Get Info: #medium

Feeling for the headphone socket

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is how I easily feel where the headphone socket is around the back of my iMac.

I stuck a little felt circle around the socket which has the benefit of being easy to physically feel as well as acting as a guide for the headphone jack.

Why is the iOS PayPal app so big?

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The size reported on the App Store (204MB as of today for PayPal version 6.8.0) does not take into account App Thinning.

The App Thinning process only delivers the parts of the app required by the device. For example, the launch screen for iPad would not be downloaded onto my iPhone; and the 32-bit binary would not be downloaded on a 64-bit device. For my iPhone 6s, the actual installed size is 131.7MB (see Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Storage > Manage Storage).

If I download the PayPal app through iTunes it is delivered as a compressed .ipa archive of 85.8MB. I can inspect this archive as detailed in another answer of mine: What is the iOS url scheme for Apple’s Numbers app? Doing so I can see that the extracted app total of 152MB is composed as follows:

The GrandPerspective app can also give a visual representation of the number of files that comprise the app and how they vary in size:

Originally published at www.quora.com.

Look Up

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favourite little touches in macOS: Look Up

And don’t forget that you can add look up support for Emoji symbols using my Emojipedia Dictionary.

Detecting Data

On iOS (since version 10) and macOS (since 10.5 Leopard) there’s a feature called Data Detectors that helps recognise various forms of data in text, such as phone numbers, street addresses, contacts, and so on.

A simple version of this is the use of capitalised words as markers to detect phrases during Look Up. It’s not foolproof, as we can see in my video, but it works well more often than not.

Adding Markdown Support to Safari

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently created a Safari Extension that renders plain text Markdown files as good looking HTML right in your browser. I also added a context menu item so you can swap between the rendered HTML and the original Markdown text.

Download

gingerbeardman.com/safari/Doctor.safariextz (25Kb)

To install: double click the file after it has downloaded.

Why?

Recently my buddy and fellow Former Apple Technology Evangelist @TDRBY asked if there was an extension available for rendering Markdown files in Safari. I had a quick look—there wasn’t—and that got me thinking.

On macOS you can use Quick Look plugins to add support for new file types to Finder’s Quick Look preview popup. These plugins are great, I use a bunch of them, but they only apply in Finder and not in Safari. Maybe I could do something similar?

So, knowing that Safari renders plain text files by wrapping them in simple HTML > BODY > PRE markup, I thought that an extension should be able to modify such files. That was enough to pique my interest—so I got to work!

How?

The extension took less than an hour to put together. This blog post took me a lot more time to write! Anyway, here’s how I did it:

Create new extension using Safari > Develop > Extension Builder > + button
Set website access level to All
Confirm extensions run on plain text files in Safari by adding a CSS file containing only body { background-color: red !important; }—success, they do!
Find a suitable JavaScript Markdown to HTML converter showdown.js—this ticks two important boxes: it is easy to use, and is still being actively developed
Write a few lines of JavaScript to run showdown.js on the page text and replace it with the generated HTML
Add github-markdown.css and apply the markdown-body class to make things look better
Configure the extension to run only on URLs ending in common Markdown file extensions
Manually add https:// variations of the Markdown file extensions to the Info.plist (far quicker than using the Extension Builder user interface)
Edit the .map file reference out of the minimised showdown.js to avoid a runtime access warning
Build the release package

At this point I’d like to mention a couple of great open-source projects that made this task so much easier: github-markdown.css by Sindre Sorhus, and showdown.js by Estevão Soares dos Santos—nice work guys!

Testing

There are Markdown files all over the internet, but two notable source stand out.

Almost every GitHub project has a README.md file. View the RAW version to have the extension render it as HTML. Here’s the one I used for testing.
John Gruber’s excellent daringfireball.net blog is written using Markdown, and the source of each post can be seen by appending .text to the URL. Here are two posts that I used to test. Of course, John is also the creator of Markdown. Thanks, John! 👍

Postmortem

After the initial build, a period of testing revealed some issues:

Strikethrough, and some other non-standard but frequently used Markdown, was not being rendered. This was fixed by enabling some options in the showdown.js file.
Rendering quirks due to using github-markdown.css outside of the GitHub page structure required few manual CSS tweaks. Mainly this was to make tables look better.
Markdown on GitHub that was already rendered as HTML was being processed a second time, resulting in corrupted pages. This was fixed by blacklisting the github.com domain.
Sometimes I wanted to see the plain text Markdown. I fixed this by spending an inordinate amount of time adding a context menu item that allows you to Show or Render Markdown. I hope it was worth it! 😬

Safari Wish List

Despite the brief development, I noticed a few quirks to do with Safari that I did not expect to encounter:

You can’t open the Web Inspector whilst viewing a plain text file. But if you open the inspector on a blank tab, or an existing HTML page, you can then navigate to the plain text file and the inspector will remain open. Phew!
Due to the way Safari Extension access permissions work, I have had to enable the extension for all pages and then reduce its power by whitelisting a range of Markdown file extensions. This feels like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer.
Extensions do not run on local file:/// documents. 😩

Please join me in filing enhancement requests with Apple if you’d like to add your support to any of the above points.

Thanks for reading!

If you have any questions feel free to get in touch using twitter or my website. I’m interested to see more extensions that add support for other file formats in Safari. And I’m available to help you make better products!

Apple Event: September 2016

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is my first iPhone launch since leaving Apple, and that’s the only excuse I need to take a guess as to what today’s announcement might feature.

