Look at any well-respected Apple news1 site, and you'll probably be able to find a post reporting that Samsung (or some other company, but mostly Samsung) has ripped off Apple's design in one of its new products.
Instead of ranting and raving about this all the time, I propose a new way to react when each new ripoff is spotted: ignore it.
Being An App Developer is my series documenting how I'm going about designing, developing and releasing my first iPhone app. I won't be sharing too many details about the app itself; since it will probably take a while to develop, there's the possiblilty someone will steal ideas if I reveal too much.
Two things I learned when I started designing the app: the best ideas come naturally, and that starting to design on paper rather than in Photoshop is much better.
Perhaps, like me, you use Jekyll to compile your blog, in which case each of your posts will be in the form of a Markdown file in a _posts folder somewhere. In that case, there's probably been a time when you were reading one of your own posts in Safari, noticed a spelling mistake and wanted to go and edit the Markdown file for that post. For situations like that, I've come up with a little Alfred extension to open the Markdown file for the currently displayed post in Safari.
I've recently started using Momento again for keeping a diary-type-thing on my iPhone. It's not a new app by any means, but I recently decided to start using it again. And it's not really so much a diary I'm writing as a kind of private Facebook – a place where I can record thoughts to look back over at some point (assuming the app still works on iOS 12 when I feel like rereading my stuff).
Momento is great, because as well as being able to write journal style text entries, you can also hook it up to a number of social feeds such as Twitter and pull entries from those. I have mine importing Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram and the RSS feed for my blog.
I guess keeping Momento going is my New Year's Resolution for 2012, and hopefully I'll be able to keep it up so that I can come back after a few years to see what I was up to in 2012.
If you visit the updates page of the Mac App Store often, and you get fed up with wating for the main page of the App Store to open, you may like to know there's now a URL you can visit which will take you straight to the updates page:
macappstore://showUpdatesPage – click to open the MAS and jump straight to the updates page.
I've also added the URL into Alfred so that I can use Alfred to open the page, too. Click the following link to add the same thing to your Alfred:
Add "Open Mac App Store updates page" to Alfred App
There's no need to change anything; simply clicking the above link will add the shortcut "masu" to Alfred, which will open the updates page when activated.
Oh, and one last thing; you don't need the Mac App Store open to use the URL. If you activate the URL with the App Store closed, it'll automatically open.
There has been a trend recently that whenever a new version of iOS is released, anyone who prefers Android over iOS will say that iOS is playing catchup to Android.
Reminders, the new app built in to iOS 5, is really useful, especially in conjuction with iCloud. However, there seems to be a bug in the app – you can't set a due date for a reminder on iOS.
I had a stab yesterday at predicting what we'd see announced at the Let's Talk iPhone keynote. Turns out that I got two of my predictions right, and two only half right.
By this time tomorrow, we'll know everything there is to know about the new iPhone, be it the iPhone 5, the iPhone 4S or the iPhone 4GS-GTi. Here are a few of my thoughts on tomorrow's keynote.
I wrote the previous post, How To Shut Down Windows 8, more as a joke than an actual how-to piece. However, I’ve since updated it to have a more serious tone, since today alone, I’ve had nearly 150 hits for search terms similar to “How to shut down Windows 8″.
Surely, that level of confusion isn’t good. Especially seeing as this is a ‘developer preview’ – essentially alpha software – and the target audience for downloads at the moment is Windows developers, people who are experienced with computers and tend to know what they’re doing.
If Windows 8 was released in its current state, we’d be seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of novice users installing it, then becoming apprehensive about using their own computer. Perhaps even more intermediate users as well as novices. What is it going to do to someone’s confidence using a computer if it takes ten minutes to work out how to shut the thing down?
The problem lies not in the fact that the shut down button is buried a few levels deep, it’s that it’s buried a few non-sensical levels deep. If you’re looking to shut a computer down, would your first (or even second or third) instinct be to look under settings?
It’s not just that the option is hidden under settings, either. To open that menu in the bottom corner, you can’t click a button or press a keyboard shortcut. You have to know beforehand that a menu will appear if you place your cursor off-screen in that certain area. There’s no hint to tell you it’s there, you have to figure it out yourself.
During my initial hunt for the shut down button, I triggered that menu by accident a couple of times, but because there was no obvious path to what I wanted, I disregarded the entire menu. I only went back once I’d clicked everywhere else and found nothing.
The other issue is that nothing looks obviously clickable. There’s no texture to anything; it’s all a ‘flat’ surface. If you look at buttons on OS X, or even previous versions of Windows, they have some depth, and look as though they can actually be pushed inwards. I clicked the word “Start” at the top of the Metro view more than once, thinking it was the Start menu. It looks exactly the same as the clickable buttons in the settings pane (see above screenshot to see what I mean).
All in all, if I’m honest, the Metro UI, used on a computer rather than a tablet, sucks. If I had been using a tablet, I wouldn’t have needed a shut down button, since I would have just hit the lock button, like on the iPad. Windows 8 needs to recognise when it’s on a platform which doesn’t support touch, and adjust accordingly.
