With yet another month behind us (time flies recently, doesn’t it?), it’s time for another entry in my “What I…” series of blog posts. This time, somehow dental care made its way into it.

… Worked On

Website Update (click)
I felt the need to update my website again. On the landing page, you used to have to scroll to see all the applications available. I didn’t particularly like that. Also, the buttons just didn’t look good. Have a look:

eternalstorms.at before updateeternalstorms.at before its recent update

With the recent update, I moved everything around, chose a nicer, easier to read font (Helvetica Neue Ultra Light probably wasn’t the best choice) and removed the buttons:

eternalstorms.at after recent updateeternalstorms.at after the recent update

You can see how much space I saved solely by scaling the Eternal Storms Software logo and moving it off to the side (which makes it less obvious, sure, but a lot nicer to look at). What’s always important to me on a website is a way to contact the people in charge. I cannot say how much I hate (and I use that word with all its meaning) websites where I have to dig through to get some contact information. So at the top left, you have a button to contact me by mail or twitter and visit my Facebook group. At the right hand side, you can reach my blog, the press page and About/Legal information.
I also hate contact forms. Why hide your mail? From spammers? They’ll get to you anyway. Just give me your email and I can write you from within the comfort zone of my preferred email client. Nothing better than that.

A click onto an app icon or the app’s description will take you to the app’s page, of course:

Yoink's website after the updateYoink’s website after the update

I don’t want to overwhelm browsers with too much information up front. A page filled with text can easily scare people away.
So what you see at first is the icon, a short tagline and a Download and Purchase button. Below that, I thought it’d be a nice idea to feature some customer and press reviews to let potential buyers see what people who have used the app thought about it.
Below that, you’ll be greeted by a short screencast and the app’s full description and functionality. If you decide to skip the screencast, there’s a quick GIF of Yoink in action to give you the gist of it.

It took me a couple of days to settle on the colors of the buttons. I started with green and blue, then tried a light shade of purple and blue:

Screenshot of iWeb 25 08 2015 22 44 30
Screenshot of iWeb 25 08 2015 22 37 34

It’s nice, but taking the #ESSPurple background into account, neither the green, grey-ish purple or blue worked that well.
The buttons are much more identifiable as such than the previously used chalk-outline ones (see first screenshot).

For Yoink, I also started a new Quick Tips website, showcasing some lesser-known features.

Yoink Quick Tips Website (click)
It’s kind of a FAQ section. I often got eMails asking how to easily select all files inside Yoink or how to copy files out of Yoink instead of moving them.
Yoink’s Quick Tips website displays simple tricks like copying and selection, but more complex ones, too, like using Automator in conjunction with Yoink or adding files to Yoink from the Terminal/Shell.

Yoink 3.1 (to be released on September 3rd 2015)
I’ve been working on an update for Yoink which, most importantly, is now localized into additional great languages, like Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean (you can find the complete list in the release notes or on Yoink’s website).
Some localizations were “donations” by awesome users of Yoink (Korean, Portuguese (Portugal) and Italian), the others were done by professional localizers via iCanLocalize and BRlingo, which I can both highly recommend.
Besides being localized into new languages, the update provides a cleaner, less cluttered interface, many improvements and bugfixes.

Transloader 2.2.2 (iOS) (click)
Transloader for iOS received a bugfix update, fixing some minor stuff in its Today Widget and Action Extension and URL schemes. The Mac app hasn’t received an update yet.

Reach ZEN – Update (click)
I worked on an update for my cousin’s iPhone and iPad game Reach ZEN, fixing a couple of bugs and interface issues. Most importantly, In-App Purchases are working now 😛
In the game, you turn a cube with random numbers on it, selecting sides that add up to ten in under ten seconds. It’s thrilling and peaceful at the same time – go check it out 🙂

… Didn’t Work On

Swift Language
At some point, I’d like to get into Swift programming. But I don’t see the point in re-writing my apps to use Swift – it doesn’t really provide any use to users, other than knowing that something was built with the “new shiny”.
Hearing stories about how code stops working after an update to the Swift language doesn’t help things, either. When I write something, I want to be sure it works with the next release of the language it was written in.
That is not to say I’m not going to develop apps using Swift – but for now, I’m waiting for a release where I know that from that point on, things don’t change fundamentally and code keeps working over releases.

