Interviews with Becky Hansmeyer and Heidi Helen Pilypas
An Interview with Marco Arment and David Smith 
Federico and John interview Marco Arment, the creator or Instapaper and Overcast and David Smith who has many apps including health and fitness apps such as Pedometer++, Workouts++, Activity++, and Sleep++ about building sustainable businesses over the past decade of the App Store.
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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