For a small software company whose product really is the app – as opposed to a SaaS with a companion app, or some other type of business that can bankroll an app by virtue of their real source of revenue – I don’t see any other sustainable path forward than subscriptions.
A ridiculously dumb brute-force approach to getting around macOS’s security UI and making my software a better experience for my customers
Until Apple gives 3rd party developers a way to properly request the permissions we need to build the apps our customers want, hacks like these are going to be the norm.
Making Siri Shortcuts run automatically – even when iOS doesn’t want you to
Let’s talk about something fun and related to my new obsession with Siri Shortcuts and CarPlay. Namely, how to trick iOS into running Shortcut automations that the OS doesn’t typically allow you to do.
Triage Your Email in the Car with Siri
With this script, Siri will speak a summary of your unread emails and then allow you to take action on each individual message. You can listen to the full email body. Or, you can archive, delete, mark as spam, mark as read or unread, and send a reply.
Rebecca Stand and the phone reason
If you saw my tweet from earlier today then you’ll already know the punchline to this particular bug report. But for those of you who don’t follow my every dumb online comment, I present to you the strangest corner case I’ve come across in fifteen years of professional development. The app I work on during […]
Gone
So, uhhhh. This isn’t good. I really hope I’m just confused and not sounding a false alarm, but… Back in April I wrote a quick post about how I was backing up the shared iCloud Photo albums that my friends and family all use to send pictures and videos of our kids back and forth. […]
Perfectly Cropped
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 […]