“What I…” is a monthly column where I write about what’s been going on in my life as an independent Mac and iOS developer over the last month.

… Did

Contract Work

Probably the main reason why I do these blog posts less often lately is because I’m busy with contract work I can’t talk about. I’m involved with two very interesting and challenging iOS projects right now. One is in the realm of audio, the other has to do with video.

It’s interesting work, and both are challenging in different ways. Regarding the audio project, there was an existing code base which I had nothing to do with, so getting into that code, understanding and ultimately working with it was very challenging (it wasn’t documented at all, some things were implemented multiple times, in different places, there were bugs). But with anything you do, if you stick with it, you’ll figure it out. I’m still having trouble here and there (the app itself is quite complex in the first place) but as The Beatles say, “It’s getting better all the time”. We’re now at a point where we’re mostly done with bug-fixing and are now fine-tuning the app for a slightly broader roll-out.

The video app, on the other hand, I have total control over. We did a fairly quick prototype last year, sort of a proof-of-concept, and are now in the process of producing version 1.0. Naturally, I feel far more comfortable working on a code-base I started and thus am completely familiar with. I’m making a point of properly documenting what I’m doing in the app, so that if someone else were to work on it, they wouldn’t have too hard a time to do so.

Of course, there are things I worry about: source-control commits, for example. For my own projects, I can basically do whatever I want – write descriptive commit messages (which is what I usually do) or very short ones, when I’m pressed for time or just “not in the mood”. For someone else’s project, that’s clearly not an option. And that’s where the worrying comes to play – is the commit message descriptive enough, did I take everything into account, did I mention all issue-tracking-ticket-numbers, and so on. Then again, perhaps the bar is not that high – I saw one project, where the commit message was just “commit”. Welp.

Another example: Unit Tests. I have no idea what to do with them or about them. I’ve never written a single unit test for my own apps (I don’t say that proudly). Guess I should start at some point.

The pre-dominant thing I worry about working on other people’s projects is: less time for my own. I’ve been working on Transloader 3 in February, but March gave me little time to do so, and the trend seems to be continuing into April. Yoink could do with an update as well, not to mention ScreenFloat. It’s very stressful, really.

Found a Copy-Cat of Yoink. Ugh.

By members of the press and multiple customers of Yoink, I was made aware of a possible copy-cat of the app. I’m not going to name or link to it here. From what I could see, they copied the look-and-feel of the app, down to the marketing material. It’s a shame they didn’t use the time copying my app to create something unique of their own… I contacted Apple about it (if this should happen to you, you can contact them here) and started a dialog with the developer through that channel. Of course, they denied everything and started bringing up lawyers, and that’s where we stand now. I doubt I’ll proceed, it’s not worth the money, the nerves and seeing as customers recognize it as a rip-off of Yoink anyway, I can leave it at that and be somewhat happy about it. Still, personally, I think Apple should recognize the rip-off nature of the app and remove it from the Mac App Store, but that’s their decision, not mine.

Some comments from customers:

• via mail: “it looks like they just duplicated your efforts under their name”
• via mail: “Please check the Apple Store for a tool named “…” it is a rip off of Yoink.”
• on a software-review site: “Appears to be a blatant rip-off of Yoink!!!”
• via twitter: “that’s not the only app they have ripped off either”
• on that note about another app of ‘theirs’ on a software-review site: “Okay this looks total rip off of Disk Diet.”
• another: “I’ve read some comments in the App Store calling (…) a rip-off of Coconut Battery, and I can definitely see where the comparisons are coming from, the two are extremely similar”

It’s not just me. Phew.

… Didn’t Do That I Had Planned

Work on Transloader

I had quietly hoped to be able to finish Transloader 3 by the end of March and release it some time in April. That doesn’t look likely now. With all that contract work keeping me busy, I had to postpone my plans and am now working on-and-off on the app, whenever there’s a little time left over. But this situation is not going to last forever, perhaps another week or two, then it’s the backend-guy’s turn again, leaving me to my own apps for a while 🙂

… Downloaded

Underpass (mac app store, website)

By developer Jeff Johnson (here on twitter), this is an end-to-end encrypted chat app, with encryption implemented from the ground up – it doesn’t use a third-party service, like other apps. “It’s just you, your chat partner, and a password. Peer-to-peer. There’s no signup. No account. No phone number, email, contacts, or any personal information requested, not even your real name.”

Thimbleweed Park (mac app store, steam, gog, website)

Released today (March 30th, 2017), I can’t wait to play this game. I backed it on Kickstarter as soon as I heard about it and I’m happy they were so successful with that campaign. Their development blogis worth reading!