Given the amount of rumours and leaks, I think we’re set for a substantially improved iPhone 7 with no headphone socket—my guess is for reasons of waterproofing more than anything else. In addition to those changes the iPhone 7 plus will feature a dual lens camera plus the improved capabilities and photography it enables. The iPhone 7 plus might even have Apple Pencil support, a feature that I expect to reach all touch screen Apple devices as time goes on.

With the removal of the 3.5mm socket we’re set to see wireless ear buds, perhaps using a custom, Apple-designed chipset to provide better-than-Bluetooth performance. Maybe with a cool name that somehow riffs on the Thunderbolt and Lightning to start a new lineage of wireless transfer protocols.

If laptops are featured—and I’m not sure they will be—then it’ll be with speed bumps due you the latest Intel processors, and a new design including the configurable touch screen OLED bar in place of the row of function keys that has been leaked numerous times.

So, that leaves us with the Apple Watch 2. This is rumoured to feature improved battery life and GPS. What better app to show that off with than the biggest game in the world right now: Pokémon Go? With a revised app the Watch could become your very own Pokémon Go Plus—notifying you when there’s something happening nearby. Game changer. Interestingly the standalone version of the Pokémon Go Plus controller hardware device was delayed from July to September and is iOS-only. I’m sure Apple would much rather feature their own device rather than one from Google/Nintendo.

Well, that was fun!

Less than one hour to go until the #AppleEvent

Game Archaeology: No Man’s Sky

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Video game news outlets are currently abuzz with articles about No Man’s Sky, one of the most eagerly awaited and massively hyped games in recent years. The game sees you dropped somewhere in space with the goals of exploration, resource management, trading and combat.

The dubious matter of how closely the released game resembles the one that was hyped over the past few years will no doubt be hotly debated for many months or years to come.

Regardless, I think the premise of the game is worth talking about because of its influences. Let’s take a trip back through space and time…

Merchant of Venus (1982)

The oldest space trading game I know of, this took the form of a menu driven interface where you could buy your first ship and then transport and trade cargo at a number of different spaceports. Very much a resource management game, but with manual landings akin to Lunar Lander (1979) that were drawn on screen using groups and combinations of letters from the character set. You can play Merchant of Venus online now or read more about it.

Elite (1984)

The grandfather of space exploration games: Elite. This featured 3D graphics, a whole procedurally generated Universe (8 galaxies, each containing 256 planets), exploration, trading, combat, hyperspace jumps, manual docking to refuel, missions, multiple ship types and space pirates. All in 32KB of RAM!

But there was no landing on the surface of planets. Also, somewhat bizarrely, the cassette version lacks the preset missions and has fewer types of ships. You can’t have everything, I suppose.

Read more about the game.

Explorer (1986)

We now come to a game that allows exploration on land, thanks to its scenario of crash-landing on an unknown, unexplored planet. The game features an overhead map and procedurally generated screens as you explore the surface, where you make contact with alien species and are able to open portals to get around more easily.

The graphics were quite impressive for the time, though the fact you’re on one planet was a cunning way to get around the limitations of the procedural generation and the similarities between screens of the various land types. Still worth playing.

Read more about the game.

Starflight (1986)

Whilst Explorer was being released in the UK, over in the USA a development studio called Binary Systems were releasing an all-encompasing space exploration, trading and combat game called Starflight. Arguably even more comprehensive than Elite, it offered exploration, trading, combat but graphically was missing 3D graphics instead going for a hybrid menu-based system with panels of 2D animated graphics to give context to the current objective.

It was released on a range of 8-bit and 16-bit home computers, and also the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. Game designer Greg Johnson went on to co-create the cult ToeJam & Earl series of games. But, for me, Starflight is his magnum opus. It’s easy to play the game (and its sequel) today on PC thanks to a re-release by GOG or read more about it.

Starglider 2 (1988)

Argonaut Games, a studio best known for creating Star Fox and the Super FX coprocessor chip with/for Nintendo, have an interesting part to play in this story. They’d forged ahead with software-driven 3D engines on computers that had very limited processing power, culminating in Starglider 2 for the Amiga, Atari ST and PC. A tour de force of cutting edge technology, the game allowed exploration of a solar system, planetary surfaces and everywhere in between. Whilst it was set in an open world, the game featured a plot and overall goal for the player: to collect the parts of a neutron bomb and use it to blow up an enemy space station.

Read more about the game.

Hunter (1991)

The final game I want to mention doesn’t involve space, but it does involve a huge open world to be explored and a mission to complete. Hunter was the perfect example of an open world game where you could use many different types of transport to get around the world, from bicycles to boats and helicopters. You could enter buildings, amass an inventory of collected items that can be used to solve puzzles and progress towards your ultimate goal.

The game had three modes: Hunter (a long story-based mission), Missions (a series of smaller missions), and Action (against the clock search and destroy around the map). The game was the most convincing depiction of a real world I had seen at that point, and remained that way for some years until the often compared Grand Theft Auto series of games.

Read more about the game.

No Man’s Sky (2016)

My hopes for No Man’s Sky were that it would combine the best features of all the space exploration games that went before it. It could take the Universe, trading, combat and missions from Elite; procedural generation from Explorer; plot-driven goal from Starglider 2; the land exploration and variety of vehicles in Hunter. Heck, maybe it would just be Starflight with a veneer of wonderful 3D graphics.

