Category: Miscellaneous

The Shit Show

Well, it happened.

We knew it was coming.

A prick pulled the plug. And what bothers me most about it is how Space Karen did it.

My mom passed away just before Christmas. Her decline was something everyone in the family saw coming and we prepared for her demise. It still hurts like hell, but she left with love and dignity. That makes all the difference when it comes to coping with loss.

Twitterrific is something that we’ve all poured our love into for the past 16 years. I’m not usually one to toot my own horn, but we literally crafted the early experience on the service. We often hear that folks joined up because of our app. Our work was definitive and groundbreaking. We loved this app like I loved my mom.

(Note today’s date and the one on our announcement – the fuckwads missed our 16th anniversary by a couple of days! King Shithead probably thought Friday the 13th was lol. I’d love some proof that the API went down at 04:20 in UTC +1.)

Like my mom, the API has been declining for awhile. Endpoints were removed, new features were unavailable to third parties, and rate limiting restricted what we could do. And like my mom, we struggled on and did the best we could, trying to stay upbeat about it all.

What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show.

But I guess that’s what you should expect from a shitty person.

Personally, I’m done. And with a vengeance.

First, arrogant bastards love seeing their names on tweets and other media. I want to starve him of the things that money can’t buy: respect and attention. Do the same by simply ignoring him and his kingdom.

Secondly, for the past several months I’ve been thinking about where we go from here. When you see decline, you plan for a demise. It was the last thing mom taught me.

I’ve been active on Mastodon since the billionaire bozo took over. And it makes me think.

One thing I’ve noticed is that everyone is going to great lengths to make something that replaces the clients we’ve known for years. That’s an excellent goal that eases a transition in the short-term, but ignores how a new open standard (ActivityPub) can be leveraged in new and different ways.

Federation exposes a lot of different data sources that you’d want to follow. Not all of these sources will be Mastodon instances: you may want to stay up-to-date with someone’s Micro.blog, or maybe another person’s Tumblr, or someone else’s photo feed. There are many apps and servers for you to choose from.

It feels like the time is right for a truly universal timeline. That notion excites me like the first time I posted XML status to an endpoint.

One thing I remember from these early days: no one had any idea what they were doing. It was all new and things like @screen_name,  #hashtags, or RT hadn’t been invented yet. Heck, we didn’t even call them “tweets” or use a bird icon at first! The best ideas came from people using the service: all of the things mentioned above grew organically from a need.

That’s where I want to be in the future. Exploring unknown territory that empowers others and adapts to the needs of a community.

There’s no sense in clinging to the personal whims of a clown leading a shit show. Especially when his circus will end up being a $44 billion version of MySpace.

Written on January 15th, 2023 for Miscellaneous

Introducing AV Remote

In my ongoing quest to release FREE apps that are useful in my daily life, I’m proud to announce the release of AV Remote. It’s a very simple remote for Denon and Marantz AV receivers.

The official apps for controlling these receivers work fine, but have way too many features for my needs. I don’t need to control zones, select inputs, or adjust equalizer presets. I just want to control the power and volume.

While using early versions of the app, I realized that I have different “listening levels”. As a result, AV Remote makes it easy to select a quiet volume for background music or something much louder for watching a movie:

AV Remote works with recent models of both Denon and Marantz receivers. If your device supports HEOS, then the app can discover the receiver on your network and begin controlling it. There’s no setup other than allowing access to your local network with Bonjour.

And if you’re looking for some good background music to put on your Apple TV, I have a solution for that too!

Written on August 30th, 2021 for Miscellaneous

Introducing Waterscope

It’s common wisdom that you should release a software product when it is minimally viable: get an early version out in the world as soon as it can perform a useful task for a customer.

When that product is for someone who is a developer that’s been coding since the dawn of time, the equation gets flipped on its head. Waterscope is a Maximally Viable Product™ and the customer is me.

The app got its start when Swift 1.0 was announced back in 2014: I wanted to build something with the new language. About that same time, I had also started learning about tides and how they are predicted. It’s a complex problem that has been vexing scientists since the three-body problem was first proposed by Newton with the publication of the Principia in 1687. Like determining the time and place for a lunar eclipse, we rely on derived approximations.

For learning a new language, tide prediction provided a lot of interesting work: data collection, complex calculations, graphical presentation, and animatable data. It also let me know when it was a good time for a dog walk.

As an ocean swimmer, I also wanted my weather app to provide information about water conditions. It turns out the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have that all figured out. As do the meteorologists at the National Weather Service (NWS) with their API for weather observations and forecasts. There are even high resolution images from environmental satellites launched by NASA. The United States government provides a treasure trove of data; the challenge with Waterscope was to organize and present it in a consistent manner.

Screenshots of Waterscope showing the home screen graphs, a map view with sea and land weather conditions, and a satellite view of California.

Which leads to a secondary goal for this app: to make it completely by myself. I work with some incredibly talented designers, but I wanted Waterscope to be uniquely my own. All the design, for better or worse, was created by my own hand. (The only exception is the use of SF Symbols when showing weather conditions.)

