Software

It was a bug I’ve been carrying along for quite some time in Yoink. But I finally found the culprit: I’m looking at you, OS X sandbox.

Webarchive opened after bug occurredA webarchive created with Safari, after a security-scoped NSURL bookmark was created for it.

The Bug and its Detection

As it happens (sadly), not I discovered the bug, but a customer and user of my app Yoink encountered it. The reason being, I rarely handle .webarchive files (if at all) – webarchive files are created when saving a website in Safari, for example – but one of Yoink’s users, Christoph, appears to have to deal with them regularly.

The bug itself is described fairly easily. You have a .webarchive file you’d like to move using Yoink. So you drag it onto the app and then move it from Yoink to the actual destination. Business as usual.
Only that now, instead of opening the webarchive in your standard browser when double-clicked, above’s warning is shown.

There’s two baffling things about this warning:

  1. It looks like you’re trying to launch an application instead of just a file (“from an unidentified developer”)
  2. The creator of the file seems to have changed. Instead of Safari, it now says “BugReport-WebArchivesAndNSURLBookmarks” (the app I submitted to Apple to demonstrate this issue)

Highly concerning, to say the least. To some people, it might even look like something fishy is going on.

Hunting Down the Bug

Seeing as .webarchive files are binary property lists (thank you, Michael Tsai (@mjtsai on twitter) for the correction), I tried other property list files (for example, .plist files), but none exhibited the same behavior.

Reproducing it was fairly easy. There’s one pre-requisite for it to appear: that in System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Allow apps downloaded from, either ‘Mac App Store’ or ‘Mac App Store and identified developers’ be selected.
Otherwise, Gatekeeper isn’t active and doesn’t react to the issue.

System Preferences - Security and Privacy Settings

At first I thought it happened when moving the file out of Yoink, since that’s where Yoink actually does something to a file – it moves it from one location to another – who knows what goes on behind the scenes there.

Going through the move-code line by line, commenting out stuff I thought could cause this, made no difference what so ever. Create a new webarchive, move it using Yoink, and get the warning again. Rinse and repeat.
With stuff like this, I get annoyed easily, so my patience usually goes out the window after a couple of alterations to the code.

It was only after the billionth time that I considered it might happen when a file was added to Yoink, not moved from Yoink.

Going through the same process as before, I went through the code line by line, trying different things.

With a recent update to Yoink, the app knows when a file is renamed or deleted in Finder, using GCD (Grand Central Dispatch) and its dispatch sources.
I believed the issue lay there, but after commenting out all of that code as well, it became clear it wasn’t the culprit.

In a fit of anger and a severe feeling of incompetence, I randomly picked at the code (I know, highly professional. But I’m using version control – all is well, right?).

To my surprise, when I removed the code responsible for saving Yoinks files over relaunches of the app, the issue went away.

Security-Scoped NSURL Bookmarks

For a sandbox’ed app to keep a reference to a file added by the user beyond relaunches, it has to use what is called a security-scoped NSURL bookmark.

Sandbox entitlements necessary for security-scoped bookmarks

They can be used if the corresponding entitlement (see above) is added to the app’s sandbox entitlements file.

There are two ways a security-scoped bookmark can be created – either with read and write access, or read-access only (NSURLBookmarkCreationWithSecurityScope or it plus NSURLBookmarkCreationSecurityScopeAllowOnlyReadAccess).

I don’t know why this causes the issue, but changing the bookmark creation options from read and write access to read-access only fixed the issue (and moving the file is still possible with Yoink). It definitely looks like a sandbox bug to me.

Why should an app-internal bookmark (mind you, it’s only a reference to a file, not the file itself, created from an NSURL object) write to and change the webarchive’s file so that it a) can’t be opened anymore and b) shows the bookmark-creating-app as its creator?

Bug Reporting to Apple

I reported this bug to Apple (rdar://21765077) with an example project you can download here, if you’d like to see for yourself. Feel free to dupe the bug with Apple’s Bug Reporter Tool – I’d appreciate it 🙂

Now all that’s left to say is thank you for your patience, Christoph. You reported this issue at the beginning of March 2015 and had to wait until now for it to be fixed (and still a little longer because I have to submit the update to Apple for release on the Mac App Store as well). I really appreciate your continued feedback on the app!

