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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

iStat 2 Review

I like Bjango. They make the kind of simple, polished, and useful software that defines OS X as a platform with equal attention to beautiful pixels and powerful features. I was already a big fan of Consume and Skala. Bjango’s latest release, iStat 2, falls exactly under this category of apps: great-looking and efficient at the same time.

Mac Servers

I own a 13-inch MacBook Air and a 21.5-inch iMac. My MBA is the “work machine”, whereas the iMac has always been the media center of the house, as it’s connected to a couple of external drives with my iTunes library on it. For the past few months, however, I’ve been increasingly switching every part of my “entertainment workflow” from local to cloud-based. It started with Rdio a year ago (now, I have a Family account and I’m not switching any time soon). For iTunes, it means I’ve slowly uploaded my library to a Mac mini hosted on Macminicolo. As documented elsewhere, I’m very happy with Macminicolo, their reliability, and the overall message of a Mac mini server always available in the cloud.

But I’m not a “server guy”. I don’t understand the teminology behind server management, and my limited skills go as far as restarting WebDAV and Apache. I use my Mac mini primarily for media streaming through Plex and as a server for Mail, OmniFocus, Dropbox, and other services or apps that allow me to automate my workflow in the cloud. All my Dropbox-based scripts for plain text and OmniFocus are created with the Mac mini in mind, because it’s always-on and lets me receive results in real time. Hazel is another invaluable utility when it comes to automating a remote Mac.

I do put my Mac mini through some more processor-intensive tasks every once in a while. Usually, it’s movie conversion through Handbrake or movie streaming through Plex Media Server. I recoginize this doesn’t compare to using a mini as an Xcode build server, but it’s still something that I want to keep an eye on. Read more

October 23: Recommended Reads & Links

It’s been quite a day for Apple aficionados. Between brand-new iMacs, a new entry in the Retina Mac family, new Mac minis, and some new iPads, there’s a lot of information to go through in a single day. Here’s a recap of our October 23 coverage in reverse chronological order (older posts at the bottom):

You can catch up with our coverage in our October 23 news hub. Below, we’ve collected some interesting links to great articles that have been published in the past few hours. Make sure to click on the source links to check out the articles in their entirety.

Ars Technica speculates on Fusion Drive, a marquee feature of the new iMac that should allow OS X to see an SSD/hard drive combination as a single drive. Furthermore, it will enable the system to intelligently move resources to the (faster) SSD automatically.

Based on Schiller’s explanation, Fusion Drive sounds similar. In a caching solution, like Intel’s, files live on the hard disk drive and are temporarily mirrored to the SSD cache as needed. In an enterprise auto-tiering situation, and with Fusion Drive, the data is actually moved from one tier to another, rather than only being temporarily cached there.

Marco Arment (creator of Instapaper and The Magazine) has his own take on today’s announcements. In particular, he has a simple but effective explanation of today’s “iPad 4” upgrade:

The new A6X CPU is promising, though: it’s presumably based on the same (awesome and cooler-running) “Swift” CPUs in the A6, with more memory bandwidth and GPU power to drive the larger screen. Going from the iPad 2 to 3, Apple kept CPU power the same and increased GPU power, but only to drive the larger screen, so it was mostly a wash. From the iPad 3 to 4, we’re finally likely to see a welcome and necessary improvement in both CPU and GPU performance.

Shawn Blanc notes how the evolution of Apple’s iMac “has evolved in pairs”.

AllThingsD has a nice photo gallery of today’s media event in San Jose.

Kyle Baxter on why, for him, today’s Apple is the best Apple. He dedicates the last part of his piece to some thoughts about the iPad and its position in the market:

What it indicates, too, is that Apple thinks the iPad is a very different kind of device than the cheap Android tablets or the Kindle Fire. Those other devices are literally larger phones, with software that is not very different. Those devices are, at best, for browsing the web, playing games and maybe reading books, but they don’t do any of those things particularly well, in Apple’s eyes. Schiller’s talk about how much better equivalent applications are on the iPad versus the Nexus 7 made that argument. Instead, in Apple’s view, the iPad is today’s PC.