But the released version of No Man’s Sky is different. Whilst it has all the trappings of a great game, it falls short in several key areas: balance, plot and—most importantly of all—gameplay. So, in a lot of ways the game is actually no more advanced than the 30-or-so year old games I’ve mentioned.

Stylistically, of course, No Man’s Sky is light years ahead. Gameplay wise it’s no better than Elite or Starglider 2, in fact it could be described as being worse. It appears to be rushed, hurried, incomplete, unbalanced.

Most interestingly, the released game lacks a host of features that had been repeatedly mentioned to the press and shown to the public over the last several years. It almost seems as if they’ve chopped huge important chunks off the game in the last few months.

The Gameplay is in Another Galaxy

So what happens next? In my experience it’s uncommon for such deficiencies in the game to be patched or updated after a few initial patches that correct serious bugs and game-breaking features.

To that end, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hello Games and Sony roll out a different—more and capable—version of No Man’s Sky for the soon to be revealed PlayStation 4 Neo.

In a funny way that would make the game even closer to Elite with a different game depending on the platform you choose to play it on.

The Great Photos Heist

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Right now Google is in the process of pulling off one of the greatest technology heists in recent memory. They’re using the global juggernaut that is the Rio Olympics—with the mind bogglingly large number of eyes that are following it on TV screens around the world—as an opportunity to advertise Google Photos.

That may seem like an odd choice, until you realise that the reason for the advertising campaign lies elsewhere: iOS.

Many iOS users own devices with limited storage space, either through lack of housekeeping or the inherent limitations of the device they have chosen to buy. These users have a daily battle with alerts that tell them they are out of storage space and they no longer have room to store any photos.

Up in the Cloud

Google has been clever enough to market their Photos app as a solution to this all too common problem. It has a new feature called Free Up Space that can backup your photos to the cloud and then, automagically, remove your photos and video from your device to, well, free up space. Cool.

The deal is almost as good as it sounds, as you only get unlimited cloud storage for your photos if you’re OK with Google compressing them (perhaps with something like JPEGmini). If you want to store the unmodified originals then they impose a limit. I think that’s fair.

This feature will sound sweet to anybody who has ever seen the nag that they’re out of storage. I’d hazard a guess that that’s pretty much most people with a 16GB or smaller iOS device and any sort of passion for photography, WhatsApp, Snapchat, selfies, or whatever else.

How do you like them Apples?

So now that we’ve understood the problem, and the proposed solution, it’s time to think about what Apple could do about it. Of course their solution will be reactive, with iOS 10 already in beta and Google Photos going strong, but a native solution would be more than welcome.

Currently Apple give every user 5GB of storage. Whilst that’s a decent amount of space for some types of files, it’s just not enough for large files like digital photos and videos.

It’s also worth remembering that most users will already be close to capacity if they’ve activated iCloud Backup. These backups could use up most, or even all, of your 5GB and leave little or no room for anything else.

Turn Back Time

The enhancement request I would file—where I still working at Apple—would be to increase the storage each user gets, make it so that backups do not take up any storage space and of course switch on iCloud Photos by default so free space is regained.

But why stop there? Apple could implement a sort of Time Machine feature for iOS, with the option to restore the whole device or individual apps, with or without their data. That would be very cool.

A Brief History of TV Guides

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

With the news that Apple are courting TV programmers with the idea of an all-encompassing TV Guide, I thought it would be fun to recap my personal history of TV Guide usage and think about where it might be going next.

Disclaimer: whilst I am a former Apple employee, I know of less than nothing about any current or future plans for iOS or tvOS.

I get my kicks on Channel 6

For a long time in the UK—during the pre-internet era, when computers loaded their software from tape cassettes and floppy disks—the Great British public turned to their Televisions for more than just TV shows. We had teletext information services which were kind of like having a limited but nonetheless powerful intranet built into your TV.

The BBC had what they called Ceefax (cf. “See facts”) whilst their main competitor ITV had Oracle, which was eventually replaced by a service called Teletext (with a capital T) run by Teletext Limited that went on to become a hugely popular service that dwarfed even the BBC’s offering.

All of these teletext services provided general information, such as news, weather, recipes and reviews, stored in a carousel of hundreds of sequential pages. You might want to imagine the bbc.co.uk website shrunk down to several hundred pages, each containing no more than about one hundred words. These pages would be transmitted with the broadcast picture and refreshed in a repeating cycle. Your TV’s inbuilt decoder would look at a few lines of the broadcast image and convert the data into screens of ANSI-like coloured characters that form pages of text and blocky graphics. You’d select your desired page by punching in a three digit page number on your remote control and waiting for it to come round in the carousel.

All the teletext services I used provided a TV Guide. This was an EPG before the acronym had even been coined. Roughly equivalent to popular printed TV guides of the time they presented succinct information about the day’s programmes over several pages. Here’s a screenshot of a TV listing from BBC’s Ceefax:

Additionally, a Now & Next feature could be overlaid on top of the TV picture, occupying the bottom half of the screen, leaving the moving image visible in the top half. Close caption subtitles were done in the same way.

Digital Love

Even at the time of its introduction to the UK, the technology powering teletext was old, so it was inevitable that it would eventually be replaced. That happened with the switch off of analogue television and the switchover to digital terrestrial services that were eventually ratified into a standard known as Freeview (and, sometime later, Freeview HD).