Correction

Thanks to Michael Tsai for pointing out on his blog that .webarchive files aren’t bundles, as I falsely stated, but binary property lists.

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[ Note: This is a guest blog post written by Frank Gregor (@TheCocoaNaut on twitter), an OS X- and iOS developer based in Austria, about his Mac app Review Times ] Review Times Icon

Once upon a time… No, only fairytales start that way. And this is no fairytale. It is a “true story”, like, I’m sure, many other developers have experienced one way or another. (-:

Some time around Christmas 2014, I stumbled upon a tweet, linking to appreviewtimes.com. Many of you may know about this website already. It gives you the average time Apple is currently taking to review apps for submission on the iOS and Mac App Stores.

I thought, hey, that would make a nice little Mac tool. So I asked a couple of developers on Twitter what they thought of such an app. The response I got was great. Without exception, everyone I asked wanted something like that. I had had some free time on my hands, so the idea manifested.

I wanted to build a small app that would live exclusively in the menu bar and offered a Today Widget. The information I would display in the app I would get from appreviewtimes.com. So I contacted Dave Verwer (@daveverwer on twitter), founder of Curated and publisher of the well-known iOSDevWeekly newsletter. He was the contact listed for the Shiny Development team, who are the creators of appreviewtimes.

I asked Dave if they perhaps already had such an app available or in development, and if that wasn’t the case, if they’d mind if I developed the app and used their data for it:

Hey Dave,

I found you as contact for Shiny Development, the maker of App-Review-Times. So I think it would be a great thing to have a little OS X tool that shows in an app extension the current review times via Notification Center. I’m building exactly such a tool and I have to grab and parse the website to get all the needed data.

So, to make things easier for development: Would it be possible to get all that raw data (iOS & OS X) as JSON or XML? Would be really great! (-;

Cheers, phranck

Dave answered promptly:

Hi Frank

I’m afraid that we don’t have either JSON or XML feeds of the information.

Please feel free to scrape the HTML though, as long as you include a link back to the original site.

Thanks Dave

Great! Now nothing stood in the way of me selling this App on the App Store (though I would learn better later). I got to work and within two days, I had a working prototype.

The fact that this app would run as a menu bar tool was very beneficial to me. I had been working on a piece of open source code, which does exactly that: place an icon in the menu bar and display a popover when clicked. This gave me a very good reason to further develop and improve the open source code.

Screenshot of Review Times Popover

Now was the time to tweet some screenshots, to whet the appetite of potential customers. It worked well. I received a lot of inquiries about what the app was about. This way, I got my first beta testers.

Review Times Today Widget

All in all, about three to four weeks went into developing the app and I believed the app was ready. I needed a nice icon that should really catch the eye. I made the acquaintance of Dan (@derpixeldan on twitter) and he created something truly wonderful at an unbeatable price… (-;

Around Mid-January, I submitted the app to the Mac App Store. Excitedly I waited for the notification on my iPhone that the review process had begun. About three weeks later, I received the message I longed for.

It didn’t take long and the review team contacted me again. But this message wasn’t what I had hoped for. My app got rejected! The reason Apple gave me was

…featuring speculative information about Apple products/services…

which I didn’t find reasonable at all. I was shocked. Every developer who ever received a “Rejected” notice knows this feeling of unease. I was annoyed and angry at the same time. Why in the world… ?!?! Did I go about this entire thing too naively?

Appstore Rejection

If you are familiar with Apple, you know they like to have control. And speculative information – like the average time it may take for Apple to review an app until submission to the App Store, shown by an app by some developer – well, that was completely out of their control. So Apple showed me, who’s boss.

