Collin Donnell

A few months ago I started working with a team on an iOS mail app called Braid Mail. It’s been pretty crazy time, like I imagine most startups are. I’ve flown back and forth to San Francisco a bunch of times, had some late nights and a lot of trips to the Ritual Coffee cart in Hayes Valley. Version 1.0 came out not long ago, but I knew we’d be doing a few things with it in the next update that made where we were going a little more clear, so I didn’t want to push it too hard… until now.

(If you’d like you can just go get it for free now before continue reading.)

Version 1.1 still isn’t perfect (software never is), but it does a good job of showing off at least one unique feature that I think people will really like that displays in the app in two ways, the categories and the activity screen. Here’s what that looks like (worth mentioning the activity screen is using data we made up in this shot):

What categories are is Braid recognizing important messages for you and turning those into categories we display in the side bar. So if you have emails from an airline, we’ll add a “travel” category, or if you have shipping notifications, we’ll add a “deliveries” category. The idea is to – without messing with your inbox and screwing up your organization – put things into a place where you can find them easily without having to search or poke around too much.

The activity feed is related to categories, but serves a different purpose. Instead of discrete categories for your email, it’s a running list of all the kinds of messages which Braid was able to categorize. It’s a different way of viewing incoming messages that makes it easier to see what kind of mail you’re receiving, and find stuff that’s important when you’re not sure of what category it might fit into.

When designing Braid Mail, the goal was to create something which felt completely at home on iOS 7 and also introduced features that we didn’t feel were being done great by any other apps available for iOS users. My opinion has always been that when creating something new it’s better to decide what your app is about and really do the hell out of that thing, and that’s the direction that we’ve taken in designing Braid.

We still have a lot we want to do, and I’m sure we will for a long time. For starters we want to support more services than just Gmail, and give you the ability to tell Braid how to categorize messages that it didn’t know about. As it stands I think there’s a lot for us to be proud of here, and I’d really appreciate you taking the time to check it out. It’s free on the The App Store and you can get it now.

My friend Justin Williams has just released his new photo viewing and management app, Photos+. It’s excellent. Photos+ can be used as a true replacement for the built in Photos app, and has the right features for hardcore photography nerds to love it without ever feeling the least bit complicated. In fact, if anything I’d say just getting around feels less complicated than in the system app, because it eschews a bunch of features I almost never use.

The grid view in Photos+ is my new favorite way to view my photos on any platform. Instead of putting each photo into an equally sized and spaced grid of images, thumbnails are scaled proportionally and put nearly right up against each other. This maximizes the number of photos you can see at a time and makes them large enough that you can actually tell what you’re looking at. It’s a better example of iOS 7’s content first strategy than Apple has actually shipped themselves in any of their apps.

You can read Justin’s post about Photos+ on his blog, or just go get it right now for $2.99 on The App Store.

I may be overlooking something that would make this a terrible idea, but it’s something I haven’t heard anywhere else: what if Apple got rid of star ratings for in app reviews? The reason those “rate this app” dialogs are so popular isn’t because app developers hate their users, it’s because the way apps are rated is flawed and many developers feel it’s the only way for them to level the playing field. Without solving the reason developers use them in the first place, there’s no way they’re going away. I agree with Marco’s statement that those dialogs are annoying spam, but that app reviews should not be eliminated completely. Without a way to try an app before purchasing, getting rid of app reviews entirely doesn’t make any sense. The 1-5 star rating part of reviews though? Kill it and leave these options for reviews:

• The ability to leave a written review with a title and subject.
• The ability to mark other reviews useful or not.

You could still leave a useless review, but it’s possible to make those have less impact than they do now. Apple could display reviews in the order of most useful, weighted towards the recency of the review, and the dates users marked it useful. If a review was marked useful many times for something that was fixed in an update, that review would get pushed down over time. Useless reviews would still exist, but hopefully thoughtful and concise concise ones would bubble to the top and bury them.

When I’m working on an app something that I try to avoid is to have lines of code like this mixed in my display code:

view.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:0.75f green:0.64f blue:0.64f];

Instead, I create a category on UIColor — called something like UIColor(MyAppColors) — and add a class method whenever I need to use a new color to the app. That makes the line above something more like:

view.backgroundColor = [UIColor alb_defaultBackgroundColor];

The main reason I do this is that if I ever want to tweak a color which gets reused in multiple places, I only need to change the category method for it to be updated everywhere. It’s a good practice to avoid having literal strings and numbers strewn throughout your code, and this is a good example of why.

