I finally got around to checking out the code for one of my apps, Qwiki.

Qwiki is a menu bar application, that lets you search and read Wikipedia articles. It can also open them in the browser, share differently formatted links, etc. But this isn’t an advertisement.

After updating it to 1.3 last year, I had other projects, university, and finding a job to do. So it got pushed right to the side. But I decided recently I wanted to modernise it, and maybe even look at adding new features.

That time hasn’t come yet, but I have spent the past few days going over the code, cleaning a few things up, migrating it to Swift 4, etc.

So in the mean time I fixed a couple of bugs, like when keyboard and mouse input get mixed up, escape key not always working, some design tweaks, and also added a preference to keep Qwiki open unless manually dismissed.

Now it’s been sent to Apple, I’ll have a few days off, and probably work updating another one of my apps. But in the very near future I plan on going back to Qwiki, and seeing what real features I can add!

If you have any ideas at all about Qwiki, then i’d be really happy to heat them. Even if it’s pure criticism, it all helps.

Check out the Qwiki website, or find it on the Mac App Store.

Just over a week ago, I really wanted to set a plain colour background to my iPad. I had a quick look on the App Store, but nothing just did the feature I wanted. So I ended up starting my own mini project.

It took a few hours to make, and I had to make it support iPhone, iPad, and all the sizes they both come in. In the end it was probably as simple as the implementation could be, but that’s what I wanted myself.

The app can be broken down into 5 elements – three sliders for the hue, saturation, and brightness, followed by a save/share button so you can save the image or do whatever you want with it. Then there’s the background of the app, which shows the currently selected colour. So you literally get to see a live preview of the wallpaper.

Shortly after making this app, I thought back to my post on clearing out my current selection of apps on the App Store. But like I said in that post, some apps don’t require much maintenance, and I this app will fit in to that category. So although I do plan on keeping it up to date, you can see yourself how simple that will be.

Of course, I couldn’t charge for an app this simple. So it is available for free on the App Store!

Jannis Hermanns took on a rather interesting challenge recently, and it was all about working from an iPad Pro.

But unlike most people that make the switch, he’s not a writer, manager, or a designer. Jannis is a backend engineer, that uses some terminal in some hardcore ways!

In the summer of 2017, I wanted to know what it would be like to use an iPad Pro as my main computer. I found out that it can actually work, thanks to an iOS app called Blink, an SSH replacement called Mosh, iOS 11 and running stuff on a server.

His perspective/experience I find, is different than most other macOS to iOS switching articles, as there was a lot more technical issues that had to be solved.

But nonetheless, he managed it in the end.

Sadly for myself though, this switch isn’t something that I could do myself any time soon, as I develop 99% of the time using Xcode. Sure, I could probably run that on a Mac, and use a iPad to operate it. But what’s the point in that.

Read the full post.

As I’ve been getting back into development for Hydrate (a water intake tracker for iOS), I’ve been thinking about the sort of representation of myself as a developer.

When I think of a great developer, they usually have a small number of apps. Sometimes they’re all at a really high standard, but most independent developers I see, have one or two main apps, and a few more fun ones.

I have been developing for iOS/macOS for quite a few years, and I have to say most of them are dead, stale, or heading in that direction. So it’s time for a clear out. This might not be a very interesting article, but I certainly think the act of me writing this, will aid in the process.

For some background information, here is the list of apps that I’ve made for iOS/macOS, and their current status.

Name	Platform	Status	Description
Hydrate	iOS/watchOS	Available.	My current work-in-progress, a water intake tracker.
Pretty Regular Expressions	iOS/macOS	Available.	Regular expression tool for macOS/iOS. Very simple.
Pixels Sticker Pack	iOS	Available.	Some pixel art iMessage stickers!
AniMatchers	iPhone	Available.	Just a fun memory matching game, with cartoon animals.
Bill Splitter	iOS/watchOS	Available.	A super basic bill splitter. Mainly a small project so I could check out the watch SDK.
Qwiki	macOS	Available.	My wikipedia menu bar app, which is one of my best projects in my opinion, which I will hopefully update soon.
Tap Gap	iOS	Available.	A quick game for iOS, where you try and tap the screen when a line is between a certain gap.
Floppy Turd	iOS	Available.	An awful, but funny remake of Flappy Birds. It took a sunday morning to create, and that was where I left it.
TinyMe	iOS/macOS	Removed.	One of my first few apps, they used the goo.gl api to shorten longer links, but they aren’t an issue anymore.
Postie	macOS	Available.	I used to blog on Scriptogram, and this was a basic Markdown editor with publishing built in. The service has unfortunately shut down.
The Girlfriend Helper	iOS	Removed.	I think the first app I made. It was an app that suggested message you could send to your girlfriend depending on the event type.
Halloween FX	iOS	Removed.	Basic soundboard app, which also featured a timer so you could hide your phone and scare someone.
The Farm	iOS	Removed.	Even more basic soundboard app, just contained farm animals.
Bug Splatter	iOS	Removed.	This was a weird one, there’s multiple levels of bugs/difficulty, and the aim was to splat as many of them before they reached the end of the screen.
Whack	iOS	Removed.	A pretty simple whack-a-mole game, but with pixel art, and funny noises.
TextShot	macOS	Never made it.	This was a really fun project to work on, it was going to be an app where you could select a bunch of text, and it would generate a picture from it, even including multiple different styles. Sadly the MacBook I was using at the time died completely, and I wasn’t clever enough to think about source control back then.

Okay, I didn’t actually know I already removed a few of these already. But there’s still some clearing out to do.