The chunky pixel pages of teletext were replaced by slightly less pixelated screens of MHEG content which, despite it actually being a declarative programming language, could render images and data in a more freeform and structured way than the columns of characters teletext was limited to. The flip side of this brave new world was that the onus now fell on hardware manufacturers to implement the MHEG engine themselves, which resulted in a wide variety of compatibility issues similar to how things were with web browsers before WebKit.

Trying to find a decent Freeview box was a real challenge and I went through a whole host: from software built in to my TV, cheap supermarket own-brand boxes, through to a box made by Korean satellite TV specialists Topfield that had its own API and App ecosystem resulting in extensive user customisation. Eventually I discovered a strange looking box made in Wales by a small company named TVonics.

TVonics: the box that’s not a box

The guys at TVonics were clever enough to notice that a recently built Sony fabrication plant in southern Wales could produce their HD-capable boxes on home soil, and had partnered with then-fledgling London design company ustwo to create the user interface for their Freeview software. This was a master stroke and resulted in the most usable Freeview software I’d ever had the pleasure of using.

Even though this was only 5 years ago, it was still a time where the remote control was the long accepted method of input when watching TV. The user interface created by ustwo was simple but effective, form following function. The only real personalisation was the ability to change the colour scheme. The rest of the interface seemed very obvious, but therein lies great design: everything was where you expected it to be and every screen adhered to the same design principles. It had been thought about, and more importantly it had been executed well. Not just in terms of the design, but also in terms of the software that TVonics created. Every aspect of the Freeview HD spec was present, implemented to a higher standard than they had been described in the specifications. The interface was more performant than other boxes and the whole thing was a real joy to use. At this time TiVo may have had extra features, but TVonics version of Freeview was streets ahead in terms of user interface and experience.

Knowing Me, Knowing You

Today Freeview continues in one form or another. There are a small number of middleware providers that have made the MHEG headaches largely disappear. But Freeview now has a number of competitors, the most interesting of which—when it comes to TV Guides at least—is YouView. YouView is both the name of the platform and the partnership that own it.

The most interesting feature of YouView, as a platform, is the way it combines catch-up content with scheduled content in its EPG. This allows you to scroll backwards through the timeline to get to the tv shows you’ve missed. But it seems that making a longer timeline isn’t the solution to the problem of there being too much on TV.

Oranges and Apples

So what’s next? Apple seems to think that the days of scheduled content are over. They probably have a point. The rise of on-demand services from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO, BBC—and almost every other TV programmer—means that it’s no longer as simple as putting all available channels on a timeline. Sky TV has an interface that has been struggling under the weight of this problem for decades, and their latest Sky Q product doesn’t do much to ease the problem, let alone solve it.

Wishing on a Star

A better approach would be to make the TV guide more intelligent. Categorising all available content from all providers with the same taxonomy would help get things to a usable point. I don’t think the iTunes taxonomy would be enough here, but I’d imagine there are some clever people over in Cupertino working on a better one right now. If they haven’t already finished it.

My guess is that Apple’s intentions for a TV Guide can be summed up in one word: Siri.

Already present on the current Apple TV software, tvOS has added content providers to Siri’s knowledge at an increasing rate—as long as you live in the USA. The rest of us are stuck being able to search only iTunes and Netflix. Regardless, the Siri efforts in the USA could be seen as laying the groundwork for a unified TV Guide feature.

However, asking Siri to show you the latest episode of Stranger Things, a movie starring Peter Dinklage, or a movie featuring a VW Beetle, can only go so far. More often than not I find myself looking at my Apple TV home screen clutching the Siri remote—a thing of beautiful symmetry and dubious usability—with no idea what I should watch, and fearful that the brief window of time that I have will be over before it’s even begun. Why can’t Siri decide?

Suggestions similar to those provided by Netflix could be combined with the data gleaned from my Apple TV and iTunes usage, search history and past purchases. This isn’t an easy task, of course. Netflix have previously invested millions into refining their suggestions accuracy through their Netflix Prize, which ended in a law suit and some concerns from the FTC about privacy.

Interestingly Apple have already planted the seed of a solution to similar issues, with their introduction of differential privacy at WWDC 2016. I thought the introduction of this feature was somewhat vague, though perhaps this was by design. To recap, differential privacy is the statistical science of trying to learn as much as possible about a group while learning as little as possible about any individual in it. It’s also a way of describing the collection of huge amounts of personal data whilst still being able to refer to it as privacy. Handy, that!

If the rumours are true regarding the next generation Siri’s vastly improved ability to both interpret speech and form responses, then no better time to put it to the test than a feature that could very well turn the tables on yet another market.

Up to eleven

The timing of these rumours doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me. I think it’s a typical Eddy Cue play, throwing a tidbit of knowledge to his preferred news/media outlets and have them whip up a bit of a storm, one that will hopefully bring the TV execs around to his way of thinking. It’s not subtle, but I suppose if it has worked for him in the past he’s going to keep doing it.

Importantly, if a TV Guide feature is agreed soon it would allow just enough time for it to make the cut for inclusion into version 11 of iOS and tvOS. And there’s nothing like a deadline to get things moving.

Emoji Dictionary 🤓 📖

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favourite features of Mac OS X is the ability to point the mouse cursor at a word and press Command+Control+D to quickly see a popup definition courtesy of Dictionary.app:

It annoys me when I use this feature on an Emoji and it doesn’t work. 😠

D.I.Y.

During my job as a Technology Evangelist at Apple, I took great pride in learning as much as possible about the frameworks and tools that are provided to developers. One such toolkit allowed the creation of custom dictionaries for Mac OS X.

