Theo Strauss, writing about Lyft’s new implementation of the search bar, and why its best placed at the bottom:

Although we don’t think about it too often, a search bar all the way at the top of the screen is hard to reach. Especially for users who have smaller hands or users who have less flexible hands, reaching up is annoying, mostly because the top of the screen is far away from where their fingers sit.

If you visualize most apps, the main content is in the middle or lower-mid area. Tab bars for navigation, posts on social media, and keyboards on messaging platforms are all examples of important pieces of experiences sitting in a more reachable position.

I feel exactly the same. The ability to search within an app, or just accessing the main navigational controls of an app, should be the most accessible parts.

In a world where we use tools such as a mouse, or laptop trackpad to direct a cursor around a screen, a classic vertical layout where all navigation is at the top, and the content filling the rest of the space, is probably fine.

However nowadays we interact with content on our displays directly, so it needs to be designed with a human hand in mind, not a cursor.

You can already see Apple pushing developers/designers towards this bottom-up approach, as they’ve added the “pull up” drawer-like component that contains a search bar and results, into the Maps app. This is the approach I feel needs to be standardised going forward, but this isn’t the only approach. As the Music app also follows this idea of having controls at the bottom, with the now playing indicator being there.

I do see this becoming a trend very soon, and I suspect that in a few months quite a lot of apps will be using a sheet similar to the one in Apple Maps. The only drawback is that Apple don’t provide a standard implementation of this bottom sheet, and instead developers either have to implement this manually, or adopt a library from other third-party developers.

I’ve been experimenting with it at work, and I’ve found one library to be very useful, and that is PullUpController by Mario Iannotta. It provides you with a simple one liner to add any view to act as the bottom sheet, and also manages the sticky points, management of inner scrolling views and content, and you can also extend it to your wishes.

Hopefully Apple can share their implementation and more developers can make use of this new interface style.

I’ve made a long needed addition to my blog, a sidebar. I’ve been restricted to the top nav bar for a while now, and it’s been a pain to keep it simple but also have all the needed links.

Now I use the top main bar for high level links such as home, micro blog, projects page, etc. And the sidebar houses a few social icons, featured sections on the blog, and also a few links to my current projects.

I see this section being very helpful.

Matthew Gault, writing for Motherboard:

Back in 2012, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) launched a Kickstarter asking for money to fund Star Citizen—an ambitious space game in the mold of Wing Commander. It’s 2018, and while parts of the game are playable in various forms, it’s far from achieving what it set out to accomplish. So far, it’s collected more than $200 million in funding from fans eager to play it.

Ken Lord was one of those fans, and an early backer of Star Citizen. He’s got a Golden Ticket, a mark on his account that singles him out as an early member of the community. In April of 2013, Lord pledged $4,496 to the project. Five years later, the game still isn’t out, and Lord wants his money back. RSI wouldn’t refund it, so Lord took the developer to small-claims court in California.

This is a major reason why I don’t partake in many Kickstarters, and I personally think games are the worst examples. Clearly I’m the minority though, as the original Kickstarter campaign received $2,134,374 from 34,397 backers.

That’s a lot of money for a game that began development in 2011, and still hasn’t been released yet. Sure, there’s an alpha available, but it’s been 7 years, and they originally planned to release in November 2014.

Anyway, I don’t want to spoil the entire story of Ken Lord’s legal case, because there are quite a few interesting twists and turns.

Read the full article on Motherboard.

I’ve just upgraded my Mac to the latest Mojave beta, and I’ve discovered a new wallpaper!

In a previous update the Desktop Pictures folder was split into two sections – Dynamic Desktop and Desktop Pictures. The first section containing the photo of the Mojave desert, which contained a dynamic, and two still (night and day) versions.

This new one is called “Solar gradients” and comes in just a dynamic format. Of course it’s a rather simple wallpaper, and the majority of the time it’s a two-colour gradient, but it will show you the sun rising, the sky getting brighter, followed by the sun fading away, and a darker blue and black combination for the night sky.

A quick tip – If you want to preview a dynamic desktop, when you navigate to the Desktop & Screen Saver pane in System Preferences, just select the wallpaper, and the preview image will cycle through the different segments.

When I started my first job as an iOS Developer just over a year ago, I was really excited about my two 23” monitors on my desk. I had every app I’d need for the entire day open and visible for 8 hours.

The past month or so I’ve started to find myself disconnecting my MacBook to eliminate distraction, and it’s certainly working. I find it a lot easier to to focus on what I’m doing if I just have the one window visible.

I could probably just use the one monitor, and keep it minimal with one app always in full screen mode. But I think I just enjoy using a laptop more. It could be down to the fact that I’ve never owned a desktop computer before though, as for the last 10 years I’ve always used 13″ MacBooks.

It feels right to me to do all my work on this small laptop, but it certainly sounds weird in my head.

With all the nostalgia of the early App Store and iOS SDK days, Frederik Riedel tweeted about his experience developing iRedstone:

When I created iRedstone, I had no idea what object oriented programming was. I had no idea what a ViewController was. It was all in one UIView. But it worked. You don’t have to be an engineer to create apps.

