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news

Glider

Glider

Did you ever read Ellen Ullman’s novel, “The Bug“? It starts with a description of Conway’s “Game of Life” and the story — without wishing to give too much away — follows a characters obsession with a variant.

Glider allows you to play with the same thing, on your nice, big screen in the living room using your Apple TV. The idea is that even with simple rules, complex behaviours can emerge.

It comes with quite a few fun presets, but you can also draw your own shapes on screen and have it cycle through. Maybe it’ll be static; maybe it’ll cycle through a few iterations; maybe it’ll fizzle out. Find out what happens is half the fun.

It’s available now as a free download for Apple TV. There’s a donate button right inside the app and we’d really appreciate it if you could support the work that went into it and any future updates.

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news

CameraGPS: End of life

Sadly it’s time to say goodbye to CameraGPS, our photo location tagging app. It’s not proved as popular as we hoped and the support load has been higher than anticipated.

To move forward we’d have to make it easier to accurately record a trail, fix a few visual glitches and rewrite the whole iCloud sync engine (the current one is deprecated in iOS 10). It’s incredibly difficult to justify making this investment given the lower-than-anticipated sales.

Despite this, it is still an app that we’re proud of in many ways. It was the first app we developed using Core Data and CocoaPods. Early versions also included the Dropbox and Box APIs, though they were later removed in favour of iCloud Drive (also a first in one of our apps!).

By removing this app from sale, we hope to be able to spend more time supporting our existing apps and creating new ones. If you bought CameraGPS, we thank you support.

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support

Quick Calendar video

I’ve had a few support emails over the last year or so asking how to enable Quick Calendar. In version 1.0.1 I added a better description in the main app, but some people are still unable to get it to work so I thought adding a video might make things easier:

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news

Quick Calendar 1.0.1

When I first download macOS 10.12 Sierra I noticed that Quick Calendar looked a little out of place. While all of Apple’s Notification Centre widgets had a light theme, Quick Calendar had a dark title bar and looked much more like things did in Yosemite and El Capitan.

I re-build the widget for Sierra. No change. I looked in the documentation for style and theme changes. Nothing. I thought, perhaps, that Apple had kept the light theme for themselves. Luckily I was wrong.

And this new version of Quick Calendar has that tiny update so that it looks at home on macOS Sierra. It still works on El Capitan and Yosemite.

I just submitted it to Apple. It should be available to download in a few days hours. Enjoy.

Update: It was approved last night, less the six hours after I submitted it!

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news

ShareEverywhere 1.1.3

Readability have decided to retire their “read later” service, which means that the time has come to remove it from ShareEverywhere, too.

This release also removes the error checking when saving a link to Delicious. You’d be right to think that’s an odd thing to do, but it’s down to the way that the Delicious API works. Or rather, doesn’t work. From our testing, the “add bookmark” API seems to work correctly but always returns an error. Sadly, this means there’s no way to distinguish between a genuine error and no error.

So not an earth shattering release, but definitely an improvement. We hope you like it.

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news

Rootn Tootn 2.2

This update has been a long time in coming and doesn’t contain anything like the feature-set originally envisaged — the story behind this may be revealed eventually — but what’s about to hit the App Store shortly is nice.

Rather than a long list of new features, it mostly makes existing features either easier to find or easier to understand.

For example, some users found the difference between a duration timer and an event time to be confusing. And, honestly, we can’t blame them. While the best names we’ve been able to come up with, they’re not necessarily immediately obvious. So rather than just say “do you want duration or event,” the new reminder screen now has some explanatory text.

We’ve extended this kind of thinking throughout the app. So it’s not a flashy new release, it doesn’t have a tonne of exciting new features, but we think there’s a lot of value in allowing new users to find the current functionality more easily.

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news

Readability

Today I received an email:

After more than five years of operation, the Readability article bookmarking/read-it-later service will be shutting down after September 30, 2016.

Currently, ShareEverywhere supports the ability to post links to Readability, so we will shortly be issuing a release that removes support.

It feels like every blog these days is about functionality that’s being removed! We hope to have better news soon!

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news

Yummy 3.2.2

A new version of Yummy is on the way to the App Store.

Sadly, this version removes support for syncing with Delicious.com. The Delicious API has been broken since March so it feels dishonest to claim support when we’re not able to. I apologise if you’re affected by this change but I’m afraid it’s outside our control. Please contact Delicious if you would like to bring back this functionality.

Categories
trivia

WWDC 2016

Quick Calendar on Sierra
Quick Calendar on Sierra

I normally have a few words to say about the announcements that Apple makes at their annual developer conference, and this year is no exception.

The features of iOS 10 are (broadly) not hugely relevant to our current apps. It’s not possible for any of our apps to integrate with Siri; none really lend themselves to plugging into Messages. I feel that CameraGPS probably works best as a separate app rather than trying to plug into Maps (and I’m not even sure it would be possible).

But there are opportunities for new apps that — time permitting — may see the light of day. Watch this space.

At the time of writing, it’s my intention to make sure that all our apps continue to work on iOS 10. This is a much bigger update for CameraGPS than the others, as it relies on a feature that has been deprecated.

Having said that, from a user perspective it seems to be a nice release. Even the first beta is relatively stable, though not good enough (in my opinion) for your main phone.

The story is similar on macOS Sierra. Quick Calendar runs just fine on the first beta build (though I might need to tweak some of the colours!). It looks and works pretty much the same as El Capitan, which I mean as a compliment. I’m not sure how much I’ll use Siri. I think I’d be embarrassed to use it in a crowded office!

So, overall, Apple’s announcements don’t change very much for Wandle Software’s apps. But they still look to be good releases! Keep an eye out for the final versions in September!

Categories
news

The future of Yummy

Back in March I wrote about a Delicious API outage. I assumed that it was a short term problem caused by them moving web hosts. But it’s now July and the service is still not back, meaning that users of Yummy and other third party clients still see no error and no bookmarks. (Actually, it’s worse than that: half the web site seems to be broken, with dead images and links abound. I think the whole endeavour is over.)

At this point I see no point in maintaining Delicious support in Yummy. When you consider that the app is named after the site this feels a little crazy but pretending that Yummy supports Delicious when it can’t is starting to feel dishonest, even though this is not a problem of my making.

Because of this, I will shortly be sending an update to Apple that disables Delicious support. After this, it will only sync with Pinboard.in.