So I thought it would be fun to use the Dictionary Development Kit to create a simple dictionary of Emoji and their meanings. It was! You can grab the finished dictionary here: github.com/gingerbeardman/Emojipedia

How it works

I grabbed a comprehensive list of Emoji Data from the Unicode website, and then set about converting it. The process was as follows:

Convert Emoji Data table to plain text (select all & copy in Chrome).
Write some simple PHP to parse the text file and write out the XML.
Setup build process.
Test and repeat many times.

For each Emoji I store the name and emoji itself, along with a list of keywords and aliases. That way you can search by word or theme and more easily find the emoji you’re looking for. I also list the keywords in the definition, which Dictionary.app automatically converts into hyperlinks allowing you to browse the Emojipedia dictionary just like a website.

Emojipedia

There’s only one place to go to find out information on any Emoji and that’s Emojipedia, a fantastic resource created by Jeremy Burge. I put a link to Emojipedia in every definition, so you can easily click through to find out more and continue learning about Emoji. I plan to work even closer with Emojipedia to include even more information in the dictionary file.

For Hire

I offer a consultancy service that helps companies make better use of technology; from low level tools through to user interface and experience. Get in touch with me if you’d like to work together.

It only remains for me to wish you a Happy #WorldEmojiDay! 🌍

Game Archaeology: Rocket League

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most successful console games of 2016 has been Rocket League. It features cars playing football (soccer) rather than people. Cool!

Some would say it’s both a surprise hit, apparently coming out of nowhere, and also a novel concept. A while go I was chatting with Simon Hade, COO and Co-Founder of Space Ape Games, who made exactly these observations. At this point the game librarian in me couldn’t help but correct him, so I mentioned that it wasn’t novel at all. 😱

During my formative years I had played a game called Wild Wheels on my teenage crush computer—the Atari ST—some time around 1990, and I’d also played Konami’s GTi Club on my Wii in 2010. Both of these games offer a take on car soccer, and I was sure there had to be even more car soccer games I wasn’t aware of.

On my way home I put together a list. I do love lists.

www.mobygames.com/game-group/ball-sports-with-vehicles

We can see that Rocket League is the latest in a long line of car soccer games, and the sequel of Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars from seven years prior. The earliest game of this type is from 1977 and there are at least a couple of dozen others between then and Rocket League.

The Secret of Success

So what made Rocket League a success in light of all the preceding games? Perhaps it was a well executed online mode? But you could then argue that half of the games in the list also had online play.

The most important differentiator is that Rocket League was released on the right platforms to target the right users. The trifecta of PS4/PC/Xbox One means every platform that is home to those “hardcore” gamers who play online seriously. In that respect I think of Rocket League as being more similar to FIFA than you might first expect.

Apparently there are signs of life outside of mobile after all.

WWDC 2016: Platforms State of the Union

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The second half of WWDC Day One is a different sort of keynote. Not as glitzy or glamorous as the one with the Apple SVPs you know, and almost definitely not as well rehearsed and exciting for the general public. But for developers, this is the where they find out how much work they’re going to have to do to take advantage of all the new technologies and features that Tim, Craig and team talked about.

Here’s a recap.

Extensions

So much of what’s new in iOS 10 revolves around the revamped extensions system. You’ll see this phrase crop up again and again in areas such as Sharing, Calls, Spotlight, Photos, Siri, Documents, Notifications, Maps, Widgets, Keyboards and iMessage.

iMessage

These sit in place of the keyboard after you invoke them, and you can interact with the app they represent or use their content in an iMessage. A huge opportunity to change the way people communicate here. You could say that Facebook Messenger has done this already, but for me the Apple method is better due to the fact that there’s already a huge ecosystem of apps that can add these extensions quite easily.

SiriKit

Leverage the power of Siri easily through your app. Limited to 6 domains to start off with: Messaging, VoIP calling, Payments, Ride booking, Photo search, Workouts. They’re the areas with the most use, but I think others will follow over time.

Swift 3

Apple’s great new programming language that is taking the world by storm. It’s now Open Source and being used across many different platforms. This third revision sees much simplification and streamlining, at the expense of breaking code written in previous versions. Xcode 8 has a tool to automatically upgrade your code, if you’d like, or you can carry on using Swift 2.3 which is still included.

Swift Playgrounds

Learn to program the easy way. These interactive programming tutorials are the sort of thing I wish I had age 12. The best news about this is that the playgrounds can be shared with Xcode on a Mac, and Apple is releasing theirs under a reuse licence so people can create more tutorials in the same style. It has a really great interface that is capable of so much without the need to actually type anything. So cool.

It’s similar to third-party app Codea, but as Playgrounds is made by Apple it’s so much better. I do hope that—eventually—apps can be created or published from Playgrounds.

Xcode

The app you use to build apps. It’s a monster of an app, with a steep earning curve and a penchant to changing its user interface every year around this time.

This year the documentation team have been hard at work combining and reducing the documentation package which is now apparently a tenth of the previous size. Xcode itself gets Extensions allowing developers to hook onto it in an approved way to supplement its features with tricks and tools of their own. Yes, the Xcode interface changes yet again but for definite good, allowing you to layout an app in an almost WYSIWYG way.

More, better debugging tools some of which happen at runtime meaning you can save time not having to run your code to find your bugs.
Stalwart system Console.app also sees improved logging and live streaming during debug.