That took the wind out of my wings in respects to this tool. I didn’t want to get into a discussion with Apple, it wouldn’t have lead anywhere anyway. I vented on twitter and let the whole thing rest for a couple of days – until, again on twitter, I received inquiries about what had happened to the app and how I would proceed with it. There were two possible options for me: 1) publish it as open source code 2) sell it outside of the Mac App Store from my website

On Twitter, I asked for input.

Since previously, people had stated their interest in paying for this app, I decided to go with option 2. After some research and testing how to best implement selling it from my website, I came to the conclusion that I should use Paddle. Their integration into an app is absurdly easy to do and they have first-class support.

All said and done, it took three more days of coding and testing and then everything was ready. I built a one-page website, wrote to many Mac-Blogs and magazines (none of whom replied!) and announced the release on twitter. Since so many developers wanted this tool, I was preparing for incredible sales-days… (-:

Poppycock. Virtually nothing happened. I sold a couple of copies, but all in all it went very, very slowly. Even after two months – with heavy-duty tweeting about it – I didn’t even make up for the cost of the icon. Reality had its grip on me again. So I had to act. Without thinking about it too long, I deleted all license- and purchase-handling code and released the app for free from my website.

Now everyone can download and install the app from http://reviewtimes.cocoanaut.com. Since then, I’ve had about 1-2 downloads a day.

—
Frank Gregor (@TheCocoaNaut on twitter) is an OS X- and iOS developer based in Austria. Among others, he is responsible for the Mac apps Review Times, Nekrologger and the iOS app f4analyse.

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Glimpses App Icon

Glimpses 2.0 for Mac

After a lot of hard work, I’m very happy to finally be able to announce the immediate availability of Glimpses 2.0 (formerly known as Briefly) on the Mac App Store.
The app has undergone some major changes, and I wanted that to be reflected in the app- name and icon (wonderful work by the very talented Alexander Käßner).

What Does Glimpses Do?

Still Motion videos typically show photos for not much longer than the fraction of a second.
Glimpses is designed to let you create these videos with just a few clicks, with stunning results.

The app produces high-quality video with a resolution of up to 4K and lets you add a soundtrack to make your video really sing.

Glimpses with soundtrack selection

What’s New?

– Soundtracks: Glimpses 2.0 makes it much easier to add multiple soundtracks. It also lets you select the parts of the soundtracks you really like to make your Still Motion video really shine.
– Face Detection: Glimpses analyses your photos for faces and places the photos in your video accordingly for much nicer and more personal results.
– 4K Resolution: Going beyond 1080p, Glimpses now renders your videos with a resolution of up to 4K.
– Projects: You can now save your projects. Up until now, the app only remembered the last used photos and soundtrack.

… as well as many more, minor improvements (like improved support for panorama photos) and fixes.

Details

Soundtracks

Soundtracks are a vital part of a Still Motion video. Glimpses makes it so much easier to add and edit one or several soundtracks.
With its new selection feature, you can select just the part of a song you like best that should be used for your video.

If a soundtrack is too short, you can either loop it or add another one. The order of appearance can be changed at any time.
Should a soundtrack be longer than your video, Glimpses will automatically fade it out at the end without you having to do anything.

Face Detection

In earlier versions, Glimpses used to center your photos within the video’s frame.
Glimpses 2.0 is much smarter and analyses your photos for faces and if detected, moves them into the video’s frame, resulting in much nicer and more personal videos.

Briefly without and with face detectionA still from a video created with Briefly 1.5.2 (top) compared to the same video created with Glimpses 2.0 (below)

Resolutions and Video Settings

With cameras getting better and better, it was only logical to include new resolutions in Glimpses 2.0 – the app now goes beyond 1080p and adds support for 2K and 4K resolutions. You can set the resolution manually or let Glimpses decide, based on the smallest photo.

Glimpses Video SettingsGlimpses Video Settings

A photo’s duration can be set from 0.1 seconds up to 4 seconds in 0.1-second-increments, an improvement that allows for more fine-grained control over the resulting video. Glimpses can also automatically do it for you, based on the duration of the soundtracks you selected.