So not only was I learning Swift, I was also learning Sketch and, of course, how much time it takes to get something to feel right. Like coding, it’s not as easy as we sometimes make it look. Don’t take your designers for granted :-)

Along the way, there were some interesting hurdles. Some visual, some simple, and some complex. Many of the things I wanted to do required learning about astronomy and orbital mechanics. My sketches from Linea will give you an idea of the breadth of the challenges. (And being the day after the solstice, that first sketch is particularly relevant.)

Sketches for a user interface design that shows seasons using the illumination of the Earth, the math for linear interpolation, and a spherical projection of a point on a satellite image.
Sketches for a user interface that shows seasons by illuminating the Earth, the math for linear interpolation, and a spherical projection for a location on a satellite image.

Here I am, six years later. I’ve learned a lot, but as with my first app in Objective-C, the most important thing about this exercise was how not to use Swift. It will probably take me another 18 years to come to terms with this new language, and feel like I’ve mastered it, but a journey can’t start without the first steps. Another insight is that a programming language is just a means to an end: the hard part is not the code, it’s understanding what needs to be done.

I’m releasing Waterscope today because there are certainly other folks who will benefit from my personal weather app. There may even be some educational value in seeing how I approached a data-rich user interface (hint: Edward Tufte’s books taught me). Information can be dynamic and beautiful.

At the same time, if you’re outside the U.S., it’s unlikely to be a satisfying experience: most of the data sources and their presentation are oriented towards North America. An example: in the southern hemisphere your view of the sun and moon’s orbit is in a counterclockwise direction as you look north. Waterscope displays a clockwise orbit.

But the good news is that Waterscope, like the data it uses, is FREE to download and use. Enjoy!

Written on December 22nd, 2020 for Miscellaneous

Luna Display

What if I told you that you could add a Retina Display to your MacBook Pro for under $100? And what would you think when I showed how it plugs into your computer?

The business card underneath this hardware gives you some hints, but where did this magical device come from and how does it work?

This story all starts out in The Iconfactory office in Minnesota where we do custom app development. It’s a co-working space that we share with the fine folks at Astro HQ, the makers of the popular AstroPad app.

Troy Gaul showed me the video from the Kickstarter page, Matt Ronge asked me if I’d give it a try (“Hell yeah!”), and Savannah Reising sent me the prototype hardware you see above.

I’ve had two displays on my development machines since the 1990’s. By now, it’s fully ingrained in my habits and makes for a very efficient workflow. So much so that it’s the capability I miss the most when I travel, especially when I have an iPad with a kick-ass display. It’s not hyperbole to say that this new product, called Luna Display, solves this problem completely.

It’s also got me thinking about how to reorganize my home office, because this is a great setup no matter where you are!

The prototype hardware arrived late last Saturday, so here is how my Sunday morning started…

Setup

I put the USB-C hardware you saw above into my wife’s MacBook Pro. My laptop is a bit older and uses Mini DisplayPort for attaching external displays (Astro HQ is working on this interface but the prototypes aren’t quite ready.) The device immediately started blinking. Who doesn’t love a blinking light on new hardware?

I then downloaded the Luna Display app for the Mac. It’s clearly labeled as a “Technology Preview” and I’m fully aware of what that means :-) For example, there are some menu options in this version, like “Reload Codec Config” and “Luna Device Reset”, that tell me engineers are still tweaking things. Like any Kickstarter project, anything I write about now may not be in the shipping product.

Even that blinking light, which stopped after I launched the app, might not be in the final product. But I hope it is, because it’s simple feedback that the Mac side isn’t running. And it blinks!

Earlier in the week, I got a TestFlight invite for the Luna Display app on iOS, so I got that all set up. After launching this app, you get a message saying “Look at your Mac Screen”. Man, I love it when developers think about how you’re going to use something!

On the Mac, there was a dialog asking if PRO BABY could connect via Wi-Fi. That’s my 9.7” iPad Pro, so of course I clicked “Allow”, but it’s good to know that they’re thinking about who gets to see what’s on my Mac.

At this point, Luna Display is all set up and I’ve got dual displays. This is awesome!

Tweaking Things

The Mac app presents two buttons: “Enable HiDPI” and “Display Arrangement”. Getting the Luna Display in the right place was the first thing I wanted to do, so it was very helpful to have that second button.

The first button presented a message to “Install the Luna System Extension”. This extension is needed to put the display into a full Retina resolution, but years of happy marriage have taught me that you don’t install with a password on your spouse’s laptop. So I declined and can’t wait to do it when my miniDP prototype arrives!

Since the Luna Display is running on an iPad, touches and Pencil input work as you’d expect. In fact, they work a little too well, because I caught myself moving my finger over to the MacBook sitting next to it. Maybe Microsoft is onto something here, after all.