Todd Olson has a clear and concise explanation of the new features in iBooks Author 2.0, announced and released today. Namely, iBooks Author 2.0 comes with proper portrait support with new templates, LaTeX and MathML support for mathematical expressions, embedded custom fonts, and more. I’m intrigued by the new popovers in images:

A new “pop-over” widget has been added to allow users to tap places on an image to get a pop-up window with more information. Pop-overs may include text and graphics.

Serenity Caldwell also elaborates on portrait orientations at Macworld:

New in iBooks Author are new templates and portrait-only iBooks. Unfortunately, portrait-only doesn’t mean iPod touch- or iPhone-friendly—iBooks Author books are still restricted to the iPad and iPad mini. The company does seem to have expanded its template offerings beyond textbooks, however: There are now options for photo books, craft books, cookbooks, and biographies.

Apple has posted some first support documents for the new iBooks Author:

Shawn Blanc, again, this time with his thoughts on today’s event.

It was fun to watch Tim and Phil tag team the event, and I thought Phil Schiller’s time on stage was one of his best. These aren’t just media press events, it’s like a global show and tell. Apple is bringing something they’ve been meticulously building in secret and showing it to the world. They’re not just selling the products, they’re inviting the media into their “living room” per se.

The guys at Macminicolo take a look at today’s Mac mini refresh and highlight some interesting points. Two in particular stuck out to me:

In marketing the Mac mini server, Apple writes “And you get amazing hardware and software, with support for iOS devices like iPad and iPhone, right out of the box.” People understimate this selling point. I’ve confirmed over and over that Mac minis are a big selling point for bringing a small business or school to iPads and iPhones. It’s the perfect iOS management server, and that’s important for SMB and education.

As I look at all the options on the machines, one things sticks out. They’ve decreased the number of components to build the minis. For instance, all machines come with 4GB now, so Apple no longer has to stock 1GB modules and 2GB modules. The middle and upper tier minis both have the same 5400RPM 1TB drives. Standardizing supply decreases inventory and decreases component pricing.

Last, Ars Technica also speculates on the nature of the A6X processor, which powers the fourth-generation iPad. It turns out, Apple may have two A6 ARM cores at 1.5GHz with four PowerVR SGX543 cores running at 500MHz.

Given the significant boosts in clock frequency—150 percent for the CPU cores, and 200 percent for the GPU cores—you may be wondering how Apple can still promise a 10-hour battery life. After all, the iPad still has the exact same 42.5Whr battery, but the processor is twice as powerful. The power savings come from the same place as we saw in the iPhone—Apple moved from a 45nm process to a more power-efficient 32nm process. Instead of keeping performance the same and decreasing the iPad’s thickness and weight, Apple instead chose to double its performance without sacrificing all-day battery life.

Internet Communicators

Today’s article by Lex Friedman over at Macworld made me think about iCloud, backups, and iOS restores.

But you probably don’t need to use iCloud to back up data from many other apps you use. And even if most of those apps account for only a few megabytes per backup per app, they can add up to a significant chunk of storage. For example, you might disable iBooks’ iCloud backup, since you can always restore your iBooks purchases from directly within the iBookstore. You probably don’t need to back up whatever data is stored by games for your kids, or games for yourself in which you don’t care about in-game progress or customizations that you might have made. And for apps that sync and back up their data on the Web—such as Instapaper—backup might be unnecessary, too.

I feel so dumb for not thinking about this earlier. Because iCloud “just works”, I’ve never thought about going deeper into its Settings to check out which apps were backing up data. I simply got used to turning iCloud on, then forgetting about it.

