Real-Life M1 Pro Review from an App-Developer
These new M1 Pro MacBooks are INSANE! I received mine today and ran it through a series of tests of my everyday workflow—most importantly: unxipping Xcode. The results blew me away.
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Stealing 1,000,000€ from Facebook’s Ad Revenue
It‘s been one year since I have published the first version of my new app “one sec”. And the feedback since then has been incredible! The app works great and helps people to get less addicted to particular apps, and to their phone in general. Read my intial blog post to learn how “one sec” works and what it does. One Thousand Five Star Ratings More than one thousand five star ratings have been…
How we used MagSafe fishing to find and recover an iPhone 12 Pro from the canal in Berlin
It‘s been a couple of days since a friend of mine dropped his iPhone 12 Pro into the canal in Kreuzberg, Berlin. News made it all around the world by now, being featured on all Apple News pages that exist: AppleInsider, 9to5Mac, The Loop, iPhone Ticker, iMore, Hi Tekno, Mac4Ever, Appgefahren, Macerkopf, MacTechNews, iDrop News, Engadget, 新浪网, 科技新報 TechNews, iXBT, … it doesn‘t stop. Apparently,…
Setting up Philips‘ Hue Wall Switch Module with HomeKit and Shortcuts Automation
Right now, I am mainly controlling my HomeKit devices using the Homie App in my Mac‘s Menu Bar. However, in more and more situations I would like to have a proper light switch integrated into my HomeKit setup: imagine guests are coming who don‘t know about the setup, or you just enter the room and would like to quickly turn on some lights without pulling out your phone. Plus adding sophisticated…
How to invent a new Emoji: The long story of my Polar Bear Emoji
As you might know, Polar Bears are my favorite animals. And for many years I was sad that there was no Polar Bear emoji at all. That was until I noticed how Emoji characters are created, and that basically any person can propose new characters to be added. Emoji symbols and even standard typed characters in different languages are standardized by the so-called Unicode Consortium, which ensures…
Homie – Menu Bar App for HomeKit
I was super annoyed that I always had to open the HomeKit App on macOS in order to control my smart home devices. To solve this, I’ve built a little app called “Homie” for Big Sur that lives in the macOS menu bar.
one sec – break your social media habits
“one sec” uses Shortcuts Automation to toggle a deep breath animation whenever you open one of the configured apps (Instagram, Twitter, YouTube…). This breaks unconcious social media habits and even helps long-term by adding more friction when opening these apps. Breaks unconcious social media habits Being forced to take a deep breath helps yourself to reflect on what you are currently doing on…
KeyPad x QuickScreen: Remote-Control your iOS devices!
I‘ve recently discovered the App KeyPad which is available for free on the Mac AppStore. It basically pretends to be a bluetooth keyboard + trackpad for your iPhone or iPad and lets your remote-control your iOS device through that. The reason why it caught my attention is, it‘s a perfect compagnion for QuickScreen which mirrors your phone‘s screen quickly to your Mac. Remote-Controlling your iOS…
Setting up QuickScreen
QuickScreen mirrors your phone‘s screen quickly to your Mac. Even though the user interface is super-simple (and quick!), there are a couple of things you can try if your phone does not connect somehow: Launch QuickScreen on your Mac. Make sure your iPhone is connected with a lightning USB cable to your computer. Newer iPads are connected with a USB-C cable. Make sure that you allow your computer…
Tips and Tricks when Climbing with Apple Watch
Climbing is a great sport. And Apple Watch is a great fitness tracker. It even provides built-in capabilities to track climbing activities – even though this is only very basic and just provides duration, heart rate, and calories for each climbing workout: The right App for Climbing & Bouldering With the integrated workout app only providing very basic statistics I started to work on my own…
Processing for iOS Education Challenge 2019
Submit your coolest projects, stories, and course material around Processing for iOS! I’ve started my app “Processing for iOS” as a little side-project in 2011. I wanted to have my processing sketches always with me to show my friends or to code on the go on my iPod Touch. At some point, I figured out that other people were also interested in using my app, so I decided to upload it to the AppStore…
Introducing Redpoint — The first Apple Watch Bouldering Fitness Tracker
Today I am publishing a new app on the AppStore: This time I combined two of my passions: My passion for climbing & bouldering and my passion for iOS development. Redpoint Redpoint is a fitness tracker for bouldering and climbing that uses the built-in sensors form the Apple Watch. While I developed this app I discovered how amazing and well-thought watchOS and the actual Apple Watch hardware…
SPD Hackathon: How we Accidentally Dethroned the German Chancellor #Schulzzug
In Germany’s 2017 national election it really looks like Martin Schulz (SPD, Gottkanzler) has the momentum to beat Angela Merkel. Germany’s social democratic party (SPD) was able to start a positive hype around their candidate Martin Schulz that had its origins in the Internet; organically. Thousands of memes were shared online, like the Schulz-Train – promoting the values of Martin Schulz and the…
funk Hackathon Mainz: WorldWide Protest
At this year’s Funk Hackathon in Mainz we developed a platform to organise and participate in protests all around the world. This platform helps to strengthen the democracy we live in by bringing together organisers and participants for protests against right-wing ideology, nationalism or for animal’s rights. In the last couple years, young people have often been accused of not being political. A…
Hackathon Stuttgart 2016: Hacking a street-sweeper: SuperMarioKehrt
This year’s Hackathon Stuttgart took place in the beautiful Römercastel location in Bad Cannstatt. This is a huge building with plenty of places to work and sleep at night. This hackathon is organized by logicline. The Idea When it comes to hackathons I am always a fan of crazy projects you wouldn’t or cannot do at home. In this case we were interested in Car2Go and Kärcher (which is a German…
Ferienakademie 2016: Drones taking over Sarntal
Ferienakademie is a voluntary holiday academy organized by three Universities from southern Germany: Freie Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Technical University of Munich (TUM) and University of Stuttgart. It takes place in Sarntal, which is a beautiful high valley near to Bozen in Italy. This year I participated in Bernd Brügge’s and Daniel Siewiorek’s course “Cyber…
WWDC 2016 — Apple Scholarship
It was a great and exhausting week at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco during the last days – with the scholarship orientation on Sunday, the big keynote on Monday and labs during the week. We got lots of questions answered during the week in the labs and met old friends from 2013, 2014 and 2015 again. Thanks for the great week and see you next year!