The Onion reports on a truly sad story:

Sources said the abnormal, visibly blemished creature has been repeatedly passed over for employment opportunities, frequently gawked at and harassed on the street by total strangers, and has faced near constant discrimination for over two decades, all due to the horrific and debilitating birth defect. Sources confirmed that, unfortunately, such cases are actually quite common, with roughly one in every two babies afflicted with the lifelong disfigurement.

I was going through some links I’d sent to Reading List, and couldn’t quite remember what the Safari extension was which redirects you to the non-mobile version of a site. It’s called Demobilizer by June Cloud; the same company which makes the Delivery Status app (which I use a lot).

I saw this article from something my hairdresser (of course) posted, and I learned a few couple of things:

• Hair products have an expiration date.
• The salon products that get sold at the grocery store, drug store, Target, etc are not licensed to be sold there, are likely expired, and therefore might not be any good.

It’s pretty much explained in the first couple of paragraphs:

What happens is that the world's least threatening black market underlords (actually, they call it the "gray market") will buy salon products from a legitimate distributor, then set them aside in a warehouse for years until the barcode expires so they can't be tracked. During this time, not only does the barcode expire but so does the product inside, warping from heat or just the cruel sands of time into something that is an ineffective shadow of its former self.

Brent Simmons has been writing a series of blog posts to journal how he’s been approaching sync in Vesper, and I strongly recommend reading it. Brent’s ability to think through an entire problem is something I constantly work to improve in myself. It’s the thing that really separates great developers and designers from everyone else who starts by typing, and defers thinking until something blows up.

Here’s the posts he’s published so far:

1. Syncing Tags
2. Core Data
3. Immutability, Deleting, and Calculated Properties
4. In Another Country
5. Sync Tokens and Efficiency
6. Merging Notes

According to this article from Freelancers Union, Portland is the most freelancer friendly city in the country. This statistic¹ in particular kind of blew me away:

The Portland community has more “micro-entrepreneurs” per capita than any other city in the country. According to ESRI Business Analyst (cited by Portland Development Commission, there are 5,287 “small firms” per 100,000 residents in Portland, the highest in the country, beating even Seattle and Austin. Entrepreneur Magazine named Portland one of the top cities for entrepreneurs.

For app makers who are or want to go indie, Portland also has some pretty great benefits that don’t get mentioned in the article.

Quality of Life

Do you remember the 90′s? People were talking about getting piercings and tribal tattoos, people were singing about saving the planet and forming bands. There’s a place where that idea still exists as a reality, and I’ve been there.

If the idea of living in a place where you can ride a bike or walk instead of driving a car, be in close proximity to the best coffee shops and microbreweries in the country and travel to the beach or mountains within an hour, Portland may appeal to you. As a bike riding vegan², I have to say that I am definitely in the right demographic for those things to appeal to me, but I don’t think you need to be a special little snowflake like me to enjoy it here.

I also like that I can almost always shop at a local business to find what you need without going out of my way. To be completely honest, I couldn’t tell you how to get to a strip-mall if I needed to. Near my house there’s a local coffee shop, Mexican food restaurant, clothing store and seafood place all next to each other. I like to joke if this were anywhere else in the country that might be a Starbucks, Chipotle, Gap and Bubba Gump Shrimp Co³. You can still find those things if you want to, but I like that what’s in my face most of of the time are locally owned places instead of the chains I could find in any other city in the country. Our biggest chain grocery store is even local (and also possibly the best grocery store in the world).

I could go on. But if you like local music, farmers markets, and living in a safe place while still having the advantages of a big city, there’s a lot here for you. If you have a unique hobby (knitting, canning, vegan body building) and would like to find other people to enjoy it with, you can probably find them here.

Cost of Living

Even though with Portland as trendy as it is, the cost of living has stayed low. For example, the median home price here is $232,900 (compared to $543,800 in San Francisco), and browsing on Craigslist I can find 900 sq. ft apartments in a cool part of town for under $1000/month. There’s also no sales tax in Oregon, which is great for a couple of reasons. First, it makes things cheaper, but second it encourages people to support local businesses (which there are a ton of).

Living in a place where you don’t have to compromise between quality of life and cost of living is great as someone who’s independent. It means that if you’re doing freelance work and want to take a couple of months off to write your own app, you can afford to do that, and that if you want to live off of selling your own products, the amount they need to generate to get you there is a lot less.

Last year I was able to mostly focus on putting out updates for Pinbook for a few months, and I don’t think that would have been possible had I lived in a place where my rent was higher and I had to pay for a car every month just to get around.

