I feel like I post more updates to Text Case here than real blog posts. Oh well, this one I’m blaming Jason Snell. We exchanged a few tweets about Text Case, and he suggested a feature where Text Case could have a list of manually capitalised nouns that would be used when converting text. I immediately saw the benefit of this idea, and started mapping it out in my head.

In just over a day, the update has been developed, and worked its way through Apple’s review process.

It contains what I’m calling the “Custom Dictionary”, and it lets you store words capitalised in a specific way. So that whenever you use Title Case or Sentence Case, these capitalisations have the highest precedence. It’s perfect for brand and product names, and that’s also why I’ve included a few common nouns in the app to start off.

The words themselves are stored in a .json file, which you can find in the Text Case folder in iCloud Drive. This can be edited manually outside Text Case (I would recommend an app called Jayson), and the changes will then be picked up when Text Case is next used.

One more thing, I also added a new dark theme. Previously the dark option had pure black as a main colour, but this is a bit too dark for some people. I’ve renamed that theme to “Black”, and added an option that is a dark grey.

You can find Text Case on the App Store.

It’s time for another update to Text Case! This time it brings another 5 formats, all relating to Markdown.

There’s support for creating Blockquotes, which supports multiple paragraphs (which I personally wanted a lot), Code Blocks, and also ordered and unordered lists. You can also convert any Markdown to HTML!

All of these formats are, of course, available to use via the app, the Action Extension, and also in the Shortcuts app. And with these new additions, Text Case now has 32 different formats! Including four variants of Title Case.

You can find Text Case on the App Store.

Cody Delistraty, writing for The Paris Review, about the capabilities of plants:

A few years ago, Monica Gagliano, an associate professor in evolutionary ecology at the University of Western Australia, began dropping potted Mimosa pudicas. She used a sliding steel rail that guided them to six inches above a cushioned surface, then let them fall. The plant, which is leafy and green with pink-purple flower heads, is commonly known as a “shameplant” or a “touch-me-not” because its leaves fold inward when it’s disturbed. In theory, it would defend itself against any attack, indiscriminately perceiving any touch or drop as an offense and closing itself up.

The first time Gagliano dropped the plants—fifty-six of them—from the measured height, they responded as expected. But after several more drops, fewer of them closed. She dropped each of them sixty times, in five-second intervals. Eventually, all of them stopped closing. She continued like this for twenty-eight days, but none of them ever closed up again. It was only when she bothered them differently—such as by grabbing them—that they reverted to their usual defense mechanism.

It’s a fascinating read, and it’s not just a clickbait headline with minimal information. Rather he mentions research that has been done regarding how trees can share nutrients and information via fungal networks, how they react to damage and animals attempting to eat parts of them.

I’ve read about the ways that trees can communicate between each other, to notify others of possible intruders, and how a forest can provide the nutrients to an unhealthy tree to sustain it, in the book “The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben. But, the idea that a plant could learn, or even just have a form of memory, would certainly alter the way we think about plants in general.

Possibly my favourite part of this article would be:

Even the slightest possibility of a proven plant intelligence would have massive scientific and existential implications. If plants can “learn” and “remember,” as Gagliano believes, then humans may have been misunderstanding plants, and ourselves, for all of history. The common understanding of “intelligence” would have to be reimagined; and we’d have missed an entire universe of thought happening all around us.

There’s a new update to Text Case for me to tell everyone about!

It’s not exactly a huge update with tons of new features, but it’s one I think will make the use of Text Case much more efficient. I talked about the way Text Case is evolving recently here on the blog, but essentially the main new “feature” is the new Shortcuts action.

In Text Case 2.2, you’ll have just the one action in Shortcuts, and that will be able to have an input parameter for the text you wish to format, an option to select the specific format, and then it will have the formatted text as an output. Previously each format had its own action, which meant it was always a bit messy. And, of course, Shortcut actions didn’t have parameter support before, so it always relied upon the clipboard.

However, now you have access to one magical action that has all the functionality of Text Case. It can slot directly into any Shortcut, and then get out of your way.

I didn’t just stop there with the update. I also added a few extra new formats. You now have the option to remove all whitespace, or just trim the leading/whitespace with the new formats “Strip Whitespace” and “Trim Whitespace”. And there’s another fun one called “Shuffled” which will randomise the order of any text that is passed as an input.

You can download Text Case on the App Store, and you can find out more information on all the functionality in Text Case on the website.

Austin Mann:

I’m here as I continue on-going work photographing The Bach Project w/ Yo-Yo Ma, a world tour where Yo-Yo is performing Bach in unconventional places around the globe. It’s been a privilege to photograph this amazing journey, and when I considered how to test the iPhone 11 Pro’s new capabilities, I thought a shoot on this project could be a great fit as many of these shoots have been in extremely low light!

Of course, I’ve also been anxious to see what this Ultra Wide lens can do, so shortly after the performance I popped out to the countryside to find some epic landscapes and have been out exploring this big, beautiful country ever since.

The iPhone 11 Pro announcement was really about one thing: camera. (ICYMI, see this video pretty much summing it up.)

The big camera features I was most interested in testing were obviously the Ultra Wide (13 mm) lens, the new Night mode, Capture Outside the Frame, and things like iOS 13 photo management, editing tools, etc.

Austin Mann’s iPhone reviews are one of the few reviews that I read every year. As the main improvements to iPhone over the recent years being the camera, I can’t think of anyone else to better it all.

