Pete Schaffner’s Blog
I was also able to contribute to the new Triggers feature (which lets you run your own code in response to Tuple events) by making a “mini app” for testing your scripts without constantly asking for coworker to call you 😂 And of course, the toolbar icons were an extension of the new settings pane set.
I recently started a new job at Tuple (!!) and had the pleasure of refreshing our settings pane icons. We made variants for both light and dark appearances, as often icons drawn for one end up looking odd (read like a photograph negative) in the other.
We released Bear 2 last week and there has been a lot of positive feedback, but this post on Rands in Repose made my day 300 times over!
We use different tools, but this is also how work is done at Shiny Frog. We use Sketch to get an idea roughed out (and for creating assets), and then move quickly to Xcode. Sometimes we’ll make a prototype project, but as much as possible design happens in the real app’s codebase. One way in which this is a huge benefit and time saver is with themes in Bear : there are a lot and it’s critical to…
Otavio Cordeiro wrote in his weekly notes : Last week Bear released Bear 2 Beta on TestFlight and, as a big Bear fan, I downloaded it to try. The editor was rebuilt from scratch, adding features users were asking for a long time. One of my favorite features is backlinks, something all Obsidian users know well. Currently Bear supports [[WikiLinks]], allowing one to link another note (as Obsidian…
I was using Micro.blog to cross post my blog entries to Mastodon, but the way they translated wasn’t great. My biggest beef was how all in-line links were stripped, appending only the first one at the end of the toot. I love links, so I decided to make a custom solution that would list them all. It also limits the text to 500 characters and links directly to posts with a title without showing any…
Sleeve 2 just landed, Mp3tag recently had a nice update, and Doppler 3 is coming next year! Hot dog my music has never looked or sounded so good!
I decided to set my headings in ITC Garamond (Condensed) as a homage to Apple circa 1984. I think it looks appropriate next to my Finder-y avatars, and actually jives quiet well with the rest of the site’s design.
I tend to go a little overboard with links, so I took a page out of Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography —or rather stole it—and marked them with a degree symbol: Vigorously styled hyperlinks on a page tend to move to the foreground of a reader’s attention, like an HDTV in a hotel bar. (See also maxims of page layout .) The red circle is meant to be noticeable while you’re reading the sentence…
It’s a read-only experience, but following Mastodon timelines using OpenRSS’s Mastodon feeds is pretty cool.
Thank you @libei@mastodon.social for Mastoot ! I’m really enjoying it and would now like to find something as simple and elegant for the Mac.
Like peanut butter and jelly: Doppler + Mp3tag (@mp3tag@indieapps.space)
Orion ’s not quite enough to pull me away from Safari (yet), but it’s so nice to see a browser built on top WebKit instead of Blink. They also took the time to build the UI rather than reskin Chromium. More of this please!
The ellipsis (…) is a handy character in writing and user interface design, but I always second guess myself when it comes time to use it in menus and buttons. So here is a reference for future me. The macOS HIG spells it out quite nicely: Append an ellipsis to a menu item’s label when people need to provide additional information before the action can complete. The ellipsis character (…) signals…
The new MarsEdit 5 app icon by @BradEllis is great! I love the Mars-surface pattern in the background; reminds me of the subtle globe backdrop on the NetNewsWire icons he made.
Ralf Herrmann writes on Typography.Guru : Apple has recently licensed fonts from type foundries such as Commercial Type, Klim Type Foundry and Mark Simonson Studio to be used as system fonts on Mac OS Catalina. But since these fonts are an optional download, many users of Mac OS X are not even aware they have access to them for free. To see and install these optional fonts, open the FontBook…
I prefer to use (and make) native software, so it was encouraging to read this Twitter thread by Rich Siegel, the maker of BBEdit . I’m going to record it here both so it is easier to read and for archival purposes. Tweet 1 : All right, let’s do this. It is time to speak of many things. Before I start I want to make a few things crystal clear: Except for my own experiences and matters of objective…
I wonder if Edward Hopper’s Night Windows inspired Hitchcock’s Rear Window 🤔
No l’X? 🖕 No CDI? 🖕 Entrepreneur? 🖕 Vive la 🇫🇷
I recently took a break from my work on Bear and made a new icon for Image2icon . The original was made by Konstantin Datz , and it was gorgeous. It was a bit intimidating to reimagine it for Big Sur, but I’m happy with how it turned out.
Dan Moren of Six Colors writes about iCloud Keychain in Chrome : “[…] I end up using Chrome a decent amount for sites that Safari doesn’t support well or at all […]”. It isn’t Safari that doesn’t support the sites, it’s the sites that don’t support Safari. When Mac software breaks because of OS changes, the developer doesn’t say “sorry, macOS doesn’t support my app”. It is on them to make sure…
Couldn’t have said it better: Daring Fireball: What an Amazing Feature .
Steve Troughton-Smith writes about Catalyst : That NeXT competitive advantage became Apple’s competitive advantage, and, later, iPhone’s competitive advantage. This is the competitive advantage a native platform from Apple has over the web; it would be such a shame to half-ass this transition to Marzipan and concede defeat to web apps on the desktop instead of letting native apps reach the heights…
I design software, and much of that work is done in Sketch . I’ve used it my whole career and will continue to do so as long as it stays a native app. Lucky for me, I think it will . (Kudos to whoever set that headline in ITC Garamond Narrow, and shame on whoever set the text in it.) I was also worried that Origami Studio , another great tool I use, would go with Electron for their next big…
“ Google’s new logos are bad ”. You can say that again…
CodeRunner recently went from being a playground to being my go-to code editor for anything I do outside Xcode. Fast and versatile with a solid completion engine. I’m so happy to see great editors with IDE capabilities that aren’t built on top of Chromium.