Close to San Francisco and Seattle

Since my company is in San Francisco, and also things like also things like WWDC and Macworld happen there, I travel to the Bay Area a lot. I also have a lot of friends in Seattle who I like to see whenever possible. From Portland, a flight to San Francisco takes around an hour and a half (there’s also a train to the airport, so getting there is easy), and if you’re not buying at the last minute the price is almost always less than $180. If I want to go to a Seattle Xcoders meet up — or just to visit friends for fun or go to a concert — I can take Amtrack (which has Wi-Fi and a dining car) for about $45 each way, or Bolt Bus (also has power and Wi-Fi) for about $11-22 and be in downtown Seattle in less than three hours.

About the Weather

It does rain a lot here, but I would describe the weather as pretty temperate. The coldest it’s ever likely to get is into the thirties, and in the summer I can’t remember a lot of unbearable 100°F days like when I lived in Sacramento. I’d describe the usual rain here as more of a drizzle. It doesn’t often rain terribly hard, just a little a lot of the time. The other thing no one tells you about about the weather here is that the summers are amazing. June through September you’re in the best city to ride a bike in the country and it’s beautiful out. For comparison, because we’re further north it stays light out about 30 minutes longer than in Northern California in the summer.

Lastly

I don’t know if the unique benefits of Portland Oregon would appeal to everyone. It’s a pretty progressive place, so conservative people (politically or socially) might not find it so amazing – although I could be wrong. If you think that it might appeal to you though, consider coming and checking it out. At the least, you can get some donuts and check out the world’s largest book store. If you’re looking for tips on when the best time to come is or what you should do while you’re here, go ahead and ask me on Twitter.

The United States Treasury:

The debt limit is the total amount of money that the United States government is authorized to borrow to meet its existing legal obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and other payments. The debt limit does not authorize new spending commitments. It simply allows the government to finance existing legal obligations that Congresses and presidents of both parties have made in the past.

I do not understand the confusion here or why you can explain this to the same people over and over and have them still not understand it.

As someone who’s spent a lot of my career being the “Core Data guy” on many projects, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I hadn’t taken much of a look at UIManagedDocument until now. UIManagedDocument came around with iOS 5, and I think because it seemed vaguely iCloud related (it’s not), and because none of the apps I was writing were document based (they don’t have to be), I never gave it a second thought. Now that I have, I can’t see any compelling reason to not use it for all of the apps I’m writing.

The best way to think of UIManagedDocument is as a replacement for the “Core Data Stack” class I’ve seen people write in a lot of different projects. What that class usually does is encapsulate set up of a Core Data stack into one class (NSManagedObjectContext, NSManagedObjectModel, and NSPersistentStoreCoordinator), often times with a private queue parent context for background saving. Doing this can make it as easy to set up a new stack as passing a file path and persistent store options to your class. What UIManagedDocument does is exactly everything I just said, and so it saves you having to write a bunch of boiler plate code — which is nice. Creating a new document just involves calling -[UIManagedDocument initWithFileURL:] and setting whatever persistent store options you like. You can now pass the document around as needed, or just use its managedObjectContext property to grab its context and inject that wherever you like.

But what if your app doesn’t work with documents in a way where having multiple persistent stores makes sense? Just create one document with a filename defined in your app. One good use case for using multiple documents is in an app where multiple accounts are allowed. If each account is its own document, than logging out just means deleting the file for that account. Also, since UIManagedDocument is easy to subclass, if you had an app that allows login from different services, it wouldn’t be a terrible place to put syncing logic that applies just to that service. If you were writing an app where you want to save the users data and sync through Service A, Service B or iCloud, you could write different document types to handle some specific differences for the two services and one that you place into an iCloud container.

I haven’t been using the class long enough to say that I’m sure I won’t run into any show stopping problems, but since the API is simple enough that they haven’t jumped out at me yet I’m only seeing upsides to using it right now.

With a nation in crisis only one podcast featuring myself and Bob Cantoni have put feet on the ground to take the temperature in Washington DC. Possibly my favorite episode yet. Check it out or subscribe in iTunes.

A few days ago Brett Terpstra released a new version of his wonderful Markdown preview app Marked. It’s only available outside of the Mac App Store on its own site, and costs $11.99. The great thing about Marked is that even though it does a lot, you can ignore any features you don’t want easily. If all you want is Markdown preview for when you’re writing Sublime Text or BBEdit, you just have to launch the app and use it that way. If you do decide to explore them though, some of the new features are great.