And as always, it’s packed full of great photography. It’s a must read.

Back in July of last year when I first released Text Case to the App Store, my idea behind it was for it to be a small utility app that you could use to format text into a few different formats. The main format was title case, and although it was a standalone app, I always thought of it being used primarily by selecting text and using the Action Extension to copy a formatted version of that text to the clipboard.

However, since that first release, there’s been 10 updates. Some of them were minor bug fixes, but most of them were adding new formats. In the current version that’s in the App Store, there are 24 different formats to use. Which is a pretty big number in my opinion. Especially as it was just meant to be a small utility app.

As Text Case as grown, the primary way people were using Text Case became through the Shortcuts app. Simply because it’s just easier to use it in that way. It can slot into your writing workflow, and you would never really need to open the app.

But as we all know, the original way that third-party apps could provide functionality to the Shortcuts app, was by “donating” different actions to the system. And then magically they would appear as selectable actions in the Shortcuts app, and that could either perform a task in the background, or it could launch your app directly into a specific part.

As Text Case is really just something that takes an input, does some fancy things to it, and then provides that result as an output, it was held back by the original limitations of how Shortcuts worked. The only way you would be able to use functionality from Text Case without launching the app was to copy text to the clipboard, have Text Case perform its changes on the clipboard, and then overwrite that with the newly formatted text. It only took a couple of extra steps, but it was nowhere near the ideal solution.

However, in iOS/iPadOS 13, there is a whole load of new advancements to how apps integrate with the Shortcuts app. The benefits at least from the perspective of Text Case is that you can make use of parameters. So within the format text action, you will be able to provide the source text as a parameter, there will be no specific need to make use of the clipboard. These actions can also return values as well, so your formatted text will be directly available to use as either a direct result or as an input into another action. It just turns the functionality of Text Case into customisable building blocks, that can be part of a bigger workflow.

That new functionality, that will be released very soon, is making me think about what Text Case is becoming. I can’t say that I see it as a standalone app anymore. Sure, it will always be an app. But that’s not really how it’s going to be used. Text Case is becoming a kind of “directory” of text formatting tools, which will directly integrate into different parts of the system.

It means that when I add more formats to Text Case, just like I am with the next update (which will add three new options), I don’t feel like I’m simply just making my app better. It feels like I’m providing the system with additional functionality. Whether it’s through an Action Extension that can be launched by sharing text, or within the Shortcuts app, Text Case is becoming more of a framework for using elsewhere, rather than something people would use directly.

And you know what? I’m completely fine with that. It’s really interesting to see how Text Case is changing, and how you can get all the functions of the app, without even remembering that you have it installed.

In recent years, the expected battery life of new iPhones have always been given in relative values. I saw this as a challenge to try and calculate what the raw number is.

The first place I went to was the technical specifications pages for the three new phones, the 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max. They all had relative values based on the previous generation. Of course, my next step was to look at those values. Again, they were relative.

So I followed the chain until I came to the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Their technical specifications no relative or fixed estimates for the battery life. There were estimates for audio playback, video playback, internet usage, etc. But I just wanted a single figure for an estimated use. As that’s what I expect the relative values on recent iPhones to be based on.

As far as I can tell, Apple didn’t talk about the battery life of the 6s generation iPhones when they were first announced. Therefore, I’m going to be basing these on overall estimates that I’ve found online. The numbers I found from various tests were around 8 hours for the 6s, and 10 hours for the 6s Plus.

Using these numbers, I calculated the estimated battery life for the 11 iPhones that were released since.

Here are the numbers (all amounts in hours):

iPhone	Relative Values	Resolved Values
6s		8
6s Plus		10
7	6s + 2	10
7 Plus	6s Plus + 1	11
8	7	10
8 Plus	7 Plus	11
X	7 + 2	12
XR	8 Plus + 1.5	12.5
XS	X + 0.5	12.5
XS Max	X + 1.5	13.5
11	XR + 1	13.5
11 Pro	XS + 4	16.5
11 Pro Max	XS Max + 5	18.5

One thing to point out is that the XR and XS batteries seem to last the same amount of time-based on the 6s/6s Plus estimated values, and then following Apple’s information. It was widely reported that the XR has superior battery life, which makes the numbers seem a bit odd.

But then again, we don’t know what type of data Apple is using for their estimates. Are they going on values that they have for a brand new iPhone when it was announced? Or are they based on the previous generation, but running the most up to date version of iOS? A lot of these things can skew the results.

While I would have preferred if along the chain there was at least one fixed overall value I could have used for a base. However, I do find the data to be interesting. Even if you just look at the relative differences between them. For example, we don’t know the official estimates for the 6s/6s Plus, but we do know that the 11 Pro Max supposedly lasts 8.5 hours longer than the 6s Plus. So a rough 2 hours increase in battery length every year.

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Update:

To help visualise the data, here are two charts. The first using only the relative values that Apple provide, and the second including the estimate base values for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.

Just a few weeks ago, my girlfriend and myself took a short trip to Dorset. One of the main parts of the trip was to visit Durdle Door. I was just going through my photos, and I picked out a few of them that I’d like to share here. All photos were taken on my iPhone XS.

Matt Birchler had a retrospective look at the last 10 iPhone event invites, to see if any of them actually had connections to what was unveiled at each event. The result was a lot different than I expected.

Great post by Andy Day at Fstoppers. I agree with everything.