Poking A Hole In The Sandbox: Using URLs on iOS→

Poking A Hole In The Sandbox: Using URLs on iOS

Using URLs on iOS

Using URLs on iOS

Just yesterday I wrote extensively about URL schemes and, specifically, x-callback-url in my review of Pythonista:

I believe that, going forward, Pythonista and other similar apps will show a new kind of “scripting” and task automation built around the core strenghts of iOS. As we’ve seen, x-callback-url is a standard that leverages a part of iOS – URL schemes – to achieve simple, user-friendly and URL-based inter-app communication that can be used in a variety of ways. Looking ahead, there’s a chance rumored features such as XPC will bring more Mac-like functionalities to iOS, but developers will still find new ways to make iOS more powerful without giving up on positive aspects such as increased security and the simplicity of the app model.

My workflow focused on x-callback-url, a protocol created by Agile Tortoise’s Greg Pierce. Thanks to 360|iDev, you can now watch a free session video of Greg Pierce himself explaining the basics of URL schemes on iOS as well as techniques to properly implement his specification, x-callback-url, to allow for more advanced inter-app communication, such as the one I’m using with Pythonista.

If you’re a developer and you’re interested in knowing more on the subject, check out the free video here.

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Just How Fast is Fusion Drive? Macworld Benchmarks the Mac Mini→

Just How Fast is Fusion Drive? Macworld Benchmarks the Mac Mini

Apple’s Fusion Drive isn’t a new idea — after all, Seagate sells their Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drive and Corsair promises that their Accelerator Series SSD cache drives will improve the performance of your PC by augmenting existing hard drives — but it is a new option available for Apple’s latest Mac minis and iMacs. (There are notable differences between how the aforementioned products work in comparison to Fusion Drive, but they all attempt to reach the same result.)

To quickly recap, Apple’s Fusion Drive was announced on October 23rd in San Jose, California, where Apple launched an updated Mac mini, a new iMac, the iPad 4, and the new iPad mini. The Fusion Drive pairs a mechanical hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD). Traditional hard drives, while available in large storage capacities from 1 to 2 terabytes, are slow to read and write data. Apple’s implementation uses the SSD as temporary storage, where the most recently and often used apps and documents can be stored so that they load and save faster. Things on your computer that are used the least often are placed in “long term storage,” or the slower mechanical hard drive. However, the two drives (combined) will appear as one drive in the Finder — OS X handles everything for you. So why not just use a SSD (which would be simpler in setup)? While they’re much faster and (arguably) less prone to failure than their mechanical counterparts, SSDs are still very expensive. A 500 GB SSD still costs around $400, while a 1 TB mechanical hard drive costs under $100. As Macworld puts it,

…in brief, Fusion Drive is Apple’s answer to the high-price-per-gigabyte problem of solid-state drives. SSDs are fast as all get out, but they have very limited capacity and they cost a lot more than traditional drives. Fusion Drive gives you the best of both worlds by bringing together a separate 120GB SSD and 1TB hard drive and presenting them to both the user and applications as a single drive.

The benefit is clear. Fusion Drive is less expensive and offers incredible performance. Just how fast is it?

The standard configuration $799 Mac mini with its 5400-rpm hard drive took more than three times as long to complete our copy file and uncompress file tests as the Fusion Drive did in the BTO Mac mini.

Macworld’s build-to-order Mac mini, with a Fusion Drive, scored comparatively to a 15” MacBook Pro with Retina display. Impressive. And they’ve ran a gamut of tests to show that a customized Mac mini is a really fast little machine. As a side note, I personally think if someone’s thinking about dropping $1499 on a Mac mini, most people should spend a few hundred dollars more and get a 21” iMac for the display, mouse (or trackpad) and keyboard.

As for the technical implementation of the Fusion Drive, several days ago, Ars Technica went in depth on how it works using a training document as a guide. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, and Ars writes that what makes it newsworthy is that it just works. Sounds familiar right?

If you’re a casual user and don’t care about the internals, there is nothing that you need to do to make FD “work.” You power on the system, log on, and use it. A Fusion Drive-equipped Mac leaves the factory with the operating system and all of the pre-installed applications on the SSD side, so the system is just as snappy and responsive as if it were an SSD-only Mac.