Satellite-based terrain visualization for environmental monitoring and presentation of relevant observations
STUPRO is a University software project we have been working on during the last year. This project is part of the Bachelor program “Software Engineering” at University of Stuttgart. The Team Our team consisted of Adrian Zeyfang, André Wruszczak, Jan Machnik, Jan Tagscherer, Jonas Auer, Karl-Heinz Theil, Larissa Laich, Marcel Warbeck, Paul Dieterich, Tobias Beeh and me: The Project During the…
Apple Tech Talks in Berlin: All about Apple TV
Apple’s TechTalks in Berlin were a great opportunity to meet many WWDC friends from San Francisco again. The talks itself covered different important topics regarding AppleTV and tvOS app development.
Ferienakademie 2015
This year I participated in Stefan Wagner’s team “Extreme Coder Camp” where we focussed on developing software using an agile strategy, called Scrum. We developed an Eclipse-Plugin for the programming language “CamlLight” using the agile approach. The standup-meeting in the morning ensured that everybody has an appropriate work to do for the day and to see how the progress has been since…
TravelHack at SFO Hackathon: SafeStay
THack was a hackathon organized by the airport administration. The hackathon took place within SFO – the airport of San Francisco. Larissa and I decided to participate in the hackathon before flying home. Inspiration Two German developers came to San Fransisco two years ago for Apple Developer Conference. Looking for a cheap and convenient place to stay, they booked a room at a hotel at…
WWDC 2015 — The epicenter of change.
It was great to experience Apple’s WWDC on a Apple scholarship with a strong focus on developers and great software releases. Meeting our friends at Apple and other companies in the Silicon Valley was amazing and we’re looking forward to seeing you again next year! At this year’s WWDC Apple showed the new OS X El Capitan, iOS 9, watchOS 2, Swift 2 and Apple Music – speaking of music: this is…
Wikipedia Open Culture Hackathon in Bern: Cultural Music Radio
We built a “cultural music radio” which plays suitable music depending on your gps location or travel route. Our backend server looks for artists and musicians nearby the user’s location and sends back an array of Spotify music tracks which will then be played on the iOS app. We use a python server backend to process RESTful API requests. Clients can send their gps location and will receive a list…
NICHTS – A Tournament Management System for SoPra
SoPra (software internship) is part of my Bachelor program “Software Engineering” at the department of our Professor Stefan Wagner. Together with two other students I had to realize a software project within one semester. This year’s assignment was to create a Java-tool that supports tournaments for card-based games. But developing the tool was not everything – like in a real software-projects…
Evernote Apple Watch Hackathon: Watch Vocab Trainer App
Evernote organized an AppleWatch hackathon in Zürich. There I met with Arik, whom I know from previous WWDCs. We developed an Apple Watch app which helps to learn vocabulary on the go. We use different sensors to determine when the user is idling, for example waiting at a red traffic light. We then push a little exercise notification which includes one vocabulary. This can help to learn a new…
Hackathon Stuttgart 2014: MealHub
MealHub was our project at the Hackathon Stuttgart 2014. We developed this app to be able to meet new people, cook and eat together. The initial problem was the lack of lunch options at our university. But what if every dorm could be a canteen? Cooking for five people is not much more time-consuming than cooking for one or two. After all we received the “price for best project”. After winning the…
Halloween Hackathon 2014: Kolumbus, a cultural travel buddy
Kolumbus is an intelligent, gps-based iOS application + server-backend, which reminds you to visit cultural institutions, when you are already there. The idea is to encorage especially young people to enjoy cultural highlights without additional effort. This project was rewarded with “Price for best Application”. The source code is available on GitHub.
