10 Years of iPhone SDK→

Whether you’re a developer who’s working on mobile apps, or just someone enjoying the millions of apps available for your phone, today is a very special day. It’s the ten year anniversary of the original iPhone SDK.

I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this release changed a lot of people’s lives. I know it changed mine and had a fundamental impact on this company’s business. So let’s take a moment and look back on what happened a decade ago.

Craig Hockenberry published a fantastic retrospective on a decade of the iPhone SDK, which, after months of jailbreaking, allowed developers to start making real iPhone apps in 2008. It’s an excellent, well-researched story (with a lot of links, which you should open in new tabs; take your time to explore) that brings back a lot of memories. You should also check out the replies (standard and quoted) to Craig’s tweet for a lot more interesting stories.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t be here, typing this post today, hadn’t Apple decided to open iPhone app development to third-party developers 10 years ago. I think many of us in this community of people who still care about this stuff at least partially owe our careers to the iPhone SDK. I’ve shared this story before, but in 2008 I dropped out of university, got a job at a physical “eBay store”, and later started blogging with a free WordPress website because I wanted to write about apps. But really, I wanted to write about iPhone apps and try as many as possible to share my thoughts with other people. That website eventually became MacStories and these words I’ve been putting out for almost 9 years now.

In hindsight, it feels strange that thousands of jobs around the world were created or inspired by a huge and sprawling corporation, but it didn’t feel that way back then. Even as a nobody watching and blogging (in poor English) from the sidelines of a burgeoning industry, that period between the spring of 2008 and early 2009 carried a palpable sense of discovery, surprise, and wild experimentation that I remember fondly. I saw app developers as pioneers charting a future we couldn’t even imagine. It was, in many ways, a different, ingenuous, more enthusiastic era – one that I hope to live through again someday.

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Apple Releases ‘Welcome Home’ Video by Spike Jonze and Featuring FKA twigs to Promote the HomePod

Apple posted a short film on its YouTube channel called ‘Welcome Home’ directed by Spike Jonze, starring singer/dancer FKA twigs, and featuring the song ‘’Til It’s Over’ by Anderson .Paak. The video, which promotes the HomePod, is the first since the device was released to spotlight Siri. The spot begins with a young woman’s long, crowded commute home in the rain. She arrives home wet and exhausted barely able to muster “Hey Siri, play me something I’d like.’

She sits down on the couch in a small apartment as the HomePod begins to play ’Til It’s Over.’ As she starts to relax and sway to the music, she discovers she can extend her apartment with simple hand gestures. The remainder of the video is an energetic and colorful dance routine that shows off FKA twigs’ talent as she moves around the apartment extending the walls. The spot ends with FKA twigs opening her eyes as she lies on the couch apparently waking from a dream.

Video can’t capture the sound quality of the HomePod that Apple points to as one of the device’s main selling features. Instead, Jonze captures the convenience of asking Siri to play something you’d like. Siri has serious limitations on the HomePod, but controlling Apple Music works well and is a strength that I’m not surprised to see Apple highlight.

Halide 1.7 Brings New Depth Photography and ARKit Features, Darkroom Integration

We first reviewed Halide, the powerful third-party camera app by Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With, when it debuted in the summer of 2017, providing a powerful and elegant alternative to Apple’s Camera app that fully embraced RAW photography and advanced controls in an intuitive interface. We later showcased Halide’s iPhone X update as one of the most thoughtful approaches to adapting for the device’s Super Retina Display; to this day, Halide is a shining example of how the iPhone X’s novel form factor can aid, instead of hindering, complex app UIs.

While Halide was already regarded as an appealing alternative to Apple’s stock app for professional photographers and RAW-curious iPhone users (something that designer de With covered in depth in his excellent guide), it was lacking a handful of key features of the modern iPhone photography experience. Sandofsky and de With want to eliminate some of these important gaps with today’s 1.7 update, which focuses on bringing the power of Portrait mode to Halide, supporting the iPhone X’s TrueDepth camera system, and extending the app’s integrations via a special ARKit mode, new export options, and native integration with the popular Darkroom photo editing tool.