It turns out though, if you’re on a free 5 GB plan and you like to keep a lot of apps on your devices, that might not be a good strategy. I recently decided to not renew my old MobileMe data plan for iCloud (the one that got you 20 GB of storage for free), and I was reminded that Apple would soon end the free plan for old MobileMe members. Besides the fact that a weird glitch is still showing 2050 as expiration date, I decided to take a look at my available space, and – surprise – my two devices were barely fitting in the 5 GB threshold. Upon further inspection, I noticed apps like Instapaper, Evernote, and GoodReader were backing up hundreds of megabytes to iCloud. I deleted their backups, and now I can comfortably move on with 5 GB while still using iCloud Backup and Documents & Data sync.

But Lex’s article made me think about another aspect of my workflow: iOS backups and restores.

People often complain about how awful setting up a new iOS device is. Personally, I don’t have a problem with starting “from scratch” when a new iOS version or device comes out. In fact, that’s why I did with my iPhone 5. I didn’t restore from iCloud, and I wasn’t bothered by starting fresh.

90% of my apps live in the cloud. Either in iCloud, Dropbox, or their own cloud database, the apps I use on a daily basis can access data that’s available on a server somewhere in the sky, not just on my local storage space.

  • My photos and videos are in Dropbox.
  • My articles are in Instapaper’s cloud.
  • The things I write are in Dropbox.
  • Evernote is my personal archive.
  • My communications happen through Twitter and email.
  • My RSS feeds are handled by Google Reader and Fever.
  • My OmniFocus database runs on a Mac mini server.
  • My media is on a Mac mini server too.
  • All my iTunes purchases (media, apps, books) can be redownloaded at any time.
  • My music is on Rdio.
  • My podcast subscriptions are stored by Downcast in iCloud.
  • I get my daily dose of Internet entertainment from Reddit.
  • My contacts, calendars, bookmarks, and other app data are safely stored in iCloud.
  • To top it off, I can have a searchable index of my online digital life.

The only apps that are exclusively “local” to my device are Apple’s stock apps and a few games. The Apple apps are obviously bundled with every iOS version; as for the games, I don’t care about losing data because I don’t do any serious gaming on iOS anyway. But if I did, I know game developers are starting to support iCloud for save files, too.

Two things really matter to me: that “the cloud” is available and reliable, and that I have a data connection. My devices are now mainly Internet communicators.

As I said above, last week I set up my iPhone 5. I had an iCloud backup from my iPhone 4S, but I decided to start with a so-called “clean install” – meaning, no iCloud restore. It’s not that I don’t like restoring all my settings and apps with iCloud: the feature does indeed work as advertised. But partially because of a self-imposed belief that iOS “gets slower over time” and a personal tradition of using new devices with new data, I preferred to set up my iPhone manually, without restoring any backup.

And to tell the truth, I quite enjoyed the process. There are three pieces of data I need to remember: my iCloud, Dropbox, and 1Password credentials. With those in mind, I can install all my apps from the App Store and proceed to fill logins for services I use. I can access my email by copying logins from 1Password; I can easily redownload all my apps from the Purchased tab of the App Store (when it works); once installed, iCloud-enabled apps re-fetch their documents and data automatically.

There are some downsides to this: I need to wait for apps and databases to re-download; I need to tap around and switch between apps to copy and paste logins; I need to adjust iOS Settings again for the new device. And yet the thing is – I don’t mind doing it. Starting anew gives me a chance to revaluate the way I use an iPhone and iPad. More often than not, it reminds me of some app I don’t use anymore or a service I’ve always wanted to try out. Quite paradoxically, tweaking makes me more efficient and aware of the technology I use.

But more importantly, the apps I use are their own backups. As long as the Instapaper, Evernote, or Dropbox “clouds” are fine, I will be fine. I don’t need to worry about backups and restores. It’s a trusted system.

That’s not to say backups aren’t important. Especially on the Mac, you should consider a reliable and easy backup workflow. In fact, I regularly backup my Dropbox folder too, just to make sure.

