Here’s a fun, personal story about what can go wrong in an otherwise fine UI when things are redesigned. My wife typically only charges her phone when she’s at her desk during the day. She doesn’t leave it plugged in overnight, which means iOS’s software update never happens automatically for her. So, she just recently […]
Feels like the future
Nick Heer writes about AirPods at Pixel Envy: It’s also the category of tech products that, I think, comes closest to feeling futuristic today I’ve never managed to phrase it like that in my head, but that’s exactly my feelings, too. For two reasons: One: AirPods are a damn marvel of technology and miniaturization. They’re […]
Aftermath
So last week was incredibly stupid. I’ve had one thing I’ve written reach the #1 spot on Hacker News before, plus an old website that reached the top of the trending del.icio.us charts, as well as a few moronic tweets that garnered a couple hundred likes, and one appearance on Slashdot back in the day. […]
Broken
This isn’t the blog post I intended to write. In fact, last night I drafted up one about my problems sending background push notifications with Amazon SNS (coming soon!). And after the ridiculously over-the-top shit-storm that blew up over my dumb tweet earlier this week, the last thing I wanted to do was step back […]
macOS 10.15 Vista
I completely realize and wholeheartedly own-up to the fact that I’m a geek and a Mac power user above and beyond what normal muggles will ever experience, nonetheless, this is the first-run experience I was greeted to this afternoon after upgrading to Catalina. Another update… It’s now 48 hours later. Ignore my original update below. […]
A Stupid-Simple Automated iOS Build Script
I’ve worked with a bunch of different automated iOS build systems over the years at the various companies I’ve worked for and with my own apps. In the early days of the App Store, many of these were completely home grown. As the toolchain matured, I’ve dealt with Xcode bots as well as dedicated SaaS […]
More Apple Photos Fuckery
Back in May I posted a Twitter rant about how iCloud Photos was fucking up videos I shot on my phone after upgrading to iOS 12.3. I’m happy to report that hasn’t happened again. But now I’m running into this… Every two months I upload a bunch of photos to Shutterfly and mail physical prints […]
Reviving an Old Mac App
A long time ago, on a Mac far, far away… In 2011 I had an idea for a tiny little Mac app called CommandQ. I’m a terrible touch-typist and it just so happens that on U.S. style keyboard layouts, the Q and W keys are right next to each other. That means I’d often press […]
The Mac Won’t Be Sherlocked
With last week’s WWDC news announcing that Catalyst (Marzipan) is now an official thing, there have been a metric crap-ton of Twitter Hot Takes™ declaring UIKit the one true way forward. I’m not going to debate that. Instead, I just want to point out that not everything in computing revolves around a 44pt tap target […]
My Favorite Email Spam Filtering Rule
All of my email is hosted at FastMail across two domains: tyler.io for personal clickontyler.com for business And across those two domains I basically have just three email addresses. rth@tyler.io is my primary email address that I migrated to when I switched away from Gmail five years ago. And then there’s support@clickontyler.com, which was originally […]
Automatically backup up the full contents of your Pinboard (and Pocket) bookmarks in DEVONthink
This is a followup to my post last week about archiving your existing Pinboard bookmarks into DEVONthink. I wanted to clarify two points and also explain the new workflow I’ve setup to automatically archive any new websites I bookmark – whether in Pinboard or Pocket. First, in my last post, I said “I recently stopped […]
How to Import Your Pinboard Bookmarks Into DEVONthink and Convert Them to Searchable Web Archives
Pinboard is a web-based bookmarking service that can optionally crawl the websites you save and store a complete copy of how they appeared at that time. Because Pinboard is a good web citizen, they allow you to request an archive of all of your bookmarks and their saved contents as a tar.gz file. I recently […]
My One Feature Request For iOS 13
With WWDC fast approaching, it’s the time of year when everyone posts their hopes and dreams and predictions for Apple’s upcoming software release. There’s tons of great ideas out there, and I certainly have my own feature requests both as a developer and as a consumer, but I just want to write today about one […]
Creating a Permanent SSH Tunnel Back to Your Mac at Home
Today’s post is a bit more technical than what I’ve been writing about lately, but it’s also partly for my own reference to save me some googling when I forget everything again in the future. I was always a big fan of Apple’s Back to My Mac service. I found it incredibly useful to be […]
Apple Asked For Feedback
Apple asked for feedback from developers today in an email survey. I try to keep this blog positive and restrict most of my snark to Twitter, but I figured I might as well post it here, too. If you can’t see that image for some reason, here’s what I wrote: I’m a long-time, independent Mac […]