I was also curious if I could use multiple iPads simultaneously, I’m an iOS developer so conceivably I could have a MacBook with six displays of varying resolution and speediness. As we’ll see next, there’s a good reason you’re limited to only one iOS device at a time.

A Networked Display

The first thing on my mind, and probably yours, is how’s the display quality? And the answer to that question leads us to the most important part of this technology: the link between your Mac and iPad.

When we renovated our 1920’s bungalow in Laguna Beach, Wi-Fi was just getting started and the speeds weren’t great. As a result, we have a lot of gigabit Ethernet and not a lot of motivation to upgrade a bunch of old Airport Extremes. The network isn’t terribly fast, but most of the devices that can outrun it can be hardwired.

Except now I have a Mac that’s sending screenfuls of compressed pixels to my iPad’s Retina Display over an aging network. And guess what?

The display looks pretty damn good! If I look closely, there’s some blockiness as I move the windows around quickly, but things like the iTunes visualizer look much better than I expected.

I have some experience flinging pixels between a Mac and an iOS device so the effectiveness of Astro HQ’s LIQUID technology is not lost on me. It’s clearly something they’ve honed over the years with their Astropad product. It also explains that oddly named menu item we saw above: “Reload Codec Config”.

There’s also a “Vitals” window that you can open on the Mac to see how well this technology is working. I love to geek out on graphs and the data shown above helped me understand what was going on under the hood: it’s all about the bandwidth. The more you can give Luna Display, the better it looks. You want those blue throughput lines to be as high as possible. The bump in graphs is while I was moving a window around furiously on the Luna Display — I saw similar results while running the iTunes visualizer.

To make my wireless network worse than it normally is, I started a download Xcode on another Mac connected to the same access point. This chewed up about 50 Mbps, and the quality of the Luna Display decreased dramatically.

So yes, someone else in your office could ruin your productivity. Bummer.

A Wired Display

It was at this point I remembered that you could also use a USB connection between the Mac and iPad. Let’s give that a try!

As soon as the cable went in the display quality was perfect. Wowza.

And those blue graph lines you saw above? They were literally off the chart with the USB connection.

(Something tells me that the price to upgrade my network will be way more than this Kickstarter is costing me.)

Practically speaking, I think this is a likely configuration if you’re using these devices for an entire workday. The USB cable lets you share the power load and recharge during extended use. It also completely avoids the problem of your coworkers watching 4K video on YouTube all day.

In the likely event that you’ll take your Luna Display while you travel, make sure to pack a cable, because we all know how great hotel Wi-Fi can be.

A Display With an OS

Everything else behaves just as you’d expect and acts like any other display you’d plug into your Mac. The only difference with Luna Display is that there’s an operating system controlling what gets sent to your second screen.

When you put the Luna Display app into the background with the iPad’s home button, the display disappears from the Mac after a few minutes. All iOS apps have a limited time in the background and Luna Display is no different. When this timeout occurs, you’ll see the Mac’s display reconfigure and windows will move to new spaces. As soon as the iOS app is brought back to the foreground, all your windows move back to their original locations.

Quirks

All new software has its quirks, but I encountered surprisingly few of them while testing Luna Display. This product is much more mature than I expected from a Technology Preview.

One thing I didn’t expect to see was “Luna Display” as the color profile for the display. Considering that I’m running on the first “Display P3” device that Apple shipped, that wider gamut should be utilized. Changing the profile didn’t appear to have any effect, either. I’m kind of a stickler for this kind of thing :-)

In talking with the Astro HQ developers, the reason is because this version uses an 8-bit color pipeline. They are working on 10-bit color and wider gamuts since it’s a great feature for designers using AstroPad.

There were a few times where things disconnected unexpectedly or got hung up. Nothing serious, and it was easy to recover from (it’s like accidentally unplugging a display: the Mac handles that gracefully.)

Even so, the developers are working to improve this situation, which is mainly caused by congested Wi-Fi. They still have some work to do on their UDP-based network protocol when other HTTP requests start hoarding bandwidth.

As I’ve only had the device for a few days and been testing on my wife’s computer, I didn’t do any battery life measurements. I did notice that plugging in the USB cable between the Mac and iPad caused the iOS device to charge, decreasing the battery life of the MacBook Pro.

In Conclusion

I know the folks behind this device. They’ve been shipping great products on macOS and iOS for many years, and I have great confidence that they will iron out any of the kinks in Luna Display.

I also know that I’ll never have a MacBook or an iPad without this tiny bit of magic. Please join me in backing the Kickstarter.

Written on August 22nd, 2017 for Development, Miscellaneous

Accessibility Matters

At the Iconfactory, we look at accessibility as a way to give back to a community that’s given us so much. We were thrilled to be inducted into the AppleVis Hall of Fame.

Adding VoiceOver and other accessibility features to your own app is extra work. But as soon as you realize that you’re making someone else’s life better, it’s all worth it.

This is also a good time to remind you that we have an accessibilty project of our own: xScope’s vision defect simulation is open source.

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