… Did

My girlfriend and I went to the dentist. For me, it was the first time in 15 years, easy (I know, I’m an idiot). But it went far better than I thought, considering the time span.
Three cavities (one has already been taken care of with two kind of drills and a filling) and one wisdom tooth that’s coming out the wrong way and needs to be surgically removed at some point (that X-Ray was quite shocking, to be honest).
Still, I’ve never had such a pleasant dentist visit. She was very comforting, careful and explaining what she did all the way through. The next appointment is in two weeks where the next tooth is getting fixed (by drilling, I hope).

… Downloaded

Angry Birds 2 icon, RovioAngry Birds 2 (click)
A worthy successor to the game that started it all. It’s entertaining and fun and pretty much sticks to what made the first game great.
I’m not very far into it due to lack of time, but it is a nice way to relax a little.

Pac-Man 256 IconPac-Man 256 (click)
I didn’t play much of it yet, but it’s Pac-Man – what can go wrong? 😛
I did get to the “Glitch” stage and died pretty soon afterwards and haven’t played it since – to be honest, I’d rather play Crossy Roads.

… Read

Swift – The Genius of Protocols (click)
This article provides a nice look into Protocols in Swift.
I’m not using Swift for anything yet and have only put my pinky toes into the vast sea that is this new programming language, but I do enjoy reading about what it has to offer.

Intro To GCD (Grand Central Dispatch) (click)
I’m familiar with how GCD works and I make extensive use of it, but it never hurts to read up on something you think you know. This is a multi-part series about GCD and if you’re a Mac / iOS developer, I suggest you check it out.

The increasingly long lives of old Macs (click)
Something I’m very thankful for, working on a retina MacBook Pro from 2012 and a 20’’ Apple Cinema Display from ca. 2004.
And OS X El Capitan will give it at least one more year of usage – including the new Metal framework (Macs starting from 2012 are supported, so my rMBP barely made it).

How Runic Games was Reborn After Torchlight: The Story Behind Hob (click)
The story behind a new game from Runic Games and how it deviates from previous games they made while having to deal with key people leaving the company.

… Listened To

Liftoff Podcast (click)
“Liftoff is a fortnightly podcast about space, the universe, and everything.”
I’m kind of into Astronomy, it’s a “hobby” of mine, if you can call it a hobby.
The podcast just started, they’re at episode 2 (episode 3 if you count the intro episode) and it’s been very interesting.

… Watched

Why CG Sucks (Except It Doesn’t) (click)
A short video about why we think CG in movies sucks, but it really doesn’t.

… Ate

Tomato PizzaSelf-Made Tomato Pizza with Garlic

… Went to See

My girlfriend and I were at quite a few places this month 😉

Schallaburg, Viking ExhibitionViking Exhibition at Schallaburg

Setagayapark in Doebling, ViennaSetagayapark in Vienna, Döbling.
Between Doebling, a district of Vienna and Setagaya in Tokio, there has been a year-long friendship and cultural agreement.
Out of that, this park was created. Planned by Ken Nkajima.

Haus des Meeres (House of the Sea)Haus des Meeres / House of the Sea, Vienna.

Aninite Convention SchwecahtAniNite Convention, Schwechat
Way more people (and cosplayers) than last year.

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[Note: This is a guest blog post written by Martin Nguyen (@iMaddin on twitter), an OS X- and iOS developer based in Austria, about his Mac app Gestimer]

Gestimer Icon

I don’t like to keep too many thoughts in my head at the same time. Also, my short-term memory isn’t the greatest. If I had to cook dinner and then went back to my Mac to continue whatever I was working on, I’d probably forget about my dinner.

That’s especially true while coding where I have to be completely focused. Other unrelated thoughts are too distracting when writing code. I feel comfortable knowing that an app will take care of such thoughts as its memory is most likely better than mine.