My aim is to have a small number of applications, that either are stable, and need hardly any maintenance, or ones that I can regularly keep updated, and are proven to be worthwhile.

So if you just take the apps I have available, there’s 9. Well one isn’t released yet, but it’s in progress.

• Hydrate
• Pretty Regular Expressions
• Pixels Sticker Pack
• AniMatchers
• Bill Splitter
• Qwiki
• Tap Gap
• Floppy Turd
• Postie

If I separate them into the groups I mentioned before, I’m left with this:

Maintainable Apps:

• Hydrate
• Qwiki
• Pretty Regular Expressions?

Minimal Effort/Stable Apps:

• Pixels Sticker Pack
• Tap Gap

Left over:

• AniMatchers
• Bill Splitter
• Floppy Turd
• Postie

That was pretty quick and easy, and it sort of represents what I already had in my head. Out of the four left over, they all have very good reasons why I don’t want to support them anymore. Low download numbers, super old code, and lack of interest to work on them again.

So, they’re be removed.

That leaves just five remaining apps, three I feel that are maintainable, and the other two are kind of eternal to an extent.

Of course Hydrate will stay, I mean I haven’t even released it, and it’s still in active development. Qwiki is stable, and my most popular app, so that will also stay.

Pretty Regular Expressions however was initially well taken, but I haven’t had any desire really to go back to it, and improve it. I will have a look at the code again, and hopefully I can add something to make the app even better soon.

Pixels Sticker Pack is a bunch of images, and I can’t see myself ever needing to update these. They’re fun, and I still enjoy using them!

That leaves Tap Gap, it’s a simple game, that still works fine. I’ll certainly make a few changes and support the iPhone X soon, but that is only a minor issue.

So the remaining apps, along with their pricing are:

Name	Price
Hydrate	Not decided.
Qwiki	£2.99
Pretty Regular Expressions (iOS/macOS)	£0.99
Tap Gap	Free
Pixels Sticker Pack	Free

Not a bad bunch!

I’ll be checking out a few of these projects today, and maybe even get thinking about the changes/updates I can make!

If you want to follow on with more detail, just follow me on twitter!

At this years MacSysAdmin conference, Sal Soghoian (the king of automation) talked about his new role at the Omni Group, and work that they have been focussing on.

The talk was titled “OmniJS: Automation Magic comes to iOS and macOS”, and you can guess everything from that. There’s a bunch of demos from Sal, showing off the new scripting possibilities (on iOS and macOS), and it’s really impressive.

You can find the video, presentation slides, and information on the entire conference at the MacSysAdmin 2017 page.

This is just brilliant.

Craig Hockenberry writing at Furbo.org (Back in 2013):

I started started using Twitter at the beginning of December. Like John Gruber and my colleagues at the Iconfactory, I loved our new “water cooler for the Internet.” I was, however, unhappy with using Twitter via the website or Dashboard widgets.

While taking a shower in the middle of December, an idea struck me: it wouldn’t be hard to hook up Twitter’s new API to the Cocoa networking classes and display a table with tweets. So I dried off and started prototyping: the next day I had the world’s first Twitter client running on my Mac.

A few days later, I checked all my code into our repository and Twitterrific was born:

r174 | craig | 2006-12-20 17:54:11 -0800 (Wed, 20 Dec 2006) | 1 line`
Initial import

Read the full post.

It’s a great story about the beginning of Twitter, and how Twitterrific came about. It certainly seems that everyone involved at the early stages, were super influential on the end product that all of us use today.

Twitter launched on the 15th July 2006, and the initial release of Twitterrific was on the 15h January 2007. So it didn’t take long!

I joined Twitter in July 2009, so even though I feel like I was relatively early to the service, I can’t imagine how cool it would of been to use it in it’s earlier days. I would imagine, something similar to App.net, as that was very enjoyable to use. But sadly didn’t make it.

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In related news, Iconfactory have been working on Twitterrific 5 for Mac for a while, becuase of a hufgely successful Kickstarter campaign. And it will go live on the Mac App Store on the 10th October!

How do you get the general public to update to the lates version of iOS?

Easy:

Hundreds of new emoji, including more emotive smiley faces, gender-neutral characters, clothing options, food types, animals, mythical creatures and more, are coming to iPhone and iPad with iOS 11.1. – Apple Newsroom

So in the next update to iOS, you’ll find mermaids, wizards, hedgehogs, giraffes, vampires, brocolli, and some more!

There’s a new Pokémon movie coming out (the 20th actually), and it’s by far one of the most significant they’ve ever made.

Instead of continuing the timeline of Ash and his many companions, they’re using it to celebrate all the adventures between Ash and Pikachu, that have happened across the tv-series and the other movies.

I won’t spoil too much about the film, because it’s probably best to just watch the trailer, and let it all come flooding back in. All I will say is, it starts right back at the beginning! And it contains so much stuff, I seriously don’t know how they will fit everything in.

Trailer:

Extras

As always, there’s a few benefits you get from going to see a Pokemon movie. You can get a code for Pokémon Sun/Moon to allow your Pikachu to wear Ash’s hat. Or for Pokémon Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon, you’ll receive a QR code that will grant you a Pikachu wearing the hat that Ash wears in the movie.

However, there’s something else that’s just brilliant. They will give you a special edition card for the Pokémon TCG!

Maybe that isn’t a big deal on it’s own. But I remember when I saw the first Pokémon movie at the cinema. I came out after watching the film, and was presented with a free poster, and a Pikachu trading card! To be honest, I don’t know where the card is anymore, but I still want this one.