However, with time I’ve found the restore process of iOS devices to be less annoying than some people claim it to be.

My apps are in the cloud. I just need the Internet.

Turn URLs and Webpages Into PDFs In Your Dropbox

I stumble across a lot of interesting webpages on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s a video I want to watch later; sometimes it’s an article I don’t have time to read right away. Other times, I find a webpage that I want to keep around for future reference. For me, there’s a difference between articles to read later and reference material: whereas a new item added to Instapaper has a short life span in terms of attention (read, share, archive), a webpage I want to keep around forever needs to be turned into a document I can read anywhere, highlight, annotate, and carry around between platforms and devices. For that, I like PDFs.

I keep a “PDFs” folder in my Dropbox that contains all the documents I check upon regularly for work and personal purposes. They can be eBooks, tutorials, or guidelines from Apple that are essential to my writing online. Thanks to the increasing support for cloud services in apps like PDF Expert, GoodReader, and iAnnotate, I can keep a single copy of a PDF in my Dropbox, use the app I want to annotate the document with, and forget about duplicates thanks to sync. Furthermore, I’m fairly sure that, due to their popularity, PDFs will still be readable and supported 20 years from now, so I don’t have to worry about data preservation and file formats.

Lately, I have become obsessed with turning longer articles I find on the Internet also into PDFs for long-term archival. For as much as I like Instapaper, I can’t be sure that the service will be around in the next decades, and I don’t want my archive of longform and quality content to be lost in the cloud. So I have come up with a way to combine Instapaper with the benefit of PDFs, Dropbox, and automation to generate documents off any link or webpage, from any device, within seconds.

(Disclaimer: what follows is an explanation of a hack I created for personal use. It uses publicly available tools and apps to fill a personal need. You shouldn’t create PDFs off websites and redistribute them – you should support the sites you read instead).

In short, I use the Instapaper Text bookmarklet to fetch a webpage’s text and images (while preserving hyperlinks and great typography) and I convert the resulting page to PDF using wkpdf. Created by Christian Plessl, wkpdf is a command line tool that uses WebKit and RubyCocoa for rendering HTML content to PDF. Since wkpdf uses WebKit’s HTML rendering, it can generate good-looking PDFs that maintain most CSS2 and CSS3 stylings and properties. I have tried another command line tool for file conversion, Pandoc, but I like wkpdf better for straight HTML to PDF conversion. Read more

OmniFocus and Calendar Notifications

I recently became tired with the fact that OmniFocus needs to be launched every once in a while in order to get the latest version of its synced database. For almost two years, I synced OmniFocus through The Omni Group’s excellent (and free) Omni Sync Server service, but I switched to a manual WebDAV location hosted on my Macminicolo machine because I like to be in control of the app’s sync sessions, and to fiddle around with ways to better automate the app’s syncing system.

Over the past few months, however, I have found myself increasingly missing notifications for due items because I am not always using the same device to manage OmniFocus, and I tend to forget to launch the app and hit the Sync button. I may go a full week without using OmniFocus for Mac, but I’d still like to be reminded of important items even if I don’t sync my iPhone and iPad all the time. Unfortunately, in the way OmniFocus is structured, the standard sync doesn’t allow items to be “pushed” in the background.

I came up with a way to have OmniFocus’ due reminders synced “in the cloud” and always up-to-date that enables me to keep using the app like I always have, yet staying assured I won’t miss items because I forgot to sync or open the app. It uses OmniFocus’ built-in calendar export functionality, and a mix of automation, Macminicolo hosting, and third-party apps to get the job done reliably and consistently. It’s not perfect (mainly due to Apple’s fault) and it’s likely doable in some other way with some other hosting solution, but I found this method to work perfectly for me in my workflow. Read more

Reeder 3.0 Review

In 2009, reading news on the iPhone was different. The App Store was only one year old; Twitter wasn’t the information network adopted by mass media and millions of users we interact with today; there was no iPad, no universal apps, and no Flipboard. In 2009, reading news on an iPhone meant having to choose between few decent Google Reader clients, some Twitter apps, and lots of “mobile optimized” web apps.

