Posts in Linked

Introducing the Relay FM Membership→

Big news from Relay FM today: you can now directly support your favorite shows (including the ones which I co-host, Connected and Virtual) with memberships.

From the beginning, Relay FM has been a community for podcasters, listeners and follow-uppers to share their common interests and passions. Now, with a Relay FM membership, you can directly support the hosts of your favorite shows.

There are two monthly tiers and an annual plan, and initial perks include bonus episodes of every show during Relay’s anniversary week in August, a monthly newsletter, and 15% off anything in the Relay store.

As someone who partially makes a living off memberships, I obviously think this model can work well for podcasts as well – I could argue that podcasts are even more personal than blogs, forming a stronger relationship between listeners and podcast creators.

Myke and Stephen have been working tirelessly to launch memberships, which make perfect sense as an addition to the Relay community. To become a member today, you can pick your favorite shows here.

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IBM Swift Sandbox→

Hi, I’m John Petitto, one of IBM’s Swift developers located at IBM’s Mobile Innovation Lab in Austin. We love Swift here and thought you would too so we are making our IBM Swift Sandbox available to developers on developerWorks.

The IBM Swift Sandbox is an interactive website that lets you write Swift code and execute it in a server environment – on top of Linux! Each sandbox runs on IBM Cloud in a Docker container. In addition, both the latest versions of Swift and its standard library are available for you to use.

Neat idea by IBM to write and execute Swift code in any desktop web browser. Too bad the web app is barely usable in iOS Safari because of text selection issues. I’d love to have something like this as a native iOS app eventually (if Apple allows it; but if they allow Pythonista, why not a Swift interpreter now that the language is open source?).

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Craig Federighi Talks Open Source Swift→

Writing for Ars Technica, Andrew Cunningham interviewed Craig Federighi on Swift going open source and how Apple is approaching open development:

The Swift team will be developing completely in the open on GitHub,” Federighi told Ars. “As they’re working day-to-day and making modifications to the language, including their work on Swift 3.0, all of that is going to be happening out in the open on GitHub.”

So instead of getting a big Swift 3.0 info dump at WWDC 2016 in the summer and then digging into the Xcode betas and adapting, developers can already find an “evolution document” on the Swift site that maps out where the language is headed in its next major version.

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The Grand Unified Theory of Apple Products→

Spot-on analysis by Neil Cybart on Apple’s product lineup:

At the Apple Watch introduction keynote, Apple changed its tune when explaining its product line. Instead of positioning product categories in such a way that each product played a specific role in our lives, Apple began moving down the path of consumers picking and choosing the devices that made the most sense for them. The now classic, “product profile” slide made its debut (pictured below). All of Apple’s primary products fit on one spectrum.

The message behind the slide was simple: each distinct product category possesses a different ratio of personal technology and power. The smaller the device, the more personal the technology.

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Pedometer++ Gets Smarter Step Counting on Apple Watch and iPhone→

David Smith’s Pedometer++ is one of the apps that got me back in shape and I’ve always appreciated the thought and care that he puts into it.

Today, David released a substantial update to Pedometer++ with an entirely new logic to coalesce steps registered by the iPhone and Apple Watch:

You might be wondering why I don’t use Apple’s Health.app merging system for this. After extensive testing about how that works I determined that it doesn’t really do a good job for step data. The Apple Health algorithm works around the concept of a ‘priority’ device. This priority device’s steps are then used in all instances except where that device is completely unavailable. In which case the secondary devices data is used to fill in the gaps.

The concept of a fixed priority device doesn’t really work for step data. As you move between the various activities of your daily life, the best device for measuring your movement is constantly switching. Thus you need a data merging algorithm that can dynamically analyze your step data and determine which device’s data is best at any particular time.

That is exactly what Pedometer++ now does. It goes through your daily data and can dynamically determine which device to use for any particular point in your day. The result is a much richer and complete picture of your daily activity than you’d get from Health.