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Tinderbox: Analyze, Organize, and Visualize Your Best Ideas [Sponsor]

Tinderbox is a powerful Mac app that stores and organizes your notes, plans, and ideas, bringing order and understanding to the vast amounts of information collected when you’re working on a big project. Whether that’s writing a book, creating course materials, planning a wedding, or just managing your day-to-day life, Tinderbox helps impose structure on your data.

The app acts as a personal content assistant giving you the tools you need to discover connections and relationships between your notes that you might otherwise miss. Best of all, Tinderbox adapts to the way you work. You can use mind maps with shapes, colors, and links to surface connections between ideas, or one of many other tools like outlines, word clouds, timelines, and dashboards. Each is a powerful way to gain new insights and perspectives on your ideas.

Tinderbox also has agents and rules, which are fantastic automation tools that can do things like surface a series of tasks coming due soon or a particular topic you’re tracking. The options are only limited by your imagination.

Tinderbox works beautifully with other apps and platforms too. Connect the app to Apple’s Notes app, and notes you enter on your iOS devices or Mac can be automatically categorized in Tinderbox. The app also works with other apps like Evernote, DEVONthink Pro, and Dropbox.

Eastgate, the maker of Tinderbox, has a very special deal just for MacStories readers. Use this link to save $53 on Tinderbox – that’s over 20% off the usual price.

Our thanks to Tinderbox for supporting MacStories this week.

Dropbox Announces Forthcoming Integration with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides→

Today on its blog, Dropbox announced an exciting piece of news: the company will soon add integrations between its service and Google’s G Suite. The most prominent of those new ties involves Google Docs:

Dropbox users will be able to create, open, edit, save, and share Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides directly from Dropbox. And when you’re working in Dropbox, you’ll be able to save Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides to your Dropbox account.

Considering how much effort Dropbox has poured into building its own Google Docs competitor in Dropbox Paper, it’s surprising to see the company embrace the competition wholeheartedly with a full-fledged integration like this. It’s certainly good news for Dropbox users though, as Google Docs has long been the gold standard of web-based, collaborative document services.

Today’s announcement post is unfortunately short on details of exactly when this integration will launch (besides saying “later this year”), or what it will look like. It’s unknown, for instance, if the change will primarily impact Dropbox on the web, or if Dropbox’s mobile app will be also optimized to do things like preview Google files and open them in their appropriate iOS apps for editing; one would hope mobile will reap the benefits too. The solid implementation of Dropbox’s existing support for Microsoft Office gives hope that the service will play just as nicely with Google when the time comes.

One related piece of news from the post is that Dropbox is also building native integrations for Gmail and Hangouts Chat, so you’ll be able to select files from your Dropbox account while using those services, plus a couple other small things.

Dropbox is pushing forward as a platform-agnostic, service-agnostic file hub for your working life. Whether the strategy will lead to long-term health for the company remains to be seen, but for me personally, it’s one of the points keeping me from giving Dropbox up and going all-in on Apple’s iCloud.

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Things Automation: Building a “Natural Language” Parser in Workflow

One of the Todoist features I miss the most as a Things user is the service’s natural language parser. Available in the Quick Add field of Todoist for iOS, web, and macOS, this feature is, effectively, Fantastical for tasks. Instead of having to manually select task fields such as projects, tags, or dates, you can take advantage of an easy-to-remember syntax and quickly type them out. As you do that, Todoist will highlight the parts it understands in red, indicating that it knows how to parse them. I entered hundreds of tasks in Todoist using this system, and I think it’s an aspect of task creation that every other task manager should implement as well. It makes perfect sense, and it saves a lot of time.

Aside from a half-baked attempt at supporting natural language entry in its date assignment UI, Things doesn’t unfortunately offer a quick entry feature comparable to Todoist’s. So, of course, I set out to make my own using the app’s latest automation features.