Provisioning finally sees much improvement. This is the process you have to go through to be entitled to run code on your device and also be able to upload it to iTunes Connect so it can be be sold on the App Store. I’ve banged my head against the problems this could cause many times, so this is a very welcome change.

Differential Privacy

Apple seems to be using this as a setup for some big changes in the future regarding Privacy. It will require a bunch more education for people to be comfortable with it. The mentions I’ve seen of it are a bit fluffy on where exactly this is being used, but I’d bet it’s everywhere in iOS in order to better learn from user behaviour and make better decisions. I’d hazard a guess that data has been collecting in a similar way since the beginning of iOS, but now it’s time to double down on it for certain iOS 10 features that would otherwise appear to compromise your privacy.

iOS

iOS is now most definitely grown up. This year sees so much built on the groundwork of the past several years. Software this complicated takes time to build, and even longer to build it well, so it’s very exciting to see the fruits of labour pay off with so many awesome new features coming to iOS 10.

watchOS

A whole bunch of popular frameworks such as SpriteKit, SceneKit and CloudKit come to the watchOS to enable better apps. Let’s not forget the much talked about speed improvements. Fingers crossed.

tvOS

Similar to watchOS, tvOS is a relatively new branch of iOS and continues to receive a bunch new frameworks and technologies to bring it closer to iOS in capability.

Game controller changes, supporting up to 4 simultaneous controllers. Plus, developers can now mark their game as requiring a game controller. No longer do you have to find a way for the game to work on the Siri remote.

macOS

Better inegration with watchOS, including the ability to unlock your Mac by just being nearby. Window tabs for free in mukti-document apps. Picture in Picture for video playback. The same changes to Messages, Photos and Apple Music that we see on iOS.

LZFSE—Apple’s more efficient and less power-hungry compression library has gone Open Source.

Apple File System—a Next-Generation File System for Apple Products optimised for current and future technologies, replaces 18-year-old HFS that was built when we all carried around floppy disks.

WWDC 2016: thoughts on the keynote

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

June is the highlight of the year for any Apple fan, with WWDC being the focal point of all eyes on Apple. Having recently left Apple it was interesting to view the event as an outsider for the first time in a while, with no prior knowledge of anything that was announced.

This year I also had the company of a nice a cold drink in my hand as it’s a warm evening in London, UK, the day is winding down just as the conference is ramping up.

If you missed it you can watch a recording of the keynote at www.apple.com/apple-events/june-2016/

Fast and fun

For me that was a markedly better keynote than last year. More focussed, more features, more new faces. Some really great presenters appeared on stage—other than Craig Federighi, of course—I remember at least five that really made an impression. I hope that trend continues as the old guard make way for the new.

watchOS

This had to go first, in my mind, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the platform in need of the most change. And second, it’s the hardware the most users need convincing of. That said, if it heralds the performance increases that were demonstrated on stage it could finally be time the watch fulfils expectations.

The system software changes that bring these speedups will no doubt require apps to be updated to use the new APIs, or at least be changed to cope with the new view hierarchies. I am interested in how many of these improvements will come for free, from the perspective of an app developer and user.

It’s great to see the OS become simpler and more iPhone-like, much needed. This is for me the type of watchOS that the device should have shipped with: familiar, fluid and fast.

tvOS

A bit odd that Remote.app was mentioned as it’s been out for a while, but the changes it is receiving are quite substantial. Single Sign-On is a really nice time saving feature that acknowledges the inherent issues with TV and related input mechanisms, and helps things become easier. More frameworks arrive from iOS, all very welcome. APIs and features to make the Cable companies happy. Lots of changes, too many to mention here. Feels like a catch-up update to me.

macOS

Name change! But for those of us who have been around the block a few times, everything old is new again as we return to a variation of the classic Mac OS name that saw us through the 1990s.

Universal Clipboard, for me as a heavy user of a clipboard management app (Alfred) is a real killer feature that only the OS can provide at the level of integration it needs to be done. I thought the demo of this was great. Craig was excellent once again. Apple Pay in Safari, huge news that didn’t raise many eyebrows. A tool to help people free up space on their Mac, I suspect a reaction to the glut of mediocre apps that proclaim to do similar tasks filling up the Mac App Store charts.

Tabs everywhere—done at an OS-level so multi-window apps get the feature for free—my hunch is that this, along with PiP, is the start of a push to get more users using full screen mode. But why might that be? Hmm.

Siri! Very impressive demos. Let’s see if I’m ready to talk to my machine.

iOS

Less than half way into the keynote and we are already at iOS. This reaffirmed the sheer amount of new stuff in iOS—let’s not forget that it’s the most important platform by far for Apple.

The new lock screen and associated integration looks exactly what it should have been all along. Sliding to the right to get to Camera might take a bit of getting used to, but I appreciate the issue that TouchID now being so fast that something had to change with the lock screen UI.

Developers now get API hooks into more of iOS, which can only be a good thing to herald in new types of apps. I’m excited to see what might come of an API that can search through the objects found in photos.

Apple Music—what a demo! I loved Boz’s style. Interesting new design language being used in Music and News, perhaps trying to adjust the target audience to a younger demographic? Certainly made both apps feel less stuffy to me. Big changes after only a year.

The demo of Messages was another favourite, despite the technical hiccups half way through. Cupertino looking firmly and squarely at Menlo Park. Integration with extensions mean stock apps like Maps and Messages stand a good chance at becoming real competition to Facebook’s Messenger and Snapchat apps.

