Last week I introduced the idea of ‘attention,’ which I think is the single most important problem facing app developers. Attention is a gating issue, without which your app may as well not exist because no one is going to find it. This is a great topic because it has so many different facets to...
Twitter’s Fabric App Brings Real-Time Analytics and Crash Reporting to the iPhone
Over the past few years, Twitter has created and acquired an impressive array of mobile developer tools that it offers under the umbrella brand of Fabric. Today, Twitter released an iPhone companion app for Fabric that puts two of its most popular tools in your pocket – analytics and crash reporting. I have been testing Fabric, the iOS app, with two iOS apps provided by Twitter for the last few days and I’m impressed with its ability to sift through, organize, and display large quantities of data in an effective and meaningful way on an iPhone.
Ongoing Development
Hey everyone, John here. This is the inaugural installment of my new column for MacStories Weekly members called ‘Ongoing Development.’ As its name suggests, Ongoing Development is about software development, but it’s also about much more. Ongoing Development is about trying new things, seeing what works, and discarding what doesn’t. It’s about finding the time...
Screenbot Brings Droplr File Sharing to Slack
Yesterday, Droplr released a version of its online file sharing service as a Mac-only integration with Slack called Screenbot. Like Droplr, which I covered in my roundup of Mac and iOS screenshot apps, Screenbot makes it easy to share screenshots, screencasts, the clipboard, and other items.
Screenbot has a free tier that permits you to share a rather anemic 20 items per month. For unlimited sharing, you will need to pay $5 per Slack user, per month, which could get expensive fast if you have a lot of users. Given the amount of time so many teams spend in Slack, Screenbot is a smart move by Droplr, but I am skeptical about whether it is economical, unless you have a big budget and your file sharing needs are simple.
Dropshare 4 is a Great Alternative to File Sharing Services
I have tried a bunch of file sharing services over the years and many of them are good, including Droplr and CloudApp. These services have the advantage of being dead simple to set up and use, but they also happen to be subscription services. Over time, the expense adds up. The tools that come with those services are also limited.
Recently, Timo Josten released Dropshare 4 for Mac, an app that helps you create your own file sharing by connecting to services like Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, or your own server. I was skeptical about whether setting up Dropshare with one of these services would be worth the trouble, but I knew Amazon S3 has a generous free tier, so I thought I would give it and Dropshare for iOS a shot. The setup process was much easier than I anticipated and now with Dropshare I’m spending less, and can do more, with the files I share.
John’s Favorite iOS/OS X Development Podcasts
You wouldn’t necessarily expect that there are good podcasts about iOS and OS X development. It’s not exactly a topic that lends itself to audio given the syntax of programming languages. But there are a bunch excellent development-focused podcasts, especially ones focused on the iOS and OS X indie developer scene. Here are some...
Bound is a Dropbox-Connected Audiobook Player
Audiobooks occupy a weird backwater on iOS. Long tucked away in Apple’s Music app behind a ‘More’ button, audiobooks were kicked out of Music with iOS 8.4 and now live alongside eBooks in iBooks. Audiobooks are also one of the most restrictive types of media you can purchase on iTunes. Once downloaded to a device, an audiobook cannot be re-downloaded. Download an audiobook to an iOS device that isn’t backed up and if your iPhone or iPad dies, your audiobook dies with it. iTunes audiobooks are, to borrow a Steve Jobs’ complaint about Blu-ray disks, “a big bag of hurt.”
iTunes is not, however, the only game in town. Services like Audible let you re-download books, and there are plenty DRM-free audiobooks available. But Audible is its own proprietary system and even DRM-free audiobooks cannot sync to iBooks on an iOS device without using a Mac and a cable. Pain points like these are what create opportunities for third party developers like Tim Bueno who has taken the pain out of getting DRM-free audiobooks onto your iPhone with a promising, although imperfect, Dropbox-connected audiobook player called Bound.
John’s Apps for Developers: Design Apps
PaintCode 2 PaintCode 2 is vector drawing tool that instantly transforms the images you create into code that you can drop into an Xcode project. Programmatically-generated images have a lot of advantages, including smaller app bundles, but also have some disadvantages. For a good primer on the topic, I recommend listening to Episode 10...
Hi, I’m John, the New Guy
My MacStories origin story starts, appropriately enough, with a cup of coffee. Last Fall, Myke Hurley and I were catching up with each other as we walked back to our hotel from grabbing a cup of coffee during the Release Notes conference. I told Myke that I was writing a guide to affiliate linking....