An Interview with Craig Hockenberry and James Thomson 
Federico and John interview Craig Hockenberry of The Iconfactory and James Thomson, the creator of PCalc and DragThing, about the earliest days of the App Store.
App Store Storytime When the App Store opened for business on July 10, 2008, I was working at a physical eBay store after dropping out of university. I’m pretty sure I don’t even actually remember the exact day the App Store launched; I do remember that, at some point during the summer after finally buying my first iPhone, the App Store opened my eyes to a world that captured my interest like nothing had ever done before. I had no idea that, just a few months later, I would start writing a blog about Apple and apps that, nearly a decade later, is my full-time job. Something was immediately clear though: I wanted to learn everything I could about apps and the people who made them, and I wanted to try all the best ones I could find. I was hooked.
Organizing Reference Material for the iOS 12 Review For the past several years, I’ve spent the better part of my summer working on my in-depth iOS review, which I publish on MacStories the day the new version of iOS launches to the public out of beta. And every year I’ve tweaked my workflow for organizing research material for the review, which involves...
Demystifying SiriKit Peter Davison-Reiber created something pretty amazing in Drafts 5 – a natural language parser to create events in the system calendar natively, without launching other apps:
The way apps like Fantastical actually integrate with the system calendar in iOS is via an API which allows direct manipulation of calendar events. You may have seen the Allow app to access the Calendar? prompt when first launching apps which use this. Drafts integrates this API into its scripting capabilities, and so it occurred to me recently that perhaps I could build a similar functionality within Drafts using JavaScript. This would allow me to use the system calendar app, which I prefer aesthetically over Fantastical, while retaining the ability to enter events in natural language.
What I’ve ended up creating has almost all of the same functionality as Fantastical, but since it does not rely on launching an external URL scheme, is considerably faster. You can enter multiple events, each on a different line, and have them all instantly added to your calendar without even launching another app.
He used chrono.js, which is a natural language date parser written in JavaScript that he adapted to Drafts 5. This allows you to write something like “Monday at 2 PM” and the Drafts action will correctly interpret it as a date and time. This is not the first time Davison-Reiber created a Drafts 5 action based on chrono.js either – you should check out his natural language Things parser too, which takes my original idea and makes it even better and easier to use in Drafts.
Myke and Stephen hold an intervention. Federico doesn’t have much to say about MacBook Pro keyboards. All three have hopes and dreams for future Apple audio products.
On last week’s episode of Connected, we had an interesting conversation about the future of AirPods and other audio products by Apple. You can listen here.
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Apple released the first public beta of iOS 12 today, allowing non-developer testers to check out the new features and improvements in the next major version of iOS, set to be released sometime in the fall. While it’s always good practice to avoid installing a beta OS on your primary devices, the public beta seed typically ensures a minimum level of stability and functionality that isn’t always guaranteed with the first developer builds seeded at WWDC. If you’re interested in installing the public beta of iOS 12, you can find more details here.
We covered the big themes of iOS 12 and its most important functionalities in our original overview earlier this month. In this article, I want to focus on something different: showcasing my favorite small features and tidbits that I’ve come across in iOS 12 since installing the beta on both my iPhone X and iPad Pro a few weeks ago. While these features may change (or be removed altogether) between today and iOS 12’s final public release, they should give you an idea of the nice and hidden details you can expect from the latest iOS 12 beta. Let’s take a look.
To celebrate five years of podcasting together, Myke, Federico and Stephen do what they do best: talk about iOS betas, ponder photo management and screw up a round robin.
On this very special, Prompt-themed episode of Connected, we discuss the changes coming to Photos in iOS 12 and round up some excellent apps we’ve been using lately. You can listen here.
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John
