I'm in that nervous, but excited, phase of the dev cycle. So close, it could be finished, it could have a showstopper. Only time will tell.
— Rob Fahrni (@Fahrni) June 30, 2012
Month: June 2012
No, No, No, No, NO!
All Things D: “As Sippey’s post notes, it seems that copycat clients — or third party apps that really don’t add much value outside of what Twitter.com offers — may be on the chopping block”
Another take on yesterday’s Twitter announcement.
Can you imagine being stuck with Twitter’s mobile client, or worse, TweetDeck?
If this does happen, and I don’t believe it will, I feel super sorry for the likes of Iconfactory and Tapbots.
Twitter, 800lb. Gorilla?
The Next Web: “And if you’re someone who uses Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Osfoora, or any of the other ‘standard’ Twitter clients I’d be worried too. Because if there’s one thing they were designed to do and do well it is “mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.â€
I love Twitterrific. I use it on my iPhone and on my Mac. It’s my app of choice for viewing the Twitter fire hose. It would be a real shame if Twitter started shutting third-party clients out.
I’m hopeful they won’t.
Movie line of the week
It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted a movie line.
Try this one on for size.
The time-traveling is just too dangerous. Better that I devote myself to study the other great mystery of the universe: women!
Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.
Native is still King
The New York Times, Bits: “The current version of the app is essentially an Objective-C shell with a Web browser inside. When it comes to speed, this is like putting the engine of a Smart Car in the body of a Ferrari.“
That’s a decent way to describe wrapper apps.
Stack Overflow: “I got into a similar state just today. It was very odd: I could attach any XIB (new or existing) to any already-existing ViewController class in the project, but I could not create a new ViewController and have it attach properly to any XIB. The “assistant” functionality didn’t work, nor did the IB-to-headerfile-connection functionality.”
This has become an everyday annoyance so I’m documenting the link to the “fix.”
Real Companies, Not Bubbles
The Fresno Bee: “The competition impressed San Francisco developer Joel Franusic, one of five judges for the event. Franusic said Fresno’s developers seem to care less about trying to lay claim as the next Mark Zuckerberg — Facebook’s multibillionaire founder — than about producing high-quality projects.”
Bravo.
I tend to use my iPhone for a lot of things on a day-to-day basis. I watch my Twitter stream, send links from Twitter to Pocket viewing, and on occasion I write weblog posts from WordPress for iOS. Yes, all from my phone.
The read later piece from Twitterrific to Pocket works flawlessly, I’m very pleased with that, but once it arrives at Pocket I feel like it’s a bit difficult to create a new weblog post.
Here’s what I want, from Pocket, but it could start with any application that can view a web page. In this case I’d like to go from Pocket to WordPress for iOS, or Tumblr for iOS. Bits of this work for the Pocket to Tumblr for iOS case, it just falls short.
- Select a bit of the article. Say, a paragraph, or a sentence
- Tap on the Share button
- Select WordPress from the menu
- Pocket would launch WordPress and create a new weblog post to my default weblog.
I’d like to have the ability to control the formatting template for the new post, but I think we need a standard way to share between iOS applications. David Barnard, of App Cubby, has done a great job with Launch Center Pro encouraging companies to support custom URL schemes so applications can communicate with each other, but we need more.
Custom URL Schemes is something I haven’t done in an iOS application, so some of these requests may be unreasonable, but here goes.
Would it be possible to declare a standard JSON format, much in the way RSS is a standard, that would allow applications to pass clips of data to each other? As part of the URL scheme (I’m not sure how long a URL scheme can be), or via the clipboard. I’m not sure if an iOS developer can control what goes on the clipboard, but if you can, what about something that includes the following.
- Source Site Name – Blog > Apple Core Labs
- Source URL – E.G. http://blog.applecorelabs.com/2012/04/18/open-for-business/
- Snippet – This would be the selected text, say, from Pocket.
Here’s what the JSON may look like.
{ "newWeblogPost": { "sourceSiteName:" "Blog > Apple Core Labs", "sourceURL:" "http://blog.applecorelabs.com/2012/04/18/open-for-business/", "snippet:" "Are you looking for a partner to help make your iOS dream application a reality?" } }
I think that’s enough for starters.
If applications could also agree on supporting a standard set of URL scheme resources, I think we could achieve much of what I’m after.
What if WordPress accepted this?
wordpress:///newPostWithStandard?content
Now, like I said earlier, this may not be possible because the string appended to the resource, the part after the ‘?’, may make the URL too long. If we can control what’s put on the clipboard, here again I’m a bit naive, it could allow us to communicate between the two applications. If the ‘newPostWithStandard’ was handled by the receiver, and we could put formatted text on the clipboard, we can now execute a custom command to create a new weblog post using the data in our JSON formatted clipboard data.
The best support, of course, would be from Apple in the form of a system accepted sharing API. We can only hope.
Does Microsoft have a winner?
VentureBeat: “Real innovation has been laid upon innovation here. If Microsoft stood on the shoulders of giants who started this tablet revolution, the company has done its predecessors proud. The keyboard cover is sheer genius — whether or not you believe that text entry is a key part of the next generation of computing devices”
I really hope Microsoft can deliver this device, and I hope it succeeds. A real competitor to iPad will make Apple step up its game, which is good for consumers and developers. We all win.