Erica Sadun

Where technology meets something or other

Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

My xcopen adventures: playground workspaces

Now that Xcode 12 supports Swift Packages for playgrounds, I thought it was time to expand xcopen to build not only playgrounds but also allow you to embed them in workspaces.

xcopen in a nutshell

If you’re not familiar with xcopen (I’ve only mentioned it briefly on this website), it’s my answer to xed. It does what xed does more or less and adds more features that I use a lot.

I built xcopen to handle command-line activities that I regularly perform during development. If you run it without arguments, it looks for a workspace and then opens that. If no workspace is found, it looks for xcode projects and playgrounds. If you pass it file names and paths, it opens those instead.

OVERVIEW: 
xcopen ...        Open files in Xcode.
xcopen docs              Open .md and .txt files.
xcopen new               Create new files (if they don't exist), open in Xcode.
xcopen xc|ws|pg(w)       Open xcodeproj, workspace, or playground.
                           * Add ios|mac|tvos to create playground.
                           * Add w (pgw) to create playground in workspace.
xcopen pkg|xpkg          Open Package.swift in TextEdit or Xcode.

USAGE: xcopen [ ...] [--background] [--folder] [--open] [--no-open]

ARGUMENTS:
                   Files to open. If blank, opens xcworkspace or,if not
                          found, searches for xcodeproj. 

OPTIONS:
  -b, -g, --background    Open Xcode in the background 
  -f, -e, --folder        Enclose new items in folder 
  --open/--no-open        Open newly created playgrounds/workspaces (default:
                          true)
  -h, --help              Show help information.

Shortcuts let you gather up your docs (like README.md, CHANGELOG.md, and LICENSE.txt) and open them together for edits.

You control whether Xcode opens in the foreground or background, enabling you to keep working without Xcode taking up your immediate attention.

Recently, I added support for playground creation. Need a Mac playground? xcopen pg mac. It emulates Finder naming  so there won’t be naming conflicts. Instead, it builds macOS, macOS 2, macOS 3, etc as your root playground names. Based on feedback from my Twitterati pals (waves hi!), I added a flag that lets you group them together in a subfolder if you don’t want multiple playgrounds cluttering your working directory.

Adding Workspaces

Today, I decided to start working with Swift packages, so I added workspace creation:

xcopen pgw mac --folder

Using pgw builds both a playground and an associated workspace. Adding --folder embeds them both into a new folder. Otherwise they are created in the working directory.

Using Swift Package Support

Add any folder containing a Swift Package to your workspace:

  • Files > Add files to workspace name (may be greyed out); or
  • Project navigator contextual pop-up > Add files to workspace name; or
  • Or just drag the folder above your playground entry in the Project navigator to ensure you’re not adding it directly to your playground.

If your package has dependencies, they’re listed in the Project navigator.

Next, try importing the new package. If it doesn’t autocomplete, quit and restart Xcode and re-open your workspace. For some reason, in this early beta it doesn’t seem to get picked up immediately.

Then test out the functionality you’ve imported. In the following example, I’m using a custom exponentiation operator:

Wrap up

I’m using xcopen a lot these days, tooling it to make my workday easier. If you find a feature you think I should include please open an issue at github. And if you like the utility, do let me know. Thanks!

The easiest way to install xcopen is via mint, which you can install with brew. Once you have mint, all you have to say is mint install erica/xcopen.

The surprising joys of Preview

For years, I’ve been saying how surprising macOS’s Preview app is. Just about everyone knows it is _there_ and lots of people use it to look at pictures and crop and occasionally to annotate. But there’s so much more that Preview can do.

Did you know that you can use Preview to scan and fill out forms using nearby Phones so you can get paper work done and submitted? That’s just one underused feature. It syncs with the phone’s document scanner, to find the outlines of the paper, then performs geometry correction so you can fill out paperwork, whether it’s for your next group hike or your kid’s camp outing. Fill, sign, send, and you’re done.

Preview can also be your new lightweight drawing program, whether you want to work with shapes and text or with freeform lines:

Preview can also adjust photo levels for basic color corrections. The right-hand side is the original. The left shows the picture after I applied auto levels, upped the contrast, and warmed the picture slightly. (Yes, that’s me on the left, and my son on the right in the Powerade reflection.)

I’m not sure who gave the Preview team the go-ahead to add lots of silly and delightful features or whether this is just a dogfood target that somehow got shared with the public, but there’s just so much you can do with it. The other evening, my daughter had begged for a watchkit app and I used Preview to populate my XCAssets for the watch app icon.

If I can get enough people to sign up, I’ll be giving a workshop this week on Preview through Try Swift World, although it’s a bit of a hard sell given how weird a topic it is for an audience of developers.

What’s your favorite hidden app feature that few people know about?