Two things in Marked 2 are the most useful for me personally. The first is the ability to set up words to highlight which you’d like to avoid or consider alternates for. I can’t think of another time where a writing app has done something that will actively improve my writing, so this feature alone is worth the $11.99. The second feature that I’m going to use a lot is the ability to preview a document that’s being worked on in MarsEdit. The preview window in MarsEdit is fine, but basic. Being able to use Marked when writing in MarsEdit means I won’t miss out on its features if I decide to skip the dance of writing in another app and then copy and pasting my text before publishing.

Cody at MacStories has an in-depth review that’s worth reading if you want to find out about all the new features. You can buy Marked 2 from its own website.

I’ve been making a point lately to take back my inbox and actively unsubscribe from websites which send me unwanted email, and I’ve come up with a great trick to make doing that easier. All I did was create a new Apple Mail rule called “Unsubscribe” which looks at incoming messages for the word “unsubscribe” in the message content, and then set the color of that message to orange. I could probably go crazy and write an AppleScript to automatically create a new action in OmniFocus, but I don’t get so many of these that it feels worth the added effort.

Artisanal filler text for your site or project:

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Choose “Hipster with a shot of Latin” or “Hipster, neat.”

Agree or disagree with Obamacare, Oregon’s ads for our exchange are fucking awesome. My favorite part of this ad is that Laura Gibson (our primary cultural export is indie rock and bacon donuts) calls out five or six Oregon jobs, and two of them are “stay at home dad” and “indie rock band.”

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

We’re recording these things on the regular, like real podcasters. Check out our latest episode.

Bob and I have put out a new episode of everyone’s favorite podcast themed on one host being from Portland and one being from Cleveland. You can listen on the web, or wait for it to appear in your favorite podcast listening app.

OmniGraffle 6 is here and looks fantastic. I was using OmniGraffle 5 last night.

Valve (the people who made Portal, Half-Life, Team Fortress 2) are making their own OS. They’re also going to ship two of their own consoles: a $100 box that streams games from your computer, and a $300 one that’s standalone.

Steam is already extremely popular, and has a TV-centric mode, so if they can take that mode and get rid of the whole needing other people’s OS to run Steam games thing, this seems like it could really work. I’m not sure it changes Nintendo’s situation that much (which is not great), since their success is based more on creating fun games with unique gameplay, but if I were Microsoft or Sony, I’d be shitting myself.

The Verge has a big article on the whole thing.

Marco Arment’s Core Data alternative that sits on top of SQLite and FMDB is on GitHub and looks excellent. Core Data has generally worked well enough for me, but maybe not so well that I’m not interested in alternatives. What he’s done is make something simple with a couple of great features built-in:

• Multi-threading support: Database operations happen concurrently via a serial queue, so you shouldn’t stomp all over yourself. I assume if you’re accessing your model objects in your own threads the normal rules apply.
• Active record style access: You only need to worry about talking to your model objects and classes, which is simpler in most cases than the way Core Data does it.
• Simple schema migration: You can version your database and then receive a callback to update your schema as needed.

The whole thing is pretty similar to what Brent Simmons describes in his objc.io article about using SQLite instead of Core Data. Brent raises a couple of reasons for wanting to do something a bit different in his article. Mostly it comes down to hitting performance walls and wanting something that’s just a bit simpler and less general. The truth is that because Core Data is a general solution which completely abstracts you away from the idea of using a database, I’m not sure there’s anyway that it couldn’t be a bit complex in places and that there wouldn’t be walls to bump up against. In my experience with Core Data everything works great except when it doesn’t, and because you’re so abstracted away from the implementation detail of it using a SQLite store, when you do hit those walls, you hit them hard. Some things I’ve run up against with Core Data are:

1. Threading still sucks, even if it has gotten better.
2. Tries to solve for edge cases I'm not sure anyone has and is overly complex because of it.
3. Having to pass around an NSManagedObjectContext to do just about anything.
4. When you have problems, it's not always easy to find documentation that explains what's going on.

All of that being said, I still think that Core Data does do a lot for you. The first three issues I raise are mostly mitigated by having good code hygiene and also by using MagicalRecord. Taking the time to read the documentation and also Marcus Zarra’s book on the topic (before you start using MagicalRecord), would probably solve a lot of problems for people as well.

As far as performance goes, it wasn’t easy to get there, but Pinbook imports bookmark collections in the range of 20,000+ in a few seconds on an iPhone 4S, so it is possible to get very high performance when using Core Data. I can’t imagine there’s too many iOS apps out there that have those kinds of performance requirements.

