May 2013
2 posts
“Abolishing the “top” lists from all App Store interfaces and exclusively showing...”
– Marco Arment
2 tags
URL encoding with DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo will perform URL encoding and decoding. For example:
‘url encode $’ and ‘url decode %23’. Handy.
April 2013
10 posts
3 tags
Medieval Name Generator →
This would be useful if one was to play Dungeons and Dragons (like these folks), or start playing Fire Emblem: Awakening and need to name the tactician.
Sleep is important →
Professor Russell Foster, New Scientist
Sleep is not a luxury or an indulgence but a fundamental biological need, enhancing creativity, productivity, mood and the ability to interact with others.
If you are dependent upon an alarm clock, or parent, to get you out of bed; if you take a long time to wake up; if you feel sleepy and irritable during the day; if your behaviour is overly...
Zelda: Oracle of Seasons & Ages coming to 3DS in... →
Andrew Brown at Nintendo World Report
This is exciting. I’ve been after these games for years, but was never convinced with the cost and hassle of buying from Ebay.
5 tags
Touchfit: Georges St-Pierre →
Since I started at Zolmo in October, I’ve spent a lot of my time working on Touchfit: Georges St-Pierre, which we released on the App Store yesterday.
I’m so happy with how the application turned out. The user interface is both familiar and exotic; you have to see it in motion. Watch the trailer and download now for iPhone and iPod Touch.
Grouped table view background colour
I was just updating some old code and found that UIColor’s + groupTableViewBackgroundColor returns a clear colour in iOS 6. This isn’t mentioned in the documentation, but comments in UIInterface.h — where this method is declared — state that the method is deprecated.
The Time Machine menu bar icon does not spin when preparing backups on Mountain Lion. It now spins only when copying, providing less feedback. I don’t like this.
If I had a Mac that supported Power Nap (continues backing up after being put to sleep) and was convinced the backups reliably completed, then I would remove the icon from the menu bar and forget about it. But I don’t, so I want to...
1 tag
Luigi’s Mansion 2
I started playing yesterday. So far I would says it’s alright, which is about what I expected. It looks great considering how awful the 3DS XL screens are. The game uses too many buttons. I am very tempted to use the ‘Dual Scream’ ringtone on my iPhone.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director’s Cut →
Jonny and Scott’s impressions on Nintendo World Report
I was intrigued by Deus Ex when it came out. I’m more likely to buy a Wii U than an Xbox 360, so maybe I’ll be able to play it. I’m getting a Resident Evil 4 feeling from this, which is my favourite Wii game, so I hope this turns out similarly.
January 2013
2 posts
The Trend Against Skeuomorphic Textures and... →
by John Gruber, Daring Fireball
I think John is right, and he’ll appear very astute looking back on this article in a couple of years. Time will tell.
Development Notes on Glassboard 2.3.3 →
by Brent Simmons
I love hearing how OS X and iOS app veterans are doing things. Brent has been doing this for such a long time, but is still always looking for ways to improve his craftsmanship.
June 2012
2 posts
Concrete, tarmac and asphalt
Concrete is a technical term for a material composed of a mineral aggregate bound by a binder. Cement is a powder that, when mixed with water, gives a binder. In everyday use, ‘concrete’ usually refers to Portland cement concrete, which uses Portland cement.
Our use of the word ‘tarmac’ referring to road surfaces is historical. Tarmac was popular for surfacing roads about a century ago. Almost...
Cantab.net
The University of Cambridge offers email accounts to alumni on their Cantab.net service.
Firstly, do you really need another email account?
IMAP access is only available for payed accounts. I really don’t want data as important as email locked up like this. I would have to get a paid account if I used the service seriously.
I really didn’t like their advertising message. So they’re...
May 2012
3 posts
Setting Paste and Match Style as default →
by Thaweesak Suksuwan
An old tip, but a good one. Use the Keyboard System Preferences pane to set ⌘-V to “Paste and Match Style” or similar commands. I’ve just set it up for “Paste With Current Style” in OmniOutliner.
“When people ask me how much I work I will usually answer: as little as possible....”
– Ben Brooks
Clear
Clear is exciting. It pushes the boundaries of how we think software interfaces work and is full to the brim with delightful interactions. Below are some thoughts on the app. I’ll also refer to Portmanteau’s Listary for comparison.
Navigation
Standard iPhone parent-child view navigation employs a spatial model that arranges views left-to-right; lower levels move in from the right side of the...
February 2012
8 posts
Clear →
I have many thoughts on Clear, but I’ll need to use it to do real stuff before I feel qualified to talk about it. In the meantime, check out Portmanteau’s Listary, which I’ve been using since its release in May.
Better Pasta →
by John Siracusa on Hypercritical
I like pasta too, and I really liked this article. I mostly do all the things John recommends, with the exception of salting the water “until it tastes like the ocean”.
I’ll add that all hot food should be served with warm plates or bowls, not just pasta.
Picture and links
Hot zones – Marco.org
Choosing pagination tap zones - Instapaper Blog
Instapaper Pro 2.2.3 now available - Instapaper Blog
Instapaper
Rogue Amoeba - Under The Microscope » Blog Archive » The Evolution of Piezo
Audio playback CPU usage
Finder icon view: 80%
QuickTime Player: 3%
WatchJohn Gruber has a post ‘New High-DPI UI Resources in 10.7.3’, which links to various tweets. It may be true that there are new mouse cursor resources in Mac OS X 10.7.3, and that these resources scale well to large sizes. However, the equivalent resources from 10.7.0 to 10.7.2 are also scalable. My video shows some of these cursors on 10.7.2.
