If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll already know this, but I’m now developing a regular expression app for iOS!

It’s called “Pretty Regular Expressions”, and I’m going for a minimal approach, but with some optional settings, and a clean interface. Of course a dark theme was the first thing I built!

It’s still in development, but it’s moving pretty fast, so an open beta is very imminent. I already have a landing page, where you can subscribe to keep updated with the application. Of course I will only send out an email for when the beta opens, and then when the app is released.

If you want to watch the progress of the development, then just follow me on Twitter at @chrishannah, because I post a lot of screenshots.

Straight after teasing everyone with a glance of the upcoming Carpool Karaoke series, Apple has also released a trailer for their Planet of the Apps series.

Planet of the Apps, is a competition format television series, where developers will pitch their ideas, and compete for investment, and a premium spot on the App Store.

The judges on the show are: Jessica Alba, Gwyneth Paltrow, Gary Vaynerchuk and will.i.am.

Apple have just released a one minute trailer of their Carpool Karaoke series, and with it comes a bit more information about the upcoming episodes.

Hollywood Reporter said last year that Apple had ordered 16 episodes, and we now know that they won’t all be hosted by James Corden. There may be people on multiple episodes still though, as they only mention 13 celebrities “and many more”. However they did say specifically “celebrity pairings”, so this seems like they’re moving the series away from a host/guest structure.

The thirteen celebrities already confirmed are: James Corden, Will Smith, Billy Eichner, Metallica, Alicia Keys, John Legend, Ariana Grande, Seth MacFarlane, Chelsea Handler, Blake Shelton, Michael Strahan, John Cena, and Shaquille O’Neal.

The series as we expected, will be available exclusively on Apple Music. I’m quite looking forward watching these, and also whether Apple can go on to create/produce/purchase even more content.

Update:
Apple have now released a second video, showing more of the series content!

The Macalope has another great piece on the common misconceptions about Apple’s design, and it’s an opinion I quite agree with.

I encourage everyone to read it, but I just wanted to share my favourite quote from the article:

Maybe the problem isn’t Apple’s choices, it’s the fact that so many Apple competitors refuse to make their own choices of the same kind.

Federico Viticci, the King of iOS Automation has just written a great piece, regarding the latest update to Workflow for iOS.

With today’s 1.7 update, the Workflow team isn’t introducing Instant Variables. Instead, they’ve rebuilt the engine behind variables on a new system called Magic Variables, which completely reimagines how you can create workflows and connect actions for even more powerful automations.

More than a mere tweak for power users, Magic Variables are the next step in Workflow’s goal to enable everyone to automate their iOS devices. By making workflows easier to create and read, Magic Variables are the app’s most important transformation to date, and the result far exceeds my expectations.

I’m not a full time iOS user for work purposes, but with the features and innovation that is happening on the iOS platform, it makes me ever so more curious to take a bigger step. Just today I we looking at my automation options on macOS, and although there’s things like Keyboard Maestro, or the built-in Automator, there just isn’t a Workflow alternative.

Time like these make me wonder what it would be like moving fully over to iOS, but as an app developer it seems like I’ll be to macOS for a while. I’m certainly not saying I dislike the Mac platform, I’m a huge fan of it, and I’m loving my new Touch Bar MacBook Pro, but there’s just more happening over there.

The grass seems greener.

That’s right. On the 10th April I will be off to the Úll Conference.

It will be my first ever conference trip, and I’m doing it all by myself. It’s exciting and a nervous prospect, but I just had to go.

I’m already thinking about developing a new application so I can pay myself back for the trip. So expect a new app to come out soon!

If you’re an Apple Music subscriber, or you just have a super large iTunes library, then downloading all of your music to a device can be a giant pain.

With the iPhone storage sizes getting bigger, having your entire collection downloaded is even more of a possibility. I for example have a 128GB iPhone 7 Plus, so I easily have enough space for my entire library.

The only problem is that on iOS, there isn’t a “download all” button. However there’s a really simple solution if you have a Mac available.

Step 1 – In the sidebar, right click and choose Create Smart Playlist.

Step 2 – Change the rules to “Artist is not (blank)” like the image below.

Step 3 – Open the Playlist in the Music app on your iOS device.

Step 4 – Tap on the “…” button in the top right, and press Download.

That’s it!

All of your music library should then start to download.

Another bonus that this gives you, is that because it’s a Smart Playlist, it will continue to update as you add music to your library. As the rule simply is that it matches any item where the Artist name isn’t blank, which should be all of them!

Earlier today, Apple announced their financial results for the first fiscal quarter of 2017.

There’s a huge amount of data, and I’ll leave that for other people to try to understand.