I’ve tried many pedometer apps for iPhone and Apple Watch over the past few months, and I’ve noticed annoying discrepancies between data recorded by my iPhone and steps measured by Apple Watch. David’s intelligent system to reconcile steps taken sounds like what I’m looking for. It’s been a while since I wanted to really check out a new watchOS app, too.

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Apple Open Sources Swift→

As promised earlier this year, Apple today officially open sourced Swift, its new programming language unveiled at WWDC 2014. The now open source Swift is available on Apple’s GitHub page for everyone to try:

Swift is a high performance systems programming language. It has a clean and modern syntax, and offers seamless access to existing C and Objective-C code and frameworks, and is memory safe (by default).

Although inspired by Objective-C and many other languages, Swift is not itself a C-derived language. As a complete and independent language, Swift packages core features like flow control, data structures, and functions, with high-level constructs like objects, protocols, closures, and generics. Swift embraces modules, eliminating the need for headers and the code duplication they entail.

This is big news for developers who have been looking forward to experimenting with Swift. Interestingly, Apple has also publicly posted a repository to track the ongoing evolution of Swift, which should reach version 2.2 by Spring 2016 and version 3.0 by Fall 2016.

This document describes goals for the Swift language on a per-release basis, usually listing minor releases adding to the currently shipping version and one major release out. Each release will have many smaller features or changes independent of these larger goals, and not all goals are reached for each release.

Clearly, open sourcing Swift has been a massive effort for Apple’s teams, and they’re committing to it.

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Connected: The Opposite of Perfect→

This week, Stephen and Federico talk about the Mac App Store, iCloud Photo Library and (sigh) iPhone 7 rumo(u)rs.

Some of my favorite topics on this week’s Connected: iCloud, Google’s intelligence for online services, and photo management. You can listen here.

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iCloud for iOS Onboarding→

Sebastian Kreutzberger has posted a plea for developers to consider implementing iCloud authentication in their apps in lieu of traditional emails and passwords. The idea is that iCloud is inherently secure and anonymized, making for a superior solution to login information reused across multiple services.

The “magic” of iCloud authentication lays in its invisibility to the user.

With iCloud an app does not need to ask the user for an email address or a password to be able to uniquely identify who is running the app (and to later spam the user in marketing campaigns).

With the built-in, invisible iCloud authentication every app (developer) automatically can get a secure, globally unique representation of the currently logged-in iCloud user from iOS itself which it then can use to replace email and password as identifiers.

I don’t know if iCloud authentication would work for every web service with an iOS app, but I certainly am annoyed by having to create online accounts for almost every app I try these days. I have relied on iCloud signup for a couple of apps so far, and the experience has been really nice. I would like to see it used more.

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Real Design Work on an iPad→

Khoi Vinh makes some good points about using an iPad for design work. Among his list of suggestions, I’d point out better clipboard support on iOS:

Robust clipboard. The Mac’s clipboard is still relatively simple—it holds one thing at a time and allows you to paste it in any app that supports its current contents—but iOS’s clipboard isn’t even as capable as that. It would be a boon in itself to have more pervasive support for that simple level of copy and paste throughout the app ecosystem, but I would argue that iOS’s far more constrained interaction model should sport an even more advanced clipboard than the Mac’s. You should be able to save multiple clipboard items of multiple media types; each app that supports the clipboard should allow you to paste the most recently copied compatible item. That would significantly reduce the friction inherent on iOS in pulling together content from multiple sources.

Requests for better clipboard management on iOS go back a long way. Even trivial tasks such as copying rich text from one app and pasting into another one can be problematic on iOS (for “fun”, try to build workflows to paste rich text in iOS 9’s Notes. I’ll wait.). There are excellent solutions for third-party clipboard management (Clips and Copied – I use the latter now), but it should be native to the OS. There’s still plenty of low-hanging fruit for Apple to pick on the iPad.

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