Note that these cursors are truly scalable: they look...
AirPort Utility 6.0's missing features →
by Richard Gaywood at The Unofficial Apple Weblog
It seems unlikely that you are going to care very deeply about these changes, and if you do, you can easily get the older version of the utility.
I’m super annoyed and losing sleep over this. It’s 3am and I’m downloading software and reading articles. Why?
Still, though, I think it’s both peculiar and curious that Apple is...
AirPort Utility 5.6 →
Apple Support
Make sure you grab this while you can.
January 2012
12 posts
Hard-to-see scroll bars
Have you perchance been viewing the Python documentation in Safari on Lion, and been frustrated that the overlay scroll bars can barely be seen?
I promise the scroll bar is there; I can see it viewing this page on my iPhone 4.
This CSS, applied with Kridsada Thanabulpong’s User CSS extension, should remedy the situation.
body {
background-color: white !important;
}
There is no...
Safari history in Spotlight
For some reason, there isn’t an option to not show Safari history in Spotlight results. (Bookmarks can be turned off.) I worked around this by adding ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/ to the exclusion list in the Privacy tab of Spotlight preferences.
iBook author for mathematical expressions →
Apple Support Communities
I’m not the only one thinking about the lacking support for mathematical expressions in iBooks Author. It works with MathType (as does Pages ’09), but this isn’t enough.
iBooks could do more than just display expressions. I’d find it very useful to be able to get more information about symbols: what is it defined as and where else is it used?
Maybe mathematical...
Spotlight preferences
I was using my Mac, and wanted to access the Spotlight preferences without taking my hands off the keyboard. I thought it would be cool if I could summon Spotlight then press ⌘-comma but this does not work.
The arrows keys move up and down through results, and there is a “Spotlight Preferences…” option at the bottom of every results list. I found these ways to navigate quickly:
Use command...
Different Levels →
by Dov Frankel on For No One
The iPhone has two different volume levels: your ringer volume, and your audio playback volume. When audio is playing, or when an audio-centric app is open, the hardware volume buttons change the volume of the audio.
In Settings > Sounds, there is an option called “Change with Buttons”. The situation described above is when this option is on. When this option...
Bring
An “evil magic stone” in “Rave Master”? I think reading any more would spoil this.
5by6
Now I know why we’re still on iWork ’09 on the Mac →
Readomator for Instapaper →
Listen to your saved Instapaper articles as easily as you listen to podcasts. Readomator seamlessly bridges Instapaper and the iTunes podcast section using text-to-speech.
This is interesting stuff. It’s a Mac app, which takes text from Instapaper, runs it through the Mac OS X’s speech synthesis system, then puts the resulting audio into iTunes as a podcast.
Instapaper is great (we all...
Play the bitly team memory game →
Bitly have a fun game to help you learn their team.
Immobile Apps →
by Nick Bradbury
Many of my favorite mobile apps are immobile. I can’t take them with me.
All applications should aim to work as well as possible without a network connection. This is very important, but it’s often done wrong.
As well as preserving as much functionality as possible, don’t pester the user when there’s no internet connection. Mail and Maps on the iPhone are good...
December 2011
5 posts
Average web page is now almost 1MB →
by Ryan Kim on GigaOm
Roughly equal to the size of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.
(via Brent Simmons)
Listary 1.1 →
on the Listary Blog
A nice update to one of my favourite apps. I love the new option to use ‘@done’ for completed items. Contrary to the release notes, this works well with the standard Notational Velocity, not just nvALT.
One downside: despite claims that syncing is now faster, I see the network activity indicator in the status bar keep spinning for ages (about a minute or two each time).
Why can’t I undo scrolling?
Safari 5.1.2
Address issues that could cause webpages to flash white
Yay!
Allow PDFs to be displayed within web content
Interesting. How does this work? Webkit has allowed the first page of PDFs in img tags for ages.
apple.com/hypercard →
Redirects to HyperCard’s Wikipedia entry. Nice.
November 2011
23 posts
Zombie episode in Instacast
I had a zombie podcast episode in Instacast. It was cached and refused to be cleared.
The solution:
Turn on iCloud sync
Delete Instacast from the device
Download the app again
Choose to use iCloud sync when asked
The downside was that I had to go through Instacast’s settings; these are not synced, and many of the defaults are not to my liking (such as auto-caching).
Also, Instacast’s...
Alfred 1.0 is due out imminently. What a bad time for my Mac to ‘have issues’.
Better Quotes →
by Tim Bray on ongoing
I’m in with this. You must use proper quotation marks. My only exceptions are text messages (to avoid jumping up to 16-bit rather than 7-bit encoding), and I don’t go back and change what auto-correction does.
Thankfully Tumblr fixes this for me.
I agree with Brent Simmons: learn the key combinations, don’t mess with remapping.
Instacast HD →
A podcast universe in high definition
Martin Hering on the Vemedio Blog:
After the tremendous success of Instacast for the iPhone, a lot of customers asked me about a version for the iPad. At first I thought nay, who takes his iPad on the way to listen to podcasts when an iPhone in your pocket is so much more convenient? Then the idea grew on me. I thought about for what somebody would...
Greg Joswiak at SVC2UK
A week-and-a-half ago I attended Silicon Valley comes to the UK: a series of talks and panels organised by Sherry Coutu and Reid Hoffman.
Greg Joswiak gave a talk. Joswiak is the vice president of worldwide iPod, iPhone, and iOS product marketing at Apple. The twenty minute talk started with how they see product marketing at Apple. Next, Joswiak spoke about what the Apple brand means to him. A...