There’s also some specific things that Core Data really makes a lot easier. For example, it’s batching and faulting mechanisms work really well. One thing that I did not have to think about very much when developing an app that might need to display 50,000 items in a table view was managing memory for those items. I’m sure I could have come up with a way to handle that using a custom solution, and it wouldn’t have even been that hard, but with Core Data it was practically free. I’m also hearing from friends that Core Data sync might be finally working the way it should in iOS 7, and if that’s true, and I write an app which really just needs to make sure a users data remains in place between iPhone, iPad and Mac versions, would be awesome, although I’m not holding my breath until I have time to play with it myself.

No general solution will ever be perfect fit for every case. In those cases writing a custom solution is nothing to fear. If you’re writing a Mac or iOS app, however, Core Data probably is the right fit most of the time, and you should really consider what you’re doing when it’s not.

I'm excited to be given the opportunity to speak at 360iDev again in 2013. As usual, it's a great lineup this year, and there's a few talks this year that I'm really excited about. In particular Brent's SQLite and Justin's Core Image talk are two that I'll definitely be at. I'll be closing out the first day with a general session talk called App Making for Deadites about what Ash's journey in The Evil Dead movies can teach us about making great apps ¹. I'll also be on a panel with my friends Matthew Henderson and Samuel Goodwin in the same room Tuesday morning.

360iDev will be held in Lone Tree Colorado September 8-11, 2013. You can buy your ticket now, or check out the schedule.

About seven years ago — when I was twenty-one and had just been hired at the Guitar Center in Sacramento — I bought a baby guinea pig and named her Izze (like the soft drink). Last Thursday she died. Friday I cleaned all of her stuff out, took her cage to the recycling, and put her food bowl in a drawer in the kitchen. Seven years old is a long time for a guinea pig to live, and a quarter of my life so far. The day I got her I could hold her in the palm of one hand. On Thursday I had to take her on the bus in a box to the vet so that they could cremate her and dispose of her ashes.

Before Izze, I had two others — Teddy and Dolly. Teddy I got when I still lived at home and worked at a Petco. She was one of these animals someone at the store decided couldn’t be sold for one reason or another, so they left her in the back with all of the sick animals. Eventually she would have gotten sick and died back there, so I took her. I had Teddy for about three and a half years, and she died while I was in Germany about a year before I moved to Portland. Dolly I got from a guinea pig rescue in the South Bay right after I moved out of my parents house. She only lived a couple of months; she was probably older than they thought when I adopted her from the rescue.

While Teddy was still alive — right before I was about to go to Germany to work with Cultured Code for a couple of months — I bought Mooby (like the fast food mascot from Kevin Smith movies). Mooby was big and had a lot of personality from the day I bought her. Since Teddy died while I was gone, the next four years it was just Izze and Mooby. When I moved to Portland, They sat next to me as I drove a U-Haul truck to Portland. The first month I was here, they stayed with me in a hotel and chewed up some of the furniture (oops). After that they both came with me to the three different places I’ve rented since moving to Portland. When Mooby died last year I was pretty broken up about it, and Izze was all by herself for the first time.

I was a little afraid to write this, because I thought people might make fun of the fact that I’m talking about a guinea pig, and not a dog or something. Really though, why should it be any different? Seven years is a long time. I’m twenty-eight now, and that pig went with me to every place I’ve ever lived — from before I had any idea what I could do with my life, to finding a career that I love, to moving to an entirely different state. She was there for every part of what I consider my adult life so far.

Izze was a sweet little brown guinea pig who squeaked whenever I opened the refrigerator, peeked out her cage to see what I was up to, never bit anyone her entire life, and who was the companion who’s stayed with me the longest so far in my life. I’m going to miss her a lot.

The Tumult guys sit behind us at our office in San Francisco, and I’ve known them for a few years besides. Hype is an really great HTML5 animation builder for Mac, which now has an iOS companion app. Go read their post about it to find out more.

Braid Lab’s own Jason Corwin questions whether t-shirts are a worthwhile investment for startups on in a post titled “The Startup T-Shirt Stereotype.”

You're at the bottom of the barrel, nothing left to wear, and you're forced to dig into the dresser equivalent of a junk-drawer. A graveyard of shirts, it's almost like having your own personal crunchbase in your dresser.

Stickers on the other hand? No question. Yes. My house is primarily decorated by various Octocat variations and stickers from my friends companies.