Well, kind of. For starters, as much as I’d love to, automation doesn’t mean I can make my own interfaces in Things, supplementing the app with my custom UI to more easily create tasks. Things’ new URL scheme only lets us send data from other apps such as Workflow or Drafts. More importantly though, the workflow I’m sharing today isn’t based on a complex natural language engine such as the one used by Todoist or, say, the Chrono JS parser; I’m just using some special characters sprinkled with some delicious regex to make sure Workflow knows what constitutes a task title, a project, or a due date. Thus the quoted “natural language” in the headline of this story: it’s only natural as long as you don’t forego the special syntax required to make the workflow run.

That said, I’m quite happy with how this workflow lets me add multiple tasks to Things at once. I’ve been finding it especially useful at the end of the work day or during my weekly review, when I make a list of all the things I’m supposed to do next and want an easy way to add them all to Things. For this reason, rather than restricting this workflow to Club MacStories members, I thought every MacStories reader could benefit from it and modify it to their needs.

If you’re a Club member, you can still look forward to advanced Things workflows over the next few issues of MacStories Weekly; this one, however, has been too useful for me not to share with everyone.

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Connected, Episode 182: Wireless Charging Denier→

Federico and Myke slander Stephen’s good name before talking about iPhone and headphone rumors and Amazon’s acquisition of Ring.

Also on this week’s episode of Connected: a discussion about the long-term impact of Apple’s Beats acquisition and the company’s approach to an increasingly growing ecosystem of smart devices. You can listen here.

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Twitter Launches Bookmarks Feature in New Share Menu→

Twitter had previously shared that it was working on a new feature, Bookmarks, which would let users privately save tweets for later. Today the company announced that Bookmarks have officially launched and are beginning to roll out to all users across iOS, Android, and Twitter’s mobile site.

As part of this launch, the Direct Message button previously available on every tweet is being replaced by a new Share button – hit Share, and you’ll see the following three options:

  • Send via Direct Message
  • Add Tweet to Bookmarks
  • Share Tweet via…

The latter option will load the system share sheet on iOS.

Tweets added to your Bookmarks are available only for your private viewing, and they can be found by opening the app’s sidebar and hitting the Bookmarks menu option. You can see the whole process of how Bookmarks work in the tweet below.

https://twitter.com/twitter/status/968908970109812736

Everyone will have their own purposes for using Bookmarks, but for my own use, I’m considering saving links shared on Twitter for reading later. Normally I do this by saving to Safari Reading List, but Bookmarks may be a simpler alternative. Also, anytime I come across a tweet I want to share with my wife at the end of the day, Bookmarks should be a perfect fit for that.

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Sketch Adds Shared Libraries, Including the Official Apple iOS 11 Design Template, and Prototyping

Sketch, the popular design app from Bohemian Coding, received a big update today, but perhaps the most interesting aspect of the update is the incorporation of Apple’s official iOS 11 design template. An earlier update of Sketch added Libraries, sets of design assets that can be saved, reused, and shared. With the new version of Sketch released today, those Libraries can be stored in Sketch Cloud and shared with other Sketch users who can download and subscribe to them.

The utility of the new feature is highlighted by the inclusion of Apple’s official iOS 11 UI Assets as a Shared Library.

According to Bohemian Coding:

We’re really excited to say that we’ve integrated Apple’s iOS 11 design template into Sketch, and can now offer this invaluable resource as a built-in Library.

The Apple iOS UI library has all of the components you’ll need to start working on your next project, carefully crafted for Sketch. This expansive Library includes everything, from tab bars and status bars to buttons and switches, ready to be inserted into your latest designs.

Users can download the iOS 11 design template from the Libraries tab of Sketch’s Preferences. Once downloaded, users will receive notifications of updates to the templates.

Sketch’s latest release also adds prototyping. The feature allows users to link artboards and add animated transitions. Prototypes can be previewed in Sketch, using Bohemian Coding’s Mirror iOS app, or using Sketch Cloud.

To get a sense of what can be done with Sketch’s new prototyping feature, check out the video below by Sam Beckett, who has worked with MacStories in the past on Federico’s iOS concept videos.