— frederik 🧗🏼‍♂️ (@frederikRiedel) July 10, 2018

After he tweeted that, other developers started quoting it, and sharing their experiences. Frederik has compiled a great collection of them over on his blog.

Well this is unexpected, Apple have updated some of their Macs:

Cupertino, California — Apple today updated MacBook Pro with faster performance and new pro features, making it the most advanced Mac notebook ever. The new MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar feature 8th-generation Intel Core processors, with 6-core on the 15-inch model for up to 70 percent faster performance and quad-core on the 13-inch model for up to two times faster performance — ideal for manipulating large data sets, performing complex simulations, creating multi-track audio projects or doing advanced image processing or film editing. – Apple Newsroom

The improvements are to the 13” and 15” models of the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, and there are also a few extra bits of news. I thought I’d try and extract the key improvements:

MacBook Pros

 Hardware

• Faster CPUs – Now using 8th generation chips:
  • Quad-core Intel i5 and i7 processors up to 2.7GHz (Turbo Boost to 4.5GHz) for the 13”
  • Hexa-core Intel i7 and i9 processors up to 2.9GHz (Turbo Boost to 4.8GHz) for the 15”
• Up to 32GB of DDR4 memory in the 15”
• New HDD options – 2TB for the 13” ad 4TB for the 15”
• New Apple T2 Chip
• True Tone
• Upgraded graphics chips:
  • Intel Iris Plus 655 for the 13”
  • Radeon Pro chips with 4GB of video memory for the 15”
• The 13” model now ships with 4 USB C ports
• The keyboard has been replaced with a new 3rd generation butterfly keyboard, which is quieter, and maybe more reliable.
• Battery capacities have been slightly increased to cope with the newer specs. However, Brian Heater at TechCrunch says that no mechanical changes have been made.

Software

• “Hey Siri” comes to the MacBook Pro because of the new T2 chip.
• Also, enhanced security with secure booting, and on-the-fly storage encryption because of the T2.

 Extras

• There are new colour options for the MacBook Leather Sleeve (13” and 15”) – Saddle Brown, Midnight Blue, and Black.
• These MacBook Pro’s are also part of the Back to Schoo program, where students can receive a free pair of Beats headphones with eligible Macs.

It hasn’t been long since the release of Text Case, but I’ve already had some great suggestions, so I decided to add them in!

So here it goes.

Five extra formats: – URL Decoded – Capitalise All Words – Camel Case – Snake Case – Hashtags

One format has been “fixed”, and that is Capitalise. It now does the obvious and also capitalises the first letter after a period.

You can now choose which formats you want to enable, by navigating to the Settings page, and flipping the switches. This will obviously allow for a more customised interface, as I imagine some people won’t want all 12 formats to show if there aren’t needed.

I still have two things I want to work on. One is the ability for the action extension to be able to replace the original selected text with the new converted value. The other is a pretty great idea that I can’t share until I figure out how exactly I’m going to implement it. But it will be an advanced feature.

I’d also like to say thank you to everyone that has already downloaded Text Case, and I plan to keep adding useful updates!

If you haven’t already, you can download Text Case on the App Store.

Text Case is a simple utility that allows you to convert any text into various different formats. It’s available on both iOS and macOS.

It comes packed with an action extension that lets you select text anywhere in iOS, tap the Share button, and then you’ll find the “Convert Text” action. This will show you a preview of all available formats, and a simple tap on one of those will copy it to your clipboard, and you’ll be returned to the original app.

You can also choose to show/hide specific formats by navigating to the Settings page, and also change the order they are displayed in. This will apply to both the app, and the action extension. All settings will be synced across your iCloud devices.

The available formats are currently:

• Title Case (AP, APA, CMOS, MLA)
• URL Encoded/Decoded
• Uppercase
• Lowercase
• Capitalise
• Capitalise Words
• Sentence Case
• Reversed
• Strip HTML
• Strip/Trim Whitespace
• Markdown Blockquote
• Markdown Code Block
• Markdown Ordered/Unordered List
• Markdown to HTML
• Camel Case
• Snake Case
• Pascal Case
• Kebab Case
• Hashtags
• Mocking Spongebob
• Emoji
• Base64 Encoded/Decoded
• Rot13
• Clap Case
• Shuffled

All formats are available to be used with Siri Shortcuts. Every time you copy or share the result of a text conversion, iOS will be made aware and can suggest these actions to you in the future. You can also manually add a format to Siri by going tapping on Settings, and then the “Add to Siri” button at the bottom.

Download

Blog Posts

• Text Case Has Been Released!
• The First Update to Text Case
• Text Case 1.2
• Text Case 1.3
• Text Case 1.4
• Text Case 2.0 is Released!
• Text Case Can Clap for You Now! 👏
• What Text Case Is Becoming
• Text Case 2.2
• Text Case 2.3
• Text Case 2.4
• Text Case for Mac

Guides

Here are a few guides that may help you using the various parts of Text Case:

• What Is Title Case?
• Customising Text Case
• Using the Action Extension in Text Case To Format Text
• Using Siri with Text Case

Support

If at any point you need some help with Text Case, or you want to give some feedback, then you can reach me via Twitter, or email.