Paypal’s BattleHack London 2014 – RunForIt!
We developed an app which helps to collect donations for charity by running. People who participate pledge a certain amount of money for every mile you run which is then automatically collected and donated to the charity organization. You can select from different charity organizations manually who should receive the donations which are collected by your running activity.
Ferienakademie 2014
Ferienakademie is a voluntary holiday academy organized by three Universities from southern Germany: Freie Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Technical University of Munich (TUM) and University of Stuttgart. It takes place in Sarntal, which is a beautiful high valley near to Bozen in Italy. This year I participated in Albrecht Schmidt’s and Björn Eskofier’s course “Mobile…
New Bus-Tracking Feature Available in “Krautfest App”
In 2013 we published the first app-version for Leinfelden-Echterdingen’s annual “Krautfest”. The festival is visited by more than 100’000 visitors on one weekend. The new app also contains a bus-tracking feature, which shows the location of the Krautfest-bus-shuttles live on a map – that’s a brand-new feature which isn’t even available in the official VVS app! We presented the app at the press…
IBM Hackathon Uni Stuttgart: Weather-Alarm App
At IBM’s bluemix hackathon we developed an iPhone app with intelligent weather capabilities: The app can wake you up earlier when harsh weather conditions occur (for instance snow). It is also able to warn you before certain weather conditions appear using the weather forecast. All calculations are done on IBM’s bluemix backend system, which then sends out a push notification to our fronted iPhone…
HP Hackathon San Francisco 2014: Reviewily
A single restaurant can have thousands of reviews. Way too much noise to actually get exactly what you may want. At Reviewily we help organize the reviews, ratings, and comments so you can dive directly into what you care about, what people mention a lot, and you can be a more informed customer. Using IDOLOnDemand API (Sentiment Analysis) we pin point specific topics people people care about when…
WWDC 2014 – Write the code. Change the world.
This week was totally inspiring and probably the best week of our life. It was great to get in touch with Apple engineers in the labs to get help with our app projects, especially iRedstone. Apple presented iOS 8, OS X Yosemite and the new Swift programming language. On top of that we met many great people, including Jony Ive and Craig Federighi! We’ll see you again next year!
iRedstone hits 1’000’000 downloads, Top 5 most downloaded app in Germany, featured on TV
We’re proud to announce that our app “iRedstone” for iOS, Android and Mac OS has been downloaded more than 1 million times! At the same time we reached another milestone: iRedstone is among the top five most downloaded apps in Germany – being downloaded more often than Doodle Jump! iRedstone has been featured on television, watch the excerpt here:
PennApps 2014: AmaScreen
Our goal was to create an API for connecting different mobile devices of all types to one big screen without huge afford for the users. Our product is web-based, which means you don not have to install any software on your device to use it. Therefore we used Websockets, so you just have to type in the server’s IP and can connect. Via our server’s webcam we take pictures of the different devices…
Hackathon Stuttgart 2013: Multiplayer GravityGuy Game
We developed a game which can be controlled using a smartphone. The controller is a website which uses touch-input events which are then transferred to out server which displays the game on a large monitor-matrix. The school where this took place offers such an monitor-matrix, this is why we came up with this idea. Up to for players can play together using their smartphones as controller and…
“Yet an other conference” in Moscow
“Yet another conference” is the name of the technology conference by the famous Russian company “Yandex“. I met two developers from Yandex at WWDC earlier this year and they invited me to come to attend their conference as well. It was a great conference and I met lots of people there!
WWDC 2013 – Where a whole new world is developing.
This week was amazing, exciting and exhausting! Everything started with a little scholarship picknick near to the golden gate bridge that Larissa and I organized. It was great to meet all the scholars already and talk about our expectations for the keynote and the whole week. This was also the place where the legendary scholarship group picture in front of the golden gate bridge has been taken:…
iRedstone – A Redstone Minecraft Guide For iPhone
Today we’re proud to announce that our app “iRedstone” has been released by Apple’s review team on the iTunes AppStore and is available for iPhone and iPod Touch. iRedstone contains many instructions which are related to the redstone-electronics within the popular computer-game “Minecraft”. Redstone is not simple to learn, so we created this app to help everyone who’s interested to learn the…
qBe, a Minecraft Clone written in Processing
This is a school project I have been working on for half a year. QBe is a clone of the popular game “Minecraft“, written using Processing.org. Minecraft is like virtual Lego, you can place blocks, remove blocks and explore your personal world. Mountains, lakes, trees and caves are automatically created by a landscape-generator. We started this project in winter 2011 for school. This is a picture…
Codify: A great code editor for iPad
I developed some little iPad programs which I want to share with you. These apps have been developed using Codify, which is available on the AppStore. Sine Wave Generator: Planet Simulation:
Lego NXT Barcode Scanner
This is a short video about my current school project, a barcode scanner built using a Lego NXT robot.
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