Swift Playgrounds for iPad for me is a real killer app. It will sell iPads into schools at an astonishing rate. Another great demo, too. I hope the programmers keyboard can be used outside of the app, as some of the features like swiping to quickly get numbers and punctuation are lifted straight out of the popular TouchPal keyboard, which I currently use. Though of course I’d rather use a stock keyboard if at all possible.

All-in-all some amazing integration of apps into pretty much every asect of iOS from Maps through Photos to Messages. Users should be ecstatic.

More…

Other things I spotted that weren’t called out in the keynote but that I’ll be looking into over the course of the week:

Apple File System—a Next-Generation File System for Apple Products, replaces HFS and optimised for current and future technologies.
Removal of stock apps—more control for the user, and more frequent updates from Apple.
Safari Extensions on the Mac App Store—very cool new avenue for developers to make money.
I’m sure more new features will come to light this week.

Teaser websites

Game Critique: Frantic Architect

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Frantic Architect for iOS and Android is a great casual game by Will Kwan/BulkyPix in which you have to build as tall a tower as possible, with the kicker being that you have limited control of where exactly the next building block will go. A video will help explain better:

The game has a high degree of polish and the user interface design and screen layout is excellent. However, play of more than a few minutes will lead to frustration, which is something that really needs to be managed by the developer. Too much frustration and the player will go away and never open the game again.

I think there’s one change that could be made that would make the game easier and less frustrating to play:

The block should lock into place on the “touch up” event, rather than on the “touch down” event as it is now.

This simple change would enable the player to reduce their reaction time by keeping their finger on the screen until they exact moment they want to lock a block in place.

The physical movement of lifting the finger off the screen is a lot faster than the the double movement of first touching the screen followed by lifting the finger off again.

Game Critique: Hill Racer 2

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

From time to time I’ll be posting critique of video games in this way. It’s meant as constrictive criticsm in the nicest possible way. It also goes to show the type of feedback I give to developers when asked to test or review their games.

Recently I’ve been playing a fair bit of Hill Racer 2 on my Apple TV. It’s kind of like Tiny Wings, but with cars. Right up my street! Check it out:

It’s quite well done, but there are a few small details that the developers could look at to easily improve both user experience and engagement.

Game over, man!

When you run out of gas (or petrol as we say in the UK) the game ends immediately. This is quite jarring, and it would be much better if the accelerator stopped working and the car could then slowly come to a halt under its own moment. The benefit of this would be twofold:

the experience would be smoother and less jarring for the player,
the player stands a chance of reclaiming their game as they might be able to reach the next checkpoint even when they have run out of fuel. I have fond memories of clinching victory from the jaws of defeat like this in SEGA’s arcade classic Out Run.

Caught in a trap

Once you upgrade your car a few times you’ll have quite a decent top speed. This should be a good thing, but in fact it’s not. This is because the car body moves about a bit and can actually get stuck in bridges as you drive across them. This should be an easy fix by adjusting the collision of bridges against the car body only whilst the wheels are touching it.

Grinder

You can tell that the game is an iOS port, as it’s built around grinding, in this case that’s earning in-game currency to be able to upgrade your car or buy a new one. On iOS this keeps users in the game and means that the developer can run more ads, and earn more money. On Apple TV ads in games are not an option, so I think the developer should have rebalanced the game to favour less grinding. This last one is a judgment call, though, as it would mean the game would be different across platforms.

Game Analysis: Boom Dots

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One thing I occasionally do is a sort of third-person-post-mortem of a game I’ve been playing a lot of. I think about how it might have been put together from a game design and programming perspective. Of course this sort of analysis is just my opinion, but I do try to think things through far enough to prove my point. Often I go so far as to recreate the core game mechanic as a rapid prototype, just to be sure that my thinking is correct.

Boom Dots by Umbrella Games is a great minimalist, arcade-style game that has enjoyed continued success on the App Store. What struck me about the game—other than how well it has been put together—was how simple and elegant the concept is. I see it as a simplified version of Space Invaders. The developer has sucessfully reduced an already simple concept to its bare essentials, doing away with both player movement and enemy formation in the process. You might think that removing those two keys elements would remove the fun, but you’d be wrong. I think it actually amplifies the fun!

Anyway, I was playing Boom Dots, marvelling at the elegance of the concept and wishing I’d come up with it first, and I began to think about how it might be put together. That’s either a blessing or a curse, but I can’t help but think about games in that way after they get a hold of me. Boom Dots is a great game with which to start this occasional series of posts, as it’s a very simple mechanic.

There’s an Enemy Dot. And there’s a Player Dot.

The Player Dot can be released at which point it will move upwards. Meanwhile the Enemy Dot is moving back and forth across the screen.

If the Dots collide, you score and a new Enemy Dot appears. If you miss, it’s Game Over.

Testing whether the two dots, or circles, overlap is as easy as testing whether the distance between their centre points is less than the sum of their respective radiuses. A little bit of trigonometry is required. Easy.

Tapping the Player Dot gives it some velocity to it, and sends it on its way. Super easy.

Now to the Enemy Dot. The way this comes on the screen is really nice: such a smooth curve! And the way it moves back and forth: so smooth! Surely this is difficult to replicate? Well, yes, if you’re doing it from scratch. But absolutely not if you have the ability to perform tweening animations, which I tend to do using a set of tried and tested Easing functions.

Easing functions allow you to specify a curve that the speed of the animation should follow on its way from the start value to the end value. Normally it would move at a constant speed from start to end: Linear. But by adjusting the how fast we go using a mathematical formula, we can make the animation play at a different speeds depending on how far along between we are.