How to contribute to the iOS Developer Survey

Dave Verwer, bless his heart, put together an amazing collection of developer statistics in this year’s iOS developer survey. From careers to conferences, dev tools to frameworks, he profiled the community to discover what is happening on our platforms and in our jobs. If you haven’t already been over to the survey site, go and click the link. Don’t worry, this post will still be here when you get back.

The raw data only goes so far. What the survey needs now is you. Dave is looking for community members to help analyze the results so we can better understand what all this data means. For example, we’ve come to love and cherish our dev tools in a way that was unthinkable just a few years ago. Are the high marks for Xcode universal or are  coders with, say, five or more years of development experience particularly grateful for this advancement?

If you have an interest in deeper analysis, Dave has tools to help you slice, dice, and Julian fry the results. Right now there are just four articles available that evaluate the core information (“Is WWDC already a virtual conference?”, “How popular is Swift?”), and they’ve been written by Dave himself.

This data is crying out for deeper investigation, more voices, and diverse insights. If you have time and curiosity, I urge you to reach out to Dave on Twitter and get involved.

This is a fantastic opportunity to give a little back to the community that nurtures our professional lives.

Same blog, different channel

Migration done! Welcome to the new host.

After couple of days of pure hell getting things transferred and set-up, here we are. I don’t want to even think of the billable hour cost for most people making this happen. Change is traumatic.

Ended up going with siteground.com: it has cpanel, email, and WordPress. I was about theeeesclose to going with WordPress.com’s paid plan (huge huge thanks to the wonderful Jeremy Massel). In the end, there were just too many compromises. Even with siteground there were compromises, but at least it’s not Bluehost.

Thank you to everyone for your advice and recs and patience. The only thing I regret is that I forgot to get someone a referral from all this. I apologize.

If you wrote to me in the last day and it was important please try writing again just in case… There was a period of outage where the old mail hadn’t finished updating and the new mail wasn’t fully configured.

I still have to set up my mail on a bunch of different devices, so off to do that…

Fleeing Bluehost: It’s crunch time

I have under 30 days to move from Bluehost or I’ll be locked into another year. If you don’t recall, Bluehost is infuriating. It shuts down whenever I have a traffic spike. Its SSL certificates are not automatically renewed, so every 90 days or so things fail.

My email is associated with unifiedlayer, one of the worst spam providers, which means that a lot of my outgoing email never arrives. Every time I need tech support, they try to upsell me to yet another paid service. The fees have increased and increased over time.

While I’d really love to have a statically generated site, I’m not willing to give up comments. I’m sticking with WordPress as the least turbulent solution unless someone has a better idea.

I need email. I need a wordpress site. I’d like to keep a listserv going but I can probably transfer that to slack if needed. I can’t really think of any other features that I need at this time.

  • Diogene recommended SiteGround. It offers well reviewed WordPress hosting. This sounds scary though: “For migration just use IMAP for your email and synchronize all mail locally then when you move you host sync back again with IMAP”
  • Dave DeLong says FastMail is a great solution for the mail-only axis. Hank Gay, Christopher Frederick, and Dewey concur. Christopher mentions that I can set up “SPF and DKIM records” to provide more secure ownership, whatever these things are.
  • Despite the general love for FastMail, Michael Weaver says iRedMail is a good alternative as well.
  • Matt mentioned nosupportlinuxhosting.com
  • Will suggests A2Hosting. Chris likes ASPnix.com.
  • John Woolsey pitches GreenGeeks.com.
  • Nate H suggests dreamhost (also recced by Tim as a site for “people who don’t know what they’re doing”, which is pretty much me) and siteground.
  • Mark Nichols uses WebFaction, but also supports Digital Ocean.
  • Brian Anderson suggests hostagor.com.
  • Kevin likes the roll-your own AWS solution: S3 for web, EC2 for wordpress, WorkMail for mail. Any thoughts on these?
  • Simon Davies agrees on AWS but suggests hosting email with zoho.com.
  • Dan Messing and Mark Bernstein like pair.com.

I’m looking for the simplest migration with the longest shelf life and the least worries. It should remain reasonably budget affordable as well.

I want to get this done quickly and easily and it scares me to pieces. This is, admittedly, way out of my comfort zone, which explains why I’m still with Bluehost even years after identifying the problems.

Any advice and support will be greatly appreciated.

Mojave and Folderol

If you use my Folderol app, you may encounter issues in Mojave. I have not but I can confirm that some of my users have found that their folders tend to be “sticky”, and will keep their icons and folder colors even when they’ve been changed to new ones.

If this happens to you, the easiest solution is to set up a new folder, customize it with Folderol, and transfer the contents and rename it like the old one. I have reports of the issue with 10.14.3 and 10.14.2. The most common factor among those affected is that the system is running one or more UI customizations like dark mode.

Folderol works by using Apple’s NSWorkspace method that sets an icon for a file. So the actual “work” beyond creating and blending the icon is done by that class, over which I  have no control.