Put simply, this quarter was Apple’s all-time highest revenue of $78.4 billion, and also an all-time earnings per share record of 3.36. In this quarter they sold 78.3 million iPhones, 13.1 million iPads, and 5.4 million Macs (That doesn’t sound dead to me).

If that’s not good enough for you, then over at MacStories John Voorhees has written a great article covering everything you need to know, and of course it’s filled with their usual well designed graphs!

Over the past few days I’ve been setting up my own media server, and in particular, Plex. Plex is a great tool that can do wonderful things to your media collection, but the one thing that I just love is that it can take plain video files, an then give it so much context. It really makes your library something to look at.

The Server

The actual server itself is my old MacBook Pro, which I don’t think is the best machine for the job, but it’s the best spare machine I have available at the minute. I’m not going to write down all the specs, but it’s got an i5, 4 GB Ram, and a 1 TB hard drive. The only job of this machine however, is to manage my collection, the storage is a 3 TB NAS drive that I’ve had for a while.

My Collections

At the minute I have three different libraries in Plex, one for all the movies I have downloaded, second for the TV Shows, and then I have also included my iTunes Media folder as a library, as I have a huge number of films in iTunes.

Now let’s get on to how I populate these libraries (Leaving some ethical behaviour behind of course).

TV Shows

The TV Shows are just video files that I have collected over the years and obtain manually, there are a few applications that can track new episodes, and even download them automatically, but I haven’t found any that I deem good enough. I don’t watch many tv shows, so a tiny bit of manual work isn’t a big deal for this.

Movies

My Movie collection is a mix, I have ripped some movies in the past (I hate DVDs), and also have a rather magical automation for downloading other movies I like. Here is a step by step process on how this automation works:

1. Find a movie on Trakt, and add it to my watch list.
2. CouchPotato finds new additions in my Trakt watch list, and then populates them in it’s own database.
3. Every so often, CouchPotato will check to see if any of the added movies are available to download (with some quality preferences).
4. CouchPotato then sends these links to download to Transmission, which is currently running as a local web server.
5. Transmission will triage each addition, and with some specific restrictions like cumulative download limits and speed limits (that actually change depending on the time of day), start these downloads, and place them in the correct folder on the NAS.
6. Plex Media Server tries to detect when new files are added to the libraries (It also checks regularly), and then it will analyse the media, add it to the library, and also put together all the needed metadata.

It’s a really fast process, and I enjoy how little work I have to do to make something happen. I’m sure the process may change in the future, but at the minute it feels pretty seamless.

iTunes

This is definitely where my main content comes from, it’s where I get all of my favourite content. Even to a point where I will have a copy of a film, but I will then also purchase it on iTunes. Because it means I get the best quality available, any iTunes extras, and I also feel like it’s future proofing my movie collection slightly.

Thoughts

I’m starting to really see why I hear so many good things about Plex, it’s easy to set up, it work’s nearly everywhere, and it just makes my media collection look amazing.

Running my own media server is something I think I will take further, and if I can pick up a cheap Mac Mini soon, that may be the next step. With my Amazon Dot, and now this small project, automation is becoming a fun hobby.

A few days ago Setapp was released to the public, but I was fortunate enough to be in the beta, so I’ve had a lot of experience with it. If you don’t know about Setapp already, it’s a subscription-based service that gives users access to a huge bunch of great macOS apps.

If I calculate correctly, this is my second month using Setapp, and it’s been great. I’ve had access to so many great applications, that before I wouldn’t of even thought about, or even heard of.

But after all of this time, there’s only a few applications that I have actually launched:

• CleanMyMac
• CodeRunner
• iStat Menus
• MoneyWiz
• Ulysses

CleanMyMac is something I’ve ran a few times, just so I could get an idea on the state of my new MacBook.

CodeRunner is actually quite a nifty application, it’s basically a text editor for programmers, that can actually compile and execute code itself. I played around with this a few times when doing Java at university, but it wasn’t something I stuck with.

iStat Menus is probably the only consistent app I use from Setapp, and that’s really just providing me with a few useful stats, that I could realistically live without. Because my Mac isn’t at any stage where I need to worry about resources.

I think I’ve opened MoneyWiz about three times, once to set it up, and then twice to check out my transactions. It’s a nice idea, but not something I need.

Ulysses, maybe my favourite application out of the lot. But I’ve been doing a bit less writing recently, so I haven’t used it as much. I do have iA Writer, and then there’s Bear, so it’s not a necessity, although Ulysses is a well made app.

From a usability point of view, Setapp has worked perfectly. And it does provide a great deal of applications for a little amount of money a month.

However, my problem is that I simply don’t need these applications. And although a few of them are nice to have, it doesn’t warrant any kind of subscription fee.

Check out Setapp for yourself and see if it’s right for you.