… Read

70 Cents Put Me on the Mac App Store Charts (lapcatsoftware)

“The charts do not accurately reflect how (un)healthy the store is and how widely (un)profitable it is to third-party developers.”

I Worked for Steve Jobs, and This Was the Best Lesson He Taught Me (huffingtonpost)

“Telling the truth is a test of your character and intelligence. You need strength to tell the truth, and intelligence to recognize what is true.”

First Dinosaur Tail Found Preserved in Amber (nationalgeographic)

“ “Maybe we can find a complete dinosaur,” he speculates, rather confidently. “

… Listened To

Erich von Däniken Lecture (website)

My girlfriend and I had the pleasure to attend a lecture given by author Erich von Däniken in Vienna. His theories are interesting and thought-provoking. Some of it is fantastic, of course, but he’s very good at making you see things from a different point of view.

… Watched

Beauty and the Beast (itunes)

Not as good as the original. I don’t see why it had to be done with real-life actors in the first place, but ok. Instead of creating something new, it seems Disney’s more fond of re-visiting old material and re-doing it, like The Jungle Book. It wasn’t that bad, though. It had its moments.

… Ate

Vegetable-Pistachios-Rice with a Saffron Crust

… Went to See

Ah, Venice.

At the end of February, my girlfriend and I went for a one-day-trip to Venice (by bus, we started Friday night from Vienna, were in Venice on Saturday, 7AM, and returned to Vienna 8PM that same day). We had great weather and great fun, but were quite groggy afterwards – after a walking distance of over 18 km and very little sleep. We had a constantly quarrelling older couple sitting right behind us, and they would. not. shut. up. But that’s beside the fact. Venice is great. And they filmed Indiana Jones there!

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In  “What I…”, a monthly column, I take a look back at what went down over the course of the passed month.

As you can tell by the title of this blog post, I missed the last two months – my apologies.
It’s partly that I’ve been busy and partly that I couldn’t really get into my blogging mood and -mindset.
But now I forced myself to finally get down to it, so here’s what I…

… Did

Touch Bar Support for Glimpses (website, mac app store)

On a hunch that Apple would show-case apps that adopted the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar on the Mac App Store, I set out to add support for it to my still motion video app, Glimpses.
The API is lovely, so I made progress fast – implementing and testing took about 2 days altogether.
Touch Bar in Glimpses allows you to import photos from flickr or Instagram, sort your photos and adjust your project’s settings and more – all without having to look up from the Touch Bar.

Sadly, it didn’t make the cut for Apple’s “Enhanced for Touch Bar” Mac App Store-feature – even begging didn’t help, like, at all…
I wish Apple would give some feedback to developers as to why an app was (or wasn’t) chosen – does the app just suck? Does it not sell enough? Is the rating too low? Does the Touch Bar implementation suck?
Nonetheless, now I know about the Touch Bar APIs and I can put that knowledge to good use in some of my other apps for sure.

Released Yoink v3.2.1 (website, mac app store)

A simple bugfix update, version 3.2.1 fixes a bug with “private” dragging pasteboards, reacts to memory pressure events and cleans up stuff it doesn’t need and fixes a nasty bug where the video in the preferences’ “Behavior” tab would play, even if the preferences window was closed.

Worked on Transloader 3 (website, mac app store, ios app store)

Right after implementing Touch Bar support in Glimpses, I took to Transloader to see how (and if) it would work there, and I think can make things more accessible, like when switching between different views (these GIFs are of a software that’s still in development, so things might change before release) :

or when assigning a download to different Macs:

Other than that, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the “backend” (read: CloudKit) side of the app – the stuff that should just work and the user never gets to see. I’m finally happy with the approach I’m taking (which I wrote about here), so now I can polish it up.
I’m also working on the UI of course and am playing around with alternate progress bars instead of Apple’s standard progress bar UI:

It’s very easy to see if a download has succeed, failed or was cancelled, or how far a running download has progressed without having to read the status below.
Transloader 3 is progressing slowly but nicely, and I hope to be able to make an announcement in the first half of 2017 (yes, that’s very vague, but I’m not good at keeping my own deadlines and I don’t want to commit to a date too early).

