David Sparks on the missed opportunity of text and screen effects in iOS, and specifically iMessage:

When iOS 10 was first released, I made the argument that to keep these relevant, Apple needed to constantly iterate and update them. If you’ve ever spent any time with Snapchat, you know what I’m talking about. Snapchat regularly releases new filters and effects that you can apply to your images. They often change seasonally and even for particular holidays. Watching my children and their friends, they all get a kick out of whatever the latest and greatest Snapchat filter is.

I think Apple had a similar opportunity with text and screen effects in iOS messaging. Why not render text with snowflakes during the winter? Why not have a screen effect with flowers blooming in the spring?

I agree with all of the points David makes, and with the recent TV ads and a bigger focus on iMessage stickers, I think they should also work on these effects a bit more. I’m not saying they should go mad, but maybe a seasonal advert, and a few extra effects every now and then would be a massive improvement. Some people don’t even know that they exist, so surely just meeting that mark would be beneficial.

Something I’ve thought of doing before, but never really got around to, is having a break from social media. Jason Kottke spent a week “fasting” from social media:

Last week (approx. May 7-14), I stopped using social media for an entire week. I logged out of all the sites and deleted the apps from my phone. I didn’t so much as peek at Instagram, which is, with Twitter and old-school Flickr, probably my favorite online service of all time. I used Twitter as minimally as I could, for work only.1 I didn’t check in anywhere on Swarm. No Facebook. As much as I could, I didn’t use my phone. I left it at home when I went to the grocery store. I didn’t play any games on it. I left it across the room when I went to bed and when I worked.

The idea of this is very interesting to me, and his findings also made me think about doing something similar myself.

The whole outcome that I got from this piece, was that it’s more about not using a phone, than using social media specifically.

This is one of my favourite parts:

After the week was up, I greedily checked in on Instagram and Facebook to see what I had missed. Nothing much, of course. Since then, I’ve been checking them a bit less. When I am on, I’ve been faving and commenting more in an attempt to be a little more active in connecting. I unfollowed some accounts I realized I didn’t care that much about and followed others I’ve been curious to check out. Swarm I check a lot less, about once a day — there was a lot of FOMO going on when I saw friends checked in at cool places in NYC or on vacations in Europe. And I’m only checking in when I go someplace novel, just to keep a log of where I’ve been…that’s always fun to look back on.

This is something that I regularly experience, albeit very short lived. It normally happens after a holiday abroad, where the use of a phone is diminished. Usually by either the international usage costs, or just because the people that I’d be contacting, were there with me physically.

I’ve started to evaluate my computer usage in general recently, and I think of it as a refining process. Hopefully with things like automation, and better focus on specific tasks will make it easier.

With iOS 11 days from being announced, you wouldn’t expect a great deal of big updates to apps. But Readdle have implemented a feature, that most iOS users have been waiting for – Drag and Drop.

So on their iPad apps – Documents, PDF Expert, Scanner Pro and Spark, you will be able to drag items from one app to another when using Split View.

I don’t want to write thousands of words explaining this new feature, because it just wouldn’t do it justice. Instead, you can watch Readdles’s demo video.

It’s truly impressive, and it’s what I expect a native drag and drop feature on iOS would look like. Their own implementation would of took a huge amount of work, and they’ve really made it look seamless. One point I have to make though, is that if Drag and Drop is announced for iOS 11, would this custom implementation be the best way to do it?

But leaving the pessimistic thoughts alone, this is an incredible feature, and makes me want to try out even more of Readdle’s apps.

You can read Readdle’s announcement on their blog, but if you want to know more details on these updates, and see some more examples, then Federico Viticci has written a great piece at MacStories.

May the 4th be with you.

P.S. I like the prequels, Hayden Christensen was amazing, there’s nothing wrong with Jar Jar, and Rey is my favourite character.

When things at Apple go wrong, Tim Cook is the common point of blame for most people. But this small piece by Ben Brooks may make you think about his situation in a different way.

If like me, you’ve got a new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, you may get yourself in a situation where the ports just aren’t enough.

With the MacBook Pro, the ports you have access to are:

• 4 x USB C / Thunderbolt
• 1 x 3.5mm Headphone Jack

This is all perfect, until you need to plug in an external display, or have an old USB A drive you want to use. For sure, there are adapters everywhere, and you can literally find any combination of dongles.

The problem arises when you have adapters that break over time, or when using multiple adapters, they tend to get lost.

Well, a while ago I backed something on Kickstarter called HyperDrive. It’s an adapter that is more of an extension, as it just slots on to the side of the Mac, and turns 2 USB C ports into a lot more.

I was going to make a video for this when I first received it, but that just never happened. But ever since Apple released Clips for iOS, I’ve been making small videos.

So I’ve created one for this. I won’t share here what the actual details of the HyperDrive is here, because I don’t want to spoil the video!

You can’t get a HyperDrive from Kickstarter anymore, but they are now running an IndieGoGO campaign where you can find them.

It’s truly a game changer for me.

A few days ago I started to use Pinboard, which if you didn’t know, is a personal archiving service for links/notes.

I’ve known about the service for a while now, and it seems to be rather helpful to people, and while finally checking it out, the philosophy behind it really resonated with me. It’s a paid (only $11 per year) service, that has a huge focus on the actual content that you save, and letting you do whatever you intent to do. Nothing gets in your way.

I was looking into the various different settings of Pinboard, and then of course, had a look at the API. It sort of resurrected the idea in my head, where I would send out a regular newsletter to people, simply containing interesting links from around the web.

So I got creating a workflow, and in about 15 minutes I had a rough draft on a workflow that exported the days links, that featured a certain tag. My idea was I could then use this content in a super minimal email, and send it out at the end of every week.

This then evolved quite a lot, with the workflow being able to ask for user details, and then return the links (still for a specific tag) since a given date. It would then put it in a simple Markdown format, and convert to Rich Text for export purposes. I made a few cleanups, so if you want to try it for yourself, you can download my workflow.

The Newsletter

Starting this Friday, I will be using my fancy workflow to compile a list of my most interesting (hopefully) links, and send them out that night. I chose Friday, because then there’s always something to read over the weekend!

You can either head to the direct newsletter sign up page, or subscribe below:

I’m going to keep it as simple as possible, with a complete lack of images, or over the top HTML styling. By subscribing to this, you will receive a lost of what I find to be interesting, every week.

Being at home on the internet, I tend to read a lot of interesting things. So I’ve created this page to share my pinned links from Pinboard. I also have a very minimal newsletter, where I share my most interesting links from the past week.

A maximum of 10 links will appear on this page, for a full list you can view my Pinboard profile.

My sister has started blogging again, and I thought I’d just post a link here, for anyone that may be interested.

It’s called “Books & Crannies“, and as you can imagine, it’s all book-related. Or as she puts it:

The Ramblings of Someone Who Likes Books More Than People

Her most recent posts:

• The Sick Book Tag
• The Popsugar 2017 Reading Challenge (Progress)
• My monthly local book bargains

Joe Cieplinski, on the way iOS handles review prompts, and the way developers have to implement them:

While working on my latest update of Fin, I spent a bit of time playing with Apple’s new SKStoreReviewController API.

For those unfamiliar, this new API was announced with the early betas of iOS 10.3, and it went live with the 10.3 release last month. Though it isn’t the only approved way to prompt a customer to rate your app on the App Store yet, that is Apple’s ultimate intention. Like it or not, you’ll have to learn to work with this thing eventually, in other words. Unless you never prompt for reviews.

If you’re interested in the way apps now ask for reviews on iOS, or maybe just want to find out a developers perspective, Joe explains the pros and cons very nicely.