I personally wouldn’t pass up the Fusion Drive (a $250 option) if I was configuring a higher end Mac mini or a new iMac. There’s no setup of the drives themselves, and as far as you or anyone else is concerned, you still save documents and install apps the same way you always have. In the background, Apple’s Fusion Drive manages what physically goes where, how it’s handled, and when it gets offloaded to the hard drive. Apple’s Fusion Drive isn’t geek friendly — Ars Technica notes that you won’t want to “poke at or prod” the Fusion drive. This comes with caveats, such as being forced to use Apple’s Boot Camp for creating a Windows partition. It is, however, very consumer friendly, and that’s all that relatively matters when you simply want the best possible performance for the most storage.

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Automating iOS: How Pythonista Changed My Workflow

A couple of months ago, I decided to start learning Python.

I say “start” because, as a hobby to fit in between my personal schedule and work for the site, learning the language is still very much a work in progress. I hope I’ll get to an acceptable level of knowledge someday. Coming from AppleScript, another language I started researching and playing with earlier this year, the great thing about Python is that it’s surprisingly easy to pick up and understand. As someone whose job primarily consists of writing, I set out to find how Python could improve my workflow based on text and Markdown; I found out – and I’m still finding out – that Python allows for more flexible and intelligent string manipulation[1] and that some very smart folks have created excellent formatting tools for Markdown writers.

But this article isn’t strictly about Python. Soon after I took my decision to (slowly) learn my way around it, I asked my friend Gabe Weatherhead about possible options to write and execute Python scripts on iOS. Thanks to Gabe’s recommendation I installed Pythonista, and this app has completely changed my iOS workflow. Read more

Kickstarter: Shaun Inman’s Retro Game Crunch - Six Games in Six Months

I haven’t covered many Kickstarter projects as of late: it seems many are getting funded but not delivering on time or backers are still waiting for the product to ship. Today, Shaun Inman has launched his own Kickstarter project along with his friends Rusty Moyher, of Bloop fame, and Matt Grimm, a great composer and sound designer of such games as Flip’s Escape. Together they are launching Retro Game Crunch, a Kickstarter series that will try to produce six original games in six months. Sound too good to be true? Normally yes, but with the awesome team I believe it will happen. Read more

Apple Airs New iPad mini Commercials→

Apple Airs New iPad mini Commercials

Following the “Piano” ad launched after the announcement of the iPad mini, today Apple aired two new commercials for the device. Named “Books” and “Photos”, both commercials focus on showing the size difference between the regular iPad and the iPad mini. More importantly, both ads want to communicate the simple message that the iPad mini is smaller in size, but also just as capable in terms of functionality: the iPad mini runs the same apps of the bigger iPad, therefore making it a “real” iPad, only smaller (and thus more portable). This follows the tagline on the product page: There’s less of it, but no less to it.

As noted by Jordan Golson at MacRumors, the commercials rely on clever pairings of books and photos to compare the two iPad models. For books, Apple uses The Sun Also Rises and The Valley of the Moon; East of Eden and How the West Was Won; Moby Dick and Gone Fishing.

The new commercials aren’t available on Apple’s YouTube channel yet, but they have been uploaded to Apple’s website. You can watch them here.

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StatNut for iPhone

I’ll admit it: I am crazy about the details. I enjoy numbers, statistics, and as much info about my interests as humanly possible. Sometimes I wonder if my brain will collapse with all the data I try to absorb. I’m one of those people who reads the manual every time I get a new gadget because I want to know the ins and outs of how everything works.

Most of us enjoy seeing stats for our social networks; we like to know how many followers, clicks, etc. we have across the Internet. There are a few iOS apps out there that do so, like Ego or Birdbrain, but I’m always curious to try something new. StatNut is a new iPhone app from Shiny Frog and FFFABS that lets you add accounts from many social services and displays them in one easy to read mobile interface. Services include Instagram, Twitter, Dribbble, Facebook, Tumblr, Vimeo and YouTube.

Setup is easy: just enter your usernames and you’re ready to go. Once you enter your accounts you can access the settings for each by swiping to the right to reveal an animated gear icon; from there you can change your username or delete the account. Swiping to the left reveals more details like follows, lists, tweet counts, likes, shots, and favorites. A full swipe to the left reveals an animated opening eye, and this will take you to the mobile site of each service except Instagram; StatNut will open the Instagram app if you have it installed.

If you want to reorder the services, simply tap and hold to move them up and down. Some services will let you enter more than one username if you have multiple accounts, like Twitter or Dribbble. We have included a promo video below so you can see it in action. Read more