You’d think that getting a stable internet connection in a flat in Berlin would be easy. The whole process took more than 6 weeks but, it finally happened. Internet! Having no connection while WWDC with live streamed sessions would have been horrible.

Stay tuned for new posts!

Mentio 2.0 is finally available on the App Store! It’s now possible to archive items and view all these items in a dedicated section. If you wish, you will get notified if a price drop for one of your desired items occurs. I also made some smaller design changes here and there. As I said before, Mentio is now free and the code is available on Github.

After a first rejection Mentio 2.0 got approved a few days ago, but I can’t release the update right now because I still do not have a stable internet connection in my new flat. I hope to release it next week. Stay tuned.

I linked to a new App called Cite on Product Hunt. It’s tagline is “beautiful textshots made easy”. The App is beautifully designed and works perfectly, but I’m not sold to the idea of textshots.

Basically textshots are images with quotes from articles. They highlight a specific part and are shared with the source url and sometimes a short commentary on Twitter or Facebook. They were first used by M. G. Siegler. Within a short time they became the standard way to link to noteworthy articles on Twitter.

I see two big problems with textshots in general. For one the images are totally useless without the tweet or the Facebook post. Some textshots include the complete or a cropped version of the source url but because it’s an image, you can’t click the link. The image on its own has no context. The second problem is way bigger. Textshots are horrible for accessibility. It should be one of the big goals of developers to make websites and Apps as accessible as possible. Everyone should benefit from the web, no matter if they use their eyes, voice over or a braille display. Images have always been hard in regards to accessibility and textshots are no exception to that. All the technology developed over the years to help visually impaired people to consume content do not work for the text inside those images.

Linking to interesting articles isn’t new. John Gruber has done it for years with link posts. Those are basic blog posts containing the link to the article and a plain text quote. All those links and quotes are perfectly accessible for everyone.

The calendar app you won’t be able to live without.

A brand new version of Fantastical launched yesterday. It includes a whole lot of features and extends the menu bar application, we are all used to, with complete standalone calendar App. I’m not a heavy calendar user, but if I use one, it’s Fantastical.

Showcase your designs with premium mockup templates.

Creating beautiful product images for Apps is hard. Scenery takes a screenshot an returns a beautiful mockup. The idea and execution are great. The Apps is free and comes with 3 templates. If you want different templates you can buy separate bundles. I also love the fact that the App is a native Mac OS App instead of a buggy and sluggish website.

Simple. Fast. Native.
Issue tracking made fun on your Mac.

I started using Github issues for a all projects I’m currently working on. Bugs, features and the code now live in the same place. Bee by neat.io is a super useful App to work with Github issues native on your Mac. It also supports FogBugz and Jira. Try it out!

I finally found some time to watch the Keynote. Because there is never enough commentary about Apple Keynotes, here is my super short one.

• Apple TV: I hope they lowered the price to make room for a new model!
• ResearchKit: I really love what Tim’s Apple is doing in the medical field. Just great.
• The new MacBook: This is the future of the notebook and reasonable priced for a first generation. Right now it’s constrained but it will be an awesome device in 2 years.
• Watch: Apple found it’s vision for the Watch. It’s a contrast to the revealing of the Watch 6 months ago. The pricing isn’t surprising, but I don’t see a future for the Apple Watch Edition.

Federico Viticci:

Since being diagnosed with Hodgkin Lymphoma (Stage IV) in late 2011, my life changed. Beyond the psychological and emotional consequences of how cancer affected me, my family, and my relationships, it is undeniable and abundantly clear that cancer took its toll on me from a physical perspective.

Last year, I decided to regain control of my body, my life habits, and my health. I started tracking everything I could about my activities, my exercise routine, the food I ate, and the time I spent working with my iPad instead of walking, sleeping, or enjoying time with my family. Since then, I’ve made a decision to not let cancer and its consequences define me any longer.

What an inspiring story! Federico is one of a kind.

Alto’s Adventure is an endless snowboarding odyssey, set against a beautiful and ever changing alpine landscape.

From time to time a beautiful and brilliant game appears on the App Store. Altos’ Adventure is one of them. Check it out if you are tired of playing Tiny Wings, Threes or Monument Valley.

Christian Reber:

Every day, we work with the goal of making Wunderlist even better. We want to constantly improve the way we help you get stuff done. So much so, that this year you will see Wunderlist help you get stuff done in smarter, more intuitive ways. From an intelligent way to capture to-dos and sort lists, to productivity-boosting integrations with your favorite apps—2015 is going to be big!
[…]
Arriving soon, Folders will make it incredibly simple to keep your personal, family and home lists separate from all of your work and project lists—yet they are only a tap away when you need them.

I’m very excited about all the announced features. Especially folders will totally change the way how I use Wunderlist. Love it.

Marco Arment:

Vaccines are truly one of humanity’s greatest and most important accomplishments.
It’s tragic, dangerous, and incredibly destructive that society is needlessly regressing on this front. I’m sadly confident that anti-intellectualism and shunning of widely proven scientific data, selfishly and shamelessly encouraged by entertainers and politicians to advance their careers, will prove to be the most damaging and deadly regression of developed society in my lifetime.

This is one of my favourite pieces of the young year. I can not believe that anti-vaccination is still a thing in the year 2015. It’s understandable that some people were sceptic about vaccines 100 years ago. Now, after millions (even billions doesn’t sound too far off) of saved lives, there shouldn’t be a discussion anymore.

“I’m an Anti-Braker” sums up the whole discussion in a nice satiric way.

Json Snell:

Today Apple dropped Photos for Mac via a developer release, and some developers are reporting signs that Apple has built this new app using something called UXKit, which sits above the Mac’s familiar AppKit frameworks and strongly resembles UIKit on iOS.

I really, really hope UXKit is one of the big new announcements Apple will make at WWDC in 4 months! I plan to build a Mac App this year, maybe I can write it using a Framework that has a lot in common with UIKit.

1Password 5.2 for iOS and 1Password 4.1.0.538 for Windows are out, and they provide support for using Time-based One Time Passwords (TOTP) in your Logins (note: in iOS, it’s part of our Pro Features). Note that this is not for unlocking 1Password itself, but to aid with logging into sites for which you may be using TOTP, such a Dropbox and Tumblr.

It’s great seeing One Time Passwords integrated 1Password. It eliminates the need for another App, which I never fully trusted. The discussion about the whole subject in this post is also worth a read.

Radek:

In Swifty methods, I was arguing that we should resist the temptation to write Swift the way Objective-C used to be written. I argued that we should develop new approaches and conventions to designing interfaces, and that we should, once and for all, abolish Objective-C’s excessive verbosity. […]</br> And so I decided to start a series of articles called Swifty APIs, where I’m going to take some class or component from an Apple framework and show how I would design it with Swift in mind.</br> Today, we’ll dissect NSUserDefaults and give it a little make-over. We’re going to make it less verbose, a bit cleaner, and more consistent with other classes. We’ll polish its rough edges and we’ll make use of Swift’s cool features along the way.

This post is a great example on how to rethink the use of a well-known Objective-C API in Swift. It really demonstrates the beauty of Swift and shows that a lot of the points of criticism are due to inexperience and will fade in the future.

I’m looking forward to the next post of the series!