This week on Connected, we make our official WWDC predictions. Next week is going to be wild.
My thanks to our sponsors:
I got an amazing tweet today:
Made something real geeky today, partly inspired by a blog post from 9 years ago on @512px. It's a Markdown editor disguised as Word 5.1 for Macintosh System 7. Write like it's 1992! https://t.co/y7eGn49kuJ pic.twitter.com/9TiND4soeM
— Raphael ???? (@lowercasename) May 28, 2019
The post in question is titled Markdown is the new Word 5.1 and was written by my buddy Kevin Lipe back in 2011, and was the site’s first link on Daring Fireball, I believe.
You can try it out online or install it via Terminal.
The new iPod touch starts at $199, and is powered by the A10 Fusion chip, and Apple is pushing AR and Apple Arcade pretty hard in its messaging. That all makes sense, as does the lack of a larger screen and Touch ID. The iPod touch is all about being the cheapest way to get iOS into someone’s hands.
I’ve had a gear page up on the site for a long time now, but decided it was time to walk through how I record my podcasts in video form:
It’s not the only new video on my channel this morning, however. As I did last year, I’m raising money to help build out Renewal High School in Yida, South Sudan in partnership with Operation Broken Silence:
From trigger to actions, variables to debugging, David and Stephen go through the powerhouse that is Keyboard Maestro and discuss David’s new Field Guide on the subject.
I learned a ton about Keyboard Maestro in doing this episode, and I bet you will learn something listening to it.
My thanks to our sponsors:
The crew at iFixit has taken apart one of the new MacBook Pros, complete with its revised keyboards. The material that makes up the membrane over the switches is new, now made of nylon, as opposed to polyacetylene on the 2018 models.
Whatever that means.
The metal dome under each key is also tweaked slightly.
Time will tell if these keyboards hold up any better than their predecessors. I think that Apple has made improvements here over the years, but the company has a long way to go before users will fully trust these machines again.
Steven Troughton-Smith has written an epic blog post, tracing the evolution from NeXTSTEP to Mac OS X through the lens of Mail.app.
Myke keeps dropping his phone, Apple keeps releasing new MacBook Pros for Stephen to talk about, and Federico has published a magnum opus on the state of the iPad and iOS 12.
My thanks to our sponsors:
Apple has officially sent out details for this year’s event. I am very excited to say that I will be attending the keynote; this neon unicorn’s face sums up how I feel right now:
Exciting stuff going on here at Relay FM HQ:
Join us in celebrating Relay FM’s 5th birthday with a special live show featuring some of your favorite podcast hosts for what the kids call a podcasting extravaganza!
The live show will be in San Francisco on August 22. More information and tickets here.
And just check out this artwork!
After months of teasing, Casey Liss has shipped Vignette, a new iPhone app for keeping your contact images updated easily.
Here’s a bit from his blog post announcing the app, about why he wrote it:
As with all ideas, it starts with a question:
Could I get new pictures for all my contacts on my iPhone off Gravatar?
That was early February. I was just goofing off, and just seeing if I could make that work at all.
Then more questions came:
Could I do this for Twitter as well? For Instagram? For Facebook?
About three months later, Vignette is here.
The idea is brilliant, and brilliantly simple. People upload new avatars to websites all the time; why shouldn’t they be easily added to someone’s contact database? No one should live with all their contacts being represented by their initials. We’re not animals.
This is a very specific problem, and I think Casey’s app handles it supremely well.
The best part is that Vignette is private. It doesn’t need to log in to your social media accounts, or even know if you have an account on a specific platform or not. It crawls your local contacts database, then tries to match the people there with accounts online.
After its search is complete — which took a minute or two on my 693 contacts — Vignette presents you with a list of all the possible changes, allowing you to tell the app which contacts you want to update, and those you don’t, as seen in this screenshot, which I stole from Casey’s blog:
I have a handful of people in my contacts list with photos I set for them, and I didn’t want to overwrite those. Vignette considers that, and makes managing these changes easy.
For me, Gravatar was the source of most of the new images in my contacts, but if I spend a little time adding people’s Twitter, Facebook or Instagram links to their address book entries, Vignette could pull their images from those services as well.
According to Casey’s blog post, here are the fields Vignette looks for:
If you want more details on how the app works, check out Ryan Christoffel’s review on MacStories, but honestly, you should just go download Vignette now.
Vignette is free, with a one-time in-app purchase of $4.99 to write changes to your contacts database. This means that you can download and run Vignette to see how many contacts it will be able to change, and then decide if you want to move forward with the purchase. I think Casey absolutely nailed that interaction, and I hope the business model serves the app well.
My only complaint is seeing how I’ve aged in the last few years, but that’s not really Casey’s fault.
Probably.
mine was even more dramatic. 0 to 60 on that beard. pic.twitter.com/bIdRpAFZEy
— Ed Cormany (@ecormany) May 22, 2019