Not too long ago – while I was at university – I noticed that todo apps weren’t entirely fitting all my needs. Sometimes I had these little tasks like reminding me to make dinner (because I’d forget and be too busy or focused with other things) or that I had to leave for a lecture in half an hour. It was too much of a hassle to set alerts for those tasks that have a short lifespan. To me it just feels slow to enter numbers with a keyboard for inputing dates and times, especially without a num pad.

As the type person who sits at my Mac most of the time, I decided to make a Mac app to work around this problem. After a couple of months and failed attempts at such an app, the idea that later became Gestimer popped into my mind: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just drag down from the menu bar to create a quick reminder?” This seemed so simple and fast. It was the perfect solution.

Development

With this idea in my mind and a few sketches in my notebook, it was time for the execution. This was back in 2012 when I had just begun learning to code. As every beginner knows, coding is frustrating. Everything can break easily and you have no clue why. Objective-C was also not the easiest thing to learn without any prior programming knowledge. Additionally, making Mac apps appeared to be much more difficult than making iOS apps.
I shelved the project. There was nothing that was anywhere close to Gestimer out there so it was impossible finding resources that would help me realize the app.

With iOS 7, Apple introduced UIKit Dynamics. It seemed like a fun way to make interactions so I played around with it. I noticed that UIKit Dynamics allowed me to easily do something close to what I had in mind. It was only available for iOS and not OS X but it still allowed me to produce a version of Gestimer, even if it wasn’t in the intended environment. Here is the iOS version which was available from 2013 to 2014:

Gestimer_iOS

Gestimer for iOS didn’t do too well but that’s okay. I didn’t do any marketing as I simply put it up on the App Store and I was already happy to have an app that I made and used every day. Creating the iOS version taught me a lot and as I learned from more projects over the last couple years, I felt comfortable enough to tackle the Mac version again. I was especially motivated by the announcement and release of Swift.

I made some good progress on Gestimer for the Mac during the summer of 2014. The idea never changed: drag & drop from the menu bar to create a reminder. I worked on the app on and off, whenever I felt like it, whenever I slept off the frustration and head-scratching of the previous day.

As there was no UIKit Dynamics for the Mac, it was a lot more difficult to imitate the iOS version and to get things behaving as intended. By late 2014 I had a rough but useable version. I was never in a rush to release Gestimer. In fact, I stopped working on it for a couple months after that. I was again content with having an app I made and used every day. It also gave me time to simply use the app and think about if it truly did the things well that I wanted it to do.

If you haven’t seen Gestimer yet, have a look at a short clip here.
https://vine.co/v/ehEwHbWKhUj/embed/simple

Marketing

Sometime around mid-April 2015 I started sharing a beta of Gestimer with people who I thought might be interested. Besides gathering feedback, it got me excited about the prospect of launching and hear what even more people will say about it. That’s where I decided to do some proper marketing. I won’t go into detail about this here as it would double the size of this post but I took marketing very seriously.

The basic outline of what I had:
– a short 10s clip of the interaction on the website
– collected email addresses for launch day
– made a YouTube video (currently over 50k views)
– a nice press kit
– localized Gestimer into 9 languages (now even more!)

Launch

There was little press coverage on launch day, but I had Gestimer up on Product Hunt thanks to Matthias who kindly sent me an invite. Someone had also posted the app to Hacker News. Both sites led to a lot of traffic. At the end of the day Gestimer was sitting on the 3rd spot on Product Hunt. To this date, the PH submission for the app has received over 400 upvotes. Twitter also helped a bit, though I believe people overestimate its effectiveness.

More press coverage followed and an increasing number of people spread the word. During launch week Gestimer reached the #1 spot in the Top Paid charts on the Mac App Store in multiple countries including the US, UK, and Germany. While sales numbers on the Mac App Store are small compared to the iOS App Store – even if you reach the top charts – it’s still been good. It’s nothing to complain about.

The reception for Gestimer has been overwhelming and I would have never imagined it becoming this successful. It makes me very proud to have done all the design, code, and marketing work on my own.

If you’d like, you can find out more about Gestimer here.

——
Martin Nguyen (@iMaddin on twitter) sometimes works on iOS and OS X apps and lives in Austria. While he enjoys coding, he is still trying to figure out the next step in his life.