Pricing and Availability

Glimpses is available exclusively on the Mac App Store (click) for the introductory price of $9.99 for a limited time (about 60% off), after which the price will revert to $24.99.
A free, 15-day trial can be downloaded from the website (click) (direct download). If you’re from the media and would like to get more info about the app, please download the press kit (click), thank you.

Glimpses Website: http://eternalstorms.at/glimpses
Glimpses on the Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/glimpses/id637565340?mt=12
Glimpses Demo Download: http://eternalstorms.at/glimpses/Glimpses.zip
Glimpses on Twitter:https://twitter.com/GlimpsesApp
Glimpses Press Kit: http://eternalstorms.at/press/Glimpses-2-Press-Kit.zip
Glimpses on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/glimpses

Thank you for your time, I hope you enjoy this great new version of Glimpses 🙂

If you have any feedback or questions, please be sure to let me know via twitter (click) or eMail (click). I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

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ESSSquareProgressIndicator animating

What Is ESSSquareProgressIndicator?

It’s an indeterminate progress indicator originally developed for the iOS game ZEN.

It uses Core Animation (specifically, CAShapeLayers) to do its job and it’s pretty straight forward.

CGPathRefs, CAShapeLayer

CAShapeLayer has two animatable properties – -strokeStart and -strokeEnd (with a minimum value of 0.0 – start of path – and 1.0 – end of path). Going beyond 1.0 or below 0.0 doesn’t work.

So when trying to animate those values along a rectangular path – which was the first thing I tried when creating this – you do get a nice animation, but it ends at the 0.0/1.0 (which is, basically, the same) mark. So you end up with something like this:

glitchy progress indicator animation

The goal, then, was to animate beyond 1.0. The solution I came to – I’m sure there are other ways – was to use a second CAShapeLayer that animated alongside the first for the last/first part of the animation.

For a square, the values of the CAShapeLayer’s -strokeStart and -strokeEnd are as follows (starting at the top left corner):

CAShapeLayer strokeStart strokeEnd values

The CGPath begins and ends in the top left corner because I drew the path that way (you could make it start in the lower left corner or in the middle of a side, it all depends on where you start the CGPath with CGPathMoveToPoint).

The progress indicator starts at the middle of the left line and reaches to the middle of the top line. These are the two CAShapeLayers at work. The left part is one shape layer, the top line is another. I’ll do this in pictures I drew in code so it’s simpler to understand (the lines represent where the layer animated to, the dots are the invisible rest of the square).

Animating

Animation Part 1We start at this position. The line to the left is layer2(strokeStart:0.875, strokeEnd:1.0), the line at the top is layer1(strokeStart:0.0, strokeEnd:0.125).

Animation Part 2The transition to this is the reason we need two layers as we can not animate one layer beyond the 1.0 value.
So we animate layer2 to (1.0, 1.0) and at the same time animate layer1 to (0.0, 0.25) which makes it look like one line moving.

Animation Part 3This next part is easy. We animate layer1 to (0.75, 1.0).

Animation Part 4Lastly, we animate with two layers again to get to the initial position so we can repeat the whole thing from there on.
We animate layer2 from (0.75, 1.0) to (0.875, 1.0) and layer1 from (0.0, 0.0) to (0.0, 0.125) at the same time, again making it look like one line moving.

The Source Code

The repository (a sample iOS app, but the class works the same on OS X) is available on Github.

It was developed for iOS 7.1 but should work on earlier systems, and has been tested on OS X Yosemite, but should work on earlier systems as well.

You just drop in an ordinary UIView or NSView and set its class to ESSSquareProgressIndicator. Done. You can then set the color and stroke width right within Interface Builder thanks to the fairly new Xcode macros IB_Designable and IBInspectable.

Open Source

I have some more source code available here (or directly on my github profile page) if you’re interested. If you have any questions or feedback regarding this progress indicator, please be sure to mail or tweet me 😉

Enjoy!

—-
My name is Matt, I’m the developer of Eternal Storms Software. If you’d like to comment, you can catch me on twitter here: [twitter-follow screen_name=’eternalstorms’ show_count=’yes’] or by eMail.

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