Worked on someone else’s code base

For someone else’s iOS app (which I can’t talk about), I had to work on a very complex code base I was completely unfamiliar with.
One part of the complexity comes from its very extensive sync API (basically anything you do in the app is synced back to the server) and knowing the current state of data in the app, the other part is that it uses Core Data, which I only ever read about but never actually used.
Naturally, I had to go through a pretty steep learning curve (including Core Data), and it didn’t help that the initial coding was outsourced to a seemingly unexperienced developer from India, as some parts of it are very, very confusing and sometimes implemented twice or more.
Incidentally, for Christmas, my brother gave me the book “Your Code as a Crime Scene”, which helped identifying parts that needed attention and belonged together – I can wholeheartedly recommend that book.
The app is a very compelling and interesting project and gets me to think about another app besides my own – a break can do wonders on how you view certain problems or issues.

… Thought About

Yoink Removed from the Mac App Store’s ‘Invaluable Utilities’ Feature

After having been featured in ‘New Year, New Habits’, a front-page feature of the Mac App Store all through January 2017, Yoink was (silently) removed by the Mac App Store’s Editorial team from its ‘Invaluable Utilities’ feature.
I noticed by chance, and this pretty much sums up how I reacted when I saw it:

Of course I went on to iTunes Connect to see if everything was in order with the app – it was – so I decided to write Apple directly (I don’t have any contacts in their editorial team – does anybody besides the big guys? I just used iTunes Connect’s ‘Contact Us’ form).
Unsurprisingly, they couldn’t tell me anything. I thought perhaps they could tell me the app was not updated frequently enough (which I doubt, since other apps in that feature were last updated earlier than Yoink) or that it didn’t receive enough ratings, but I got the standard “the editorial team giveth, the editorial team taketh away” response. I really wish Apple were more transparent here – it would only do the developer economy good, knowing where you’d do well to improve.
Anyway, the feature has been removed from the Mac App Store entirely now, so perhaps a new Utility-promotion is coming our way on the Mac App Store soon?

… Downloaded

Oceanhorn (app store)

A great game I’m playing on my Apple TV – always reminds me of playing the Zelda games with my cousin. Good times.
At first I thought using the Apple TV Siri Remote to play it would be clumsy and a turn-off, but it works surprisingly well. I’m not quite done with the game yet, but I’m very close to the end. 

Stardew Valley (gog)

If you don’t have time to spare (which I don’t) or accidentally spend way too much time on that particular game you just can’t get enough of (which I do), do not – I repeat: do not – get this game.
It’s awesome and will make hours seem like minutes. Seriously.

WaterMinder (app store)

I’m notoriously under-hydrated. I drink some coffee in the morning and maybe one, or two glasses of water over the course of a day. Now, that might be enough, as some say, and it might be way too little, as say others.
I’m giving it a try and so that I can keep track of things, I’m using WaterMinder – an app very well designed to take care of these water-intake-tracking-needs. 

… Read

The Andromeda Strain (ibooks store)

“Five prominent biophysicists have warned the United States government that sterilization procedures for returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere.”
Michael Crichton sure was a genius.

Ancient Aliens – The Official Companion Book (amazon)

I gave this book to my girlfriend Britta for Christmas and somehow wound up reading it before her – even though I’m quite skeptic about these things (aliens being the ones who created us thousands of years ago), I still enjoyed reading it a lot – it gives you a different perspective on things.
“Transporting readers around the globe, Ancient Aliens® explores the fascinating enigmas and mysterious artifacts our ancestors left behind, from incredible objects to amazingly accurate ancient maps; from the Great Pyramid of Giza and stone megaliths at Gobekli Tepe to the Nazca Plains and mysterious structures of Puma Punku.”

Your Code as a Crime Scene (pragmatic programmer)

As I stated before, I received this book from my brother for Christmas and read it in about two evenings.
“In this book, you’ll learn forensic psychology techniques to successfully maintain your software. You’ll create a geographic profile from your commit data to find hotspots, and apply temporal coupling concepts to uncover hidden relationships between unrelated areas in your code.”

Designed for Use (pragmatic programmer)

“Expert developer and user interface designer Lukas Mathis gives you a deep dive into research, design, and implementation – the essential stages in designing usable interfaces for applications and websites.”
I’m still reading it, but already I feel like I know a lot more about how I should go about future projects – BEFORE writing code 😉

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (ibook store)

Having read “Death on the Nile” (after having seen the movie like a gazillion times), my mind is now set on reading all books featuring one Monsieur Hercule Poirot by Agatha Christie.
“Village rumor hints that Mrs. Ferrars poisoned her husband, but no one is sure. Then there’s another victim in a chain of death. Unfortunately for the killer, master sleuth Hercule Poirot takes over the investigation.”

… Ate

Nachos with self-made Salsa

… Went to See

Mariazell, Austria

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