Listed below are some of the blogs I follow closely. (Last updated 3 June 2020.) Apple Daring Fireball MacStories Six Colors Programming Bitsplitting.org Elegant Chaos Indie Stack NSHipster objc.io Software, technology, etc. Becky Hansmeyer Born Sleepy Frank Chimero furbo.org Golden Hill Software High Caffeine Content iA inessential Macdrifter MacSparky Manton Reece Marco.org Panic Pilky.me Reda…
Danny Carey of Tool is a good drummer . Oh, and if you are on an iPad, use this bookmarklet to get the system playback controls. Fuck your custom player, YouTube.
Another great RSS app from back in the day: NewsFire .
Gotta love the French, and that permalink: daringfireball.net/linked/2020/04/03/f-u .
Jason Fried writes about suddenly working remotely : This also isn’t a time to try to simulate the office. Working from home is not working from the office. Working remotely is not working locally. Don’t try to make one the other. If you have meetings all day at the office, don’t simply simulate those meetings via video. This is an opportunity not to have those meetings [emphasis added]. Write it…
Prediction: Origami Studio will follow in the path of Spark AR Studio and become a cross-platform app. I imagine they will go a React + Electron route (as apposed to C++ and Qt like they did with Spark), as I don’t think performance will be as important. I hope I’m wrong.
Talking about Pulp and Caffeinated got me thinking about another similar gem from the days of yore: Socialite (originally EventBox ).
Reda Lemeden describes how you can take full-page screenshots of webpages in Safari on macOS. This is also doable in Safari on iOS (since iOS 13) by taking a screenshot of a webpage , or by using the “Markup” action in the activity view. I’m looking into bringing those capabilities to Chrome on iOS too. Fingers crossed they aren’t private APIs.
I don’t write Go , but if I did, I’d use Chime : Our whole philosophy is fewer features, built with more polish. Attention to detail and thoughtful design is what Chime is all about. What a breath of fresh air!
…and while I’m reminiscing about RSS apps: Pulp by Acrylic Software was beautiful. They also made Wallet , which I miss dreadfully.
Back in the day I used Caffeinated for Google Reader . The same guy that did that app is behind IconJar . Neat!
I keep up with things that interest me by subscribing to blogs on the internet. For this I use a service called Feedbin , which aggregates all my feeds in one place and keeps them up-to-date. Next I use a feed reader called Unread on my iPhone and iPad to actually read through all those blog posts. And when I’m at my Mac, I use NetNewsWire . Here are some other great feed readers for macOS and…
DefaultApp looks like a great way to bootstrap a new macOS app.
When people sign their emails with a single initial, I imagine they must either be really busy or really well-known. P
With rumored ARM Macs on the horizon, it is a good time to reflect on how Apple has handled technology transitions over the years.
While reading about a nifty way to do CI-like things via GitHub Actions , I learned that with a bit of hoop-jumping, Catalyst apps on macOS can use all the power of AppKit . What a nice rabbit hole to happen down!
Wise words by Reda Lemeden : If you are just starting out as a UI designer, learn to ignore design trends.
^D deletes forward. How did I not know this!?
I just wrote about why I hate Medium , so while I’m all in a rage, let me rag on Slack . I hate Medium on principle: they are a walled garden (like Twitter or Facebook) that hoards our prose. 1 But my reasons aren’t quite so righteous when it comes to Slack. I hate them simply because they do a shit job of making a Mac app. Normally this wouldn’t bother me—I would just look elsewhere. But everyone…
Too many good writers, articles and thoughts have been sucked into that siloed black hole . I mean, I get it. Who wants to set up a blog? Just write, right? But what about owning your content? Tweets are small and usually conversational, so I can see using something like Twitter without too much thought. But when it comes time to write, why would you want to give it all over to someone else? Oh,…
Ok, the site isn’t new as in design or content, but the underlying tech is. I guess it is also a little late to be writing a new-year post. Oh well… Hosting I made a resolution this year to support more independent businesses. This site was originally hosted by GitHub Pages, but I decided I didn’t want all my eggs in one basket (being my remote was enough—no need for them to handle building and…
Software tends to march steadily downhill as it accumulates more and more features (read crap ). I think one good way to fight the bloat, especially in a corporate environment, is to remember that your project/feature is not the most important thing. Driving that one home is not easy, but it is critical if you are to preserve the software’s integrity.
On the subject of using math to justify design choices, I like Matthew Butterick’s stance × 1.61803398875: The risk with these shortcuts is that they encourage typographers to satisfy themselves with numerical justifications— I used the golden ratio, therefore it must look good! —at the expense of developing visual judgment. When your headings look right, they are right—and if so, the ratio…
Frank Chimero writes : It’s always felt narrow to say that design is problem-solving; there’s more to it than that. Design can inform, yet that very often needs to begin by seducing. That’s the aspect of design I find most fascinating. Sometimes I feel guilty about focusing on aesthetics, but that is silly. Lest we forget, form and function are both important aspects of design. Two sides of the…