I’m going to try to update the app description with a warning about the problem and add a set/remove/set sequence to see if that helps.

If you’re experiencing issues with Folderol, please let me know your OS specifics, and whether you’re using custom dark mode and/or tints. Thanks!

Happy WWDC: Watch the keynote live

Apple’s keynote (aka it’s Special Event) will be streamed live at 10AM PDT (11 Mountain, 12 Central, 1 East coast, etc etc). If you didn’t score a golden ticket, you can watch along on the Apple event web page or on your Apple TV.

I’ll update this post with thoughts and reactions as the event unfolds.

  • iOS 12 announced as a free update. New measurement app for supporting devices will allow you to measure and scan physical scale using an AR experience. Lego’s demo shows that multiplayer AR can be a fun and exciting experience. Sample code going home with developers today.
  • Enhancements to photo search and sharing put the focus on the user-product experience. Today’s keynote, more than ever, seems to be focused on selling their existing products.
  • I love extensible Siri (aka “Siri Shortcuts”, with a dedicated drag-and-drop Shortcuts app), with custom end-user phrases to perform app integration and tasks. Siri will suggest these custom items. Create a macro for common tasks you group together and launch with a custom phrase. A great way to perform everything you need to get to work, hit your commute, or head off to lunch.
  • Several redesigned apps: News, Stocks (with integrated Apple News’s business section, adding iPad support), Voice Memos (also with iPad support), iBooks which is renamed to Apple Books.
  • CarPlay will now support third party navigation apps, so you can Waze your way home.
  • Lifestyle improvements continue with “Goodnight Moon, Goodnight Watch” do-not-disturb mode for bedtime and other naturally concluding cycles. Enhanced notification control, including grouped notifications, diminishes notification burnout.
  • Screentime lets you analyze how addicted you are to your devices, with full activity reports that summarize how often you pick up your device and what apps you spend the most time in. App Limits provide an alternative to 12-step Appholic programs.
  • Animoji enhancements adds tongue detection to improve language and emotional expressiveness. Memoji adds an iOS “mii” customization to animoji.
  • Group Facetime now supports up to 32 participants. With Animoji and special effects support, it’s like you’re doing drugs while sober.
  • Apple Watch gets some enhancements for health and fitness, including group competitions to motivate participants. Apple has added Clippy for automatic workout detection: “It looks like you’re starting an exercise routine”. New watch-to-watch walkie-talkie feature adds a little fun for kids and anyone who wants to harass the cook in the kitchen. “Whaaaaats for diiiiiiinnnner?”
  • Gymkit sounds like fun.
  • Apple TV adds Dolby Atmos sound and is Dolby Vision certified. Better integration with cable TV partners including Charter Spectrum in the US. “Zero Sign-on” means that all the channels you pay for are automatically configured on your behalf. Beautiful new whole-Earth aerial joins the lineup.
  • macOS Mojave: Inspired by the desert at night. Desktop stacks allow you to group material together to save space. Preview markup moves to the Finder! Markup augments screenshots. You can also capture video demos from your screen using a built-in video recorder. Integration between your Mac and your phone allow you to use the phone camera to capture pictures for use in iWork. (Apple Work?) Voice Memos, Home, News, and Stocks are now on macOS.
  • New privacy measures are in place. Today I learned: you can be tracked by a “fingerprint” including the fonts you have installed and other “public” customizations. Scary.
  • Redesigned App Store is redesigned. Pretty.
  • CreateML lets you develop assets and train models for Machine Learning. CoreML 2 is 30% faster and quantization reduces model size by up to 75%.
  • 2019: iOS Apps come to the Mac. A multi-year roadmap converges design and a whole new generation of developers flood the platform for the benefit of the Mac as well as iOS.

Happy WWDC: Time to unenroll your devices

It’s that special time of year: new announcements, new APIs, and new betas. If you’ve got a device you depend on, don’t forget: it’s a great time right now to unenroll your beta profile so you don’t accidentally upgrade to beta 1. A big thank you goes out this morning to Jeff Forbes, who reminded me about the timing!

Unfortunately, all the developer support docs are currently offline before the event. I’ve reconstructed the following from memory and web searches as I deleted my iOS beta profiles about a month or so ago. If I’ve gotten anything wrong, please let me know and I’ll correct.

If you’re on macOS, open System Preferences > App Store, and click the “Change” button next to Your computer is set to receive beta software updates. Confirm “Do Not Show Beta Software Updates”. I chickened out from actually clicking the button this morning on my dedicated primary beta system so I don’t know the steps from there.

On iOS, hop into Settings > General > Profile to delete the iOS Beta Software Profile. I believe you tap “Delete Profile”, enter your passcode, and then tap Delete. Once deleted, the device should longer subscribe to the iOS public betas.