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Welcome back to another crazy part of the “What I…” series 😉 No dog this time.

… Did

The Jailhouse Dogs, Graz

Playing Piano for The Jailhouse Dogs
Because their regular pianist couldn’t make it, I had to jump in. We played the season’s opening for Clocktower, a Harley-Davidson dealer in Graz, Austria. I hadn’t played the piano since the last time I had to jump in for him, and that was in the summer of last year, so I was quite out of practice and I totally screwed up the intro of Status Quo’s “Rockin’ All Over The World”. No one noticed though, except the band of course, and we all had a good laugh about it. Laughing, we almost couldn’t play the song, but we pushed through. The rest went fine. I miss playing the piano regularly.

Yoink About Window

Working on an update for Yoink (click)
Besides a substantial update for ScreenFloat, I’ve been working on an update for Yoink, mostly bug fixing (for example, see this blog post about a curious bug that occurred with webarchives), performance and efficiency improvements (for example, Yoink will no longer try to create QuickLook previews for folders and apps, because those are just icons anyway. It’s not a big thing, but for a lot of dragging, it might make a small difference). Also, CPU usage shouldn’t rise to 100% anymore when accepting promised drags – another battery saver.
I’ve also included the new About window that I introduced in Glimpses and a new splash screen that’s similar to the one you can find in Glimpses as well.
I’m currently waiting for translations of the splash- and about window and then I’ll be able to release it, hopefully next week.

By the way, it’s been on the Mac App Store front page for a while, and it makes me very happy to see it there, in the “Get Stuff Done” category and is in great company – MindNode 2, OmniFocus and Evernote, to name a few.

Stationary Bike (click)
I’m not a sporty kind of guy, I’m not into sports of any kind – in short, I consider taking a brief walk working out. But it occurred to me that sitting in front of a computer all day and not doing anything to counter that could lead to a horrible, sudden death.
So I decided to use my girlfriend’s stationary bike and ride it for an hour every workday. It’s been going well so far (I started two weeks ago), cycling for 22km a session. It’s a good tempo for me right now and I feel better already.
Although they are quite pricey, I’d love to get a standing desk, as I hear good things about it. Perhaps one with a built-in walking thingy.

I don’t use any fitness trackers or anything like that, I just ride an hour and am done. If Apple sold its Apple Watch in Austria, perhaps I would have picked one up, but it’s the second time now Austria’s been dumped from their release list. Kind of annoying, in more than one way, considering I might want develop software for it.

… Downloaded

Alto's Adventure

Alto’s Adventure (click)
Admittedly, I downloaded this game for iOS not this month but about the time when it was first released, but it received a nice update recently and I’ve started playing it again. It’s a lot of fun and I can only recommend it.

… Read

The Reconstruction of Lara Croft – Rise Of The Tomb Raider (click)
A very interesting article about creating Lara Croft for her latest instalment of Tomb Raider.
At one point, they realized that Lara Croft was not Lara Croft anymore, but Camilla Luddington, the woman portraying her for motion capturing.

… Listened To

Welcome To Macintosh Podcast Episode 3: Trip to alphaSyntauri (click)
Guest starring Charlie Kellner, an Apple employee, mostly talking about the early days of computer audio.

… Watched

How To Get Your App Noticed By The Media (click)
A very good talk by Peter Cohen (Mac Managing Editor at imore, @flargh on twitter).

Broken Age Documentary (click)
Being a backer of the Double Fine Adventure (now known as Broken Age), I had access to all the videos when they were posted, but now they are also available publicly on their YouTube channel and I definitely recommend watching it if you’re at all interested in how a game is produced and comes to live.

… Ate

CurryChicken Curry with Rice, Roti bread and green salad

… Went to See

Us and Tom Cruise at the World Premiere in Vienna
Us and Simon Pegg at the World Premiere in Vienna

The World Premiere of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation was at the Vienna Opera House and my girlfriend and I were lucky enough to win two tickets to the fan zone in front of it, and even luckier to get a spot in the first row, so we managed to take pictures with Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg and, of course, get their autographs. A very exciting day, something that definitely doesn’t happen every day, especially not in Vienna 😉

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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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