Then in late 2009, Reeder came around. Created by Swiss developer Silvio Rizzi, I remember writing one of the first public reviews of Reeder for iPhone, which unlike the majority of contestants in the space at the time, sported a highly custom “sepia” interface that would later went on to define Reeder as a brand. Crafted with care and an eye for speed, Reeder not only stood out because it was beautiful to look at – the app was fast, visibly more responsive than Byline and NetNewsWire, easy to navigate in spite of its new UI paradigms, and focused on letting the user easily share links on other networks and services. Reeder 1.0 wasn’t perfect; version 2.0, released a few months later, fixed some glaring omissions of its predecessor (namely, lack of saved state), and introduced an even faster syncing engine and more link sharing options.

Reeder took off. The success of the iPhone app allowed Rizzi to become one of the most well-known names in the indie iOS developer community, redefining iPad RSS readers with a brand new version of Reeder, and then again capturing a large portion of the OS X market with the highly-anticipated Reeder for Mac.

In spite of its obvious merits, it is hard to pinpoint the exact reason behind Reeder’s rise to the top of Google Reader clients. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Google Reader apps on Apple’s App Store now. Rizzi isn’t the “fastest” developer around (Reeder for iPhone was last updated in November 2011), and many valid RSS clients have been released in the past two years, some of them combining traditional RSS functionalities with deeper social integration to offer more compelling, modern alternatives to standard Google Reader syncing and browsing. Yet Reeder has managed to maintain its top position as the go-to Google Reader client for millions of iPhone users.

That’s not to say, however, that Reeder’s constant success and popularity don’t have to account for the profound change in news reading habits that occurred in the past two years. Sometime around 2010 – and I tend to associate this shift with the release of the iPad – a new breed of apps begin grazing the surface of established mobile news reading trends and conventions. Flipboard turned the world of RSS aggregators upside down with embedded discovery and direct integration with social feeds; Twitter clients got more capable, leveraging mobilizers and read-later services to provide a better experience with URLs; Zite brought automatic and intelligent curation to a platform based on RSS, while popular news organizations like CNN and NYTimes kept improving their own iOS apps.

In 2012, people don’t find their news exclusively through Google Reader anymore. That wasn’t true in 2009 either, but the growth of the App Store has certainly catalyzed the process: news travel fast, on a variety of channels, on multiple aggregators, in real-time and in multiple forms. We have become news gatherers.

Reeder 3.0, released today, holds true to its roots of a Google Reader client, but tries to modernize the overall approach and feature set with support for a new service, improved Readability syncing, more sharing options, and a refreshed look. In the first major rewrite of the app since 2010, is Reeder still relevant? Read more

My Dropbox Writing Workflow

Ever since I wrote about my new year’s resolutions to work smarter using better tools, compared my favorite iOS text editors, and shared some of my workflow techniques on Macdrifter, I thought it would be appropriate to share a bit more about the activity that takes up 80% of my work time: writing.

As I wrote in my comparison of iOS text editors:

Two months ago, I noted how there seemed to be a distinction between text editors focused on long-form writing, and the ones stemming from a note-taking approach. I think this difference is blurring with time, but there are still several apps that are clearly focused on distraction-free, long-form writing, like iA Writer and Byword, whereas the ones I tried for this article belong to the note-taking/Markdown/Dropbox generation of text editors. I like iA Writer and Byword, but I’m saving that kind of apps for another article.

In my workflow, there is a distinction between apps “for writing” and tools for quick “note-taking”, but in order to minimize the effort required to keep everything in sync and tied together, I set out to make sure the differences of such tasks could coexist within a single ecosystem.

My writing ecosystem is powered by Dropbox. Read more