted the theme.
I was asked a few times, what my favourite talk was. But honestly, I really liked every single one I got to see. But if I got to choose the absolute fewest that really got my attention, I would choose:
That’s certainly one hell of a list, and it still doesn’t show the great talks that I got to experience at Úll.
It wasn’t just the talks either that interested me. Jason Snell hosted Úll Radio, which I think I saw about 90% of the interviews. There was also a live recording of Clockwise, which was hosted by Jason Snell, Marco Arment, Myke Hurley, and Alex Cox.
To top it off, it was packed full of great people, and held in one of the nicest locations I’ve ever been to. I’m coming away with a lot of thoughts and ideas, and a new found love for conferences.
I’d love to come back next year.
Apple released Clips yesterday, which is their new app for creating fun videos, with various filters, music, and more. I covered this app before, but as I hadn’t played around with the app at that point, it was literally just explaining the features.
But now I’ve had over a day with the app, and I must say I’m really loving it. It’s even earned it’s place on my Home screen!
The design of the app itself is quite nice, but I’m not sure I feel the same way about the icon. And it just feels easy to use, which I guess is the main focus.
I didn’t think I’d say this, but I also like the filters! The comic book one is by far my favourite, everything looks good in it!
There’s a lot of talk about the usage of private APIs, and how the app itself doesn’t ask for permission to use things like the camera or microphone, but seeing as this is an Apple app, I’m not too worried.
Another thing I like about Clips, is the exporting options. I had wondered how Apple would select social networks that would be included, but using a (completely custom) share sheet, is a good way to avoid any issues. Because this means any app can enable support for Clips, by adding video importing. One option I’m very thankful of, is YouTube, because it’s really fast (and super easy) to upload a Clip, and have it available near instantly.
I had some interesting mail today, and this gave me the opportunity to make use of Clips title features and music. Which I think turned out pretty well!
Finally, there’s something else I must say about Clips, and the type of app/service it could be enabling. And although the app is purely a way to capture, and edit videos, I think the content that people will create in Clips could change the way people watch videos.
We all know the issues with YouTube, there’s advertisement problems, the creators seem to always be annoyed about something, and it generally lacks competition. But one thing we can take from YouTube, is that people love Vlogs. Which are essentially a video version of a blog post, it’s a visual way to understand someone else’s life.
Blogs used to be huge, and while I still really enjoy writing my own, and reading other’s blog posts. But since then, microblogging services have taken over, with Twitter being the main service.
What I’m thinking is, if Twitter took blogging and made it micro, so then more people could take part, and share more content, more often. What if Clips could make vlogging micro? It would need another service of course, but it could just make use of whatever social network they’re on. I personally think that this app, along with competing apps that will no doubt turn up soon, will be the catalyst for upgrading the type of content that is shared.
Christoph Neimann, in conjunction with National Geographic Expeditions, has published what he calls an “Illustrated Travelogue”.
During a trip to Norway’s Svalbard islands, Christoph was taking some photographs, but on top of that were his illustrations. The way the story has been published is rather interesting too, with some nice effects, transitions, and the story telling is really nice.
It sounds like an amazing trip, and an equally impressive story.
Cabel Sasser on the latest Panic Report:
Welcome to 2017… Panic’s 20th anniversary!!
No, your eyes do not deceive you. Some of you may not know that we founded our company in 1997, but it’s true. We’re older than Facebook, older than Twitter, older than Google, and somehow still kickin’.
Every year is a little different, and last year was for sure — a little bit quieter on the software front (at least publicly), and a whole lot louder on the launch-of-a-major-multi-platform-video-game front.
Yes, it’s time: here’s a look back at 2016, and look forward to 2017.
It’s a really intriguing piece, and although it’s quite lengthy, I’m glad I read it. Panic is one of my favourite software companies (I love Firewatch), and Transmit 5 looks really impressive.
It’s been a while since I actually wrote something, and that’s mainly because of my university work that’s been piling up (I finish this June!), and also because I’ve been developing a few mini projects with Swift. The latter is what I’m going to be writing about today.
Basically, over the past few weeks I’ve been getting back into using the command line more. Why is a hard question, but mainly because I’m a nerd, and it’s pretty fun!
It started when I kept seeing a trend of more of the people I follow on Twitter, either retweet or post GIFs of command line apps. It also led me to Hyper, which is a terminal application, and it’s actually built using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. You can also customise it a ton, especially with the massive amount of themes available.
I personally, have Hyper set up with the hyper-ayu theme, and my favourite monospaced font, SF Mono.
This is getting a bit too meta, so I’ll bring it back on topic.
So I’ve actually developed four command line applications in the past two weeks, and they’ve all been build using Xcode/Swift[1]. The apps themselves are unix executable files, that can just be double-clicked and ran, but on each project I include more helpful installation/usage information.
(Not to be mistaken with my macOS app, Qwiki)
This is the first one I made, and it was probably the easiest of them all. That’s because the majority of the code I could just reuse from my already released app, Qwiki! This app, cwiki , is just a super minimal version of that app.
You just type cwiki followed by a search query, and it will print out the most relevant matches. It does however, only print out a basic description of the articles.
Check out cwiki on GitHub.
So after the first project, I was a bit more intrigued, I decided to make a more interactive app. slink is purely a URL shortener that uses the Goo.gl API, but this lets you shorten, and also expand (Goo.gl) shortened links.
The slightly more complex functionality than before, led me to work out how options are managed in command line apps. So if you want to shorten or expand a link, just use either -s, --shorten, -e, or --expand. I also made a mini usage guide, that you can print out using -h or --help 🤓.
Check out slink on GitHub.
The third project was a bit similar to the first two, in that it made use of a few different options to return different data, but it also presented it like cwiki.
It’s a basic interface for Hacker News, and by making use of the various options, you can retrieve the new, top, and best lists.
Check out hacker on GitHub.
Okay this one is really simple, it makes use of Brett Terpstra’s TitleCase API, which formats a given string of text to the AP Title Case style. I actually find these types of tools perfect when writing a blog post, as usually the title is formatted incorrectly.
The API was probably the easiest one I’ve ever used. But then again, there was only one parameter, no options, and one return type.
Check out TitleCase on GitHub.
Now I guess everyone knows what I’ve been up to, so I can get back to slaving away over university work, and making some random projects!
P.S. I actually have some other really great news that I’m going to share here soon, but I’m just waiting on it being finalised a bit more.