Perfect.

Types of curves that can be applied in this way are: Quadratic, Cubic, Quartic, Quintic, Sinusoidal, Exponential and Circular. Then there’s even Elastic and Bounce, which add a bit of wobble to proceedings.

Easings are easier to understand by looking at interactive visualisations.

So, back to the Enemy Dot moving side to side. We want the animation to start slowly, speed up, then slow down. Looking at the visualisations we see that easeInOutSine will do that, and it’s not as severe as some of the others so it’d be a good one to try first. By applying the easeInOutSine Easing function to the Enemy Dot as it travels back and forth we can get just the effect we require. We can apply a similar function to animate the dot as it comes down onto the screen. When both animations happen at once a smooth curve emerges—mathematics is great!

At its core Boom Dots is as easy as that: two tweens, some velocity on tap, and a simple collision detection check. Cool, huh?

That’s all well and good, but there’s only one way to really know if the analysis is correct: to make a game that way. So that’s what I did.

Play the game right now in your browser or watch a short video of it.

I chose the Phaser JavaScript framework for this particular prototype. I’d been reading its documentation and it looked well suited to the task at hand. For example, it has the Easing functions that I wanted to use to get the dots moving smoothly. SpriteKit, to contrast, doesn’t have built-in Easing functions—though of course you could write your own or port some code across if you wanted to do this natively on iOS. I tend to experiment with a variety of frameworks and tools just to keep things interesting.

Phaser is great because it takes care of the dull boilerplate work enabling you to concentrate on the actual game. It uses WebGL or the HTML Canvas depending on what is best for the device it is running on, and also provides some useful shortcuts for loading of assets, managing game states, easily adding physics and lots more. Explosions, for another example, also come for free. I used a small plugin to add the “screen shake” effect. The circle-to-circle collision I talked about earlier is also made even easier using Phaser:

Is the distance between the two centre points less than the sum of the two radiuses?

The prototype took me a few hours from start to finish, with another few the following day balancing, polishing and adding high score saving. I tend to do these reconstructions a few times a year, mostly on Bank Holidays.

The complete source code for my version of Boom Dots is on GitHub.

Of course, Boom Dots goes a lot further than the core simple mechanic. It has a thick layer of presentation varnish. It tracks every bit of gameplay and uses them to give a steady stream of meta challenges to the player. These “missions” encourage the player to approach the game in different ways; to achieve certain goals in the gameplay such as getting a perfect hit, or surviving for a certain amount of time. It also introduces graphical themes that can be unlocked with extended play. These things keep the player in the game and the developer earning money through ads and in-app purchases.

The developer, Sven Magnus, certainly knows how to juice up a game. That’s a topic for another post.

iStock: Download large comp

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2012, before my time at Apple, I was a contract developer and would often work with designers on specific projects. Over the course of those projects, we’d have to find stock photos for the apps or websites we were building and generally turned to iStockPhoto as our main resource.

During the design phase we would go through number of different image options, using the watermarked thumbnail images from iStock as temporary placeholders, or comps, before settling on the final image that we would buy.

As well as the thumbnail, iStock also offered a zoom function that let you scroll around a large version of the photo. It occurred to me that I might be able to use this to get a larger watermarked comp for download?

Version 1

In 2012, iStock’s zoom function loaded in the larger image split in tiles. My hunch is that this was to prevent people from downloading the larger version, as I doubt it would be much of a bandwidth saving mechanism.

Regardless, I was undaunted and up for the challenge. My first attempt at solving the problem, to prove that it was possible, was a UserScript. This is a snippet of JavaScript that can be run using an extension like GreaseMonkey or NinjaKit in much the same way as a native browser extension. They’re a very quick way to prototype an idea.

After the concept was proven I wrote extensions for both Safari and Chrome. When triggered—via a modified link on the page—the extension would zoom the image to the highest level, then programmatically grab each tile, composite the tiles together on a HTML5 canvas element, and finally convert the canvas into a large JPEG image that can easily be downloaded.

A lot of effort, you might say, but it worked very well and became quite popular throughout the design community.

Version 2

In early 2013 iStock changed their website to remove the zoom feature, allowing the large comp to be accessed directly without having to stitch together a bunch of tiles. I updated my extensions to cope with these changes, which of course involved throwing out most of the code I’d written for the first version.

As a software developer you learn to be ready to kill your darlings during any sort of refactoring.

Version 3

Today I release the third version of the extension, rewritten to work with the current iStock website. The extension becomes even simpler, but remains incredibly useful. You can download it at my website.

This version adds a link—a green “Download large comp” button—below the existing, red “Download this photo” button. The beauty of this new link is that it is more usable and friendly than the previous versions of the tool.

The download can be triggered in a few different ways:

Clicking the green button will open the zoomed image in a new tab.
Option-clicking the green button to download the large comp immediately.
Right-clicking on the green button will to show a contextual menu with further options, such as the ability to copy the web address.

This version will hopefully last for a while, but I’ll be keeping my eye on it. The source code is, of course, on GitHub.

Final thoughts

I have a lot of fun building extensions. Not just because it involves programming, DOM manipulation using JavaScript, and some HTML and CSS for styling. For me, the real fun comes out of deconstructing the inner workings of the webpage—I guess you could call it reverse engineering—and then implementing a solution that will not only work well, but be resistant to breaking at the slightest changes to the page it is modifying.