Collin Donnell

When we started developing the iOS app for Braid, a decision I made early on was to use Storyboards. If you’re not familiar, storyboards are a way to create iOS user interfaces visually and draw connections between the different screens in your app. In storyboard-speak, each screen is referred to as a “scene,” and the transitions between each scene is called a “segue.” Storyboards are a fantastic feature for a couple of reasons, including that when using storyboards you can set up static and dynamic table views visually, drag and drop container view controllers and get a visual picture of what you’re entire app looks like.

One part of coding with storyboards has always bothered me though — the strange way that Apple’s example code shows how to set up a view controller before a transition (setting a delegate, detail object, etc):

https://gist.github.com/collindonnell/11484b74e489575c2275.js

The string comparison felt a little gross to me, and if you have a lot of different segues, the if/else in this method could get long pretty fast, even if you’re breaking out what happens in each condition into it’s own method. If you do end up writing a method for each segue, all of those -[prepareForSomethingWithSegue:sender] methods could get repetitive pretty fast.

A nicer way is to use a block for each segue you need to prepare and to encapsulate that into it’s own class, which I did. The class is called BRLSeguePreparationController and makes it very simple to deal with preparing for segue’s in this way.

1. Create a BRLSeguePreparationBlock for each segue you need to prepare for.
2. Set them using -[BRLSegueController setPreparationBlock:forSegueIdentifier:]
3. Call -[BRLSeguePreparationController prepareSegue:identifier:] from your view controllers prepareForSegue:sender: method.

Here’s an example:

https://gist.github.com/collindonnell/cb8654a97ecddda04704.js

I’ve given the class it’s own GitHub repo and an MIT license, so use it in your own projects. If you make any improvements, make sure you add a pull request on GitHub. If you find the class useful, please check out my companies website to find out what we’re working on, and download our Passbook pass from there to keep up to date when our app comes out.

I’ve been a bit quieter the last couple of months on my blog and Twitter, and it’s not for no reason. Since the beginning of June I’ve been working on a new project with a team in San Francisco (I go back and forth), and I wanted to wait to talk until I had part of it to show. First though, let me tell you about the team and why I was so excited to work with them.

(Short version: I have a new app I’m working on with a team, we made a Passbook pass, and you should go get it.)

The Team

I’ve known my friend Zain — who’s been a longtime Django developer — for about four years. We met around the time that I had just spoken at the first or second 360iDev, and Zain at DjangoCon, before having a crazy fun time hanging out in Boulder Colorado for a couple of days. We’ve been friends ever since, and in between Zain went through Y Combinator, worked for Trulia, been a big Django contributor and continuously worked on neat things. He’s absolutely one of my favorite people. Which is why — even though I’d never considered doing this sort of thing before — when he told me he had a new company he was working on and they needed a fourth guy who was an iOS developer to be a founder, I was interested to find out more.

The other two guys are Jason and Idan, who are also Python developers (everyone on the team has a technical background). Jason handles the business side of things, and also helps Zain with developing the backend for our app. I’d describe him as one of the nicest and most immediately likable people I’ve ever met. Idan works on design, and if you’ve ever worked with someone who considers their designs sacrosanct and is unwilling to consider the opinions of others, then something like the opposite of that is Idan. He’s a great designer and will absolutely defend things he thinks should be a certain way, but he’s never made me feel as though we weren’t designing the app together. Because I love design myself, and care so much that the end product is the best it can be, most of the times I’ve worked with someone else it’s felt stifling more than anything else. With Idan, I feel like we’re able to collaborate and that our mutual goal is to make the best app possible.

The App

Of course, the best team in the world wouldn’t mean much if I hadn’t also been excited about what we’d be working on. The app is an e-mail client, and it’s called Braid. One of the first decisions I was a part of making was that it would be iOS 7 only, and we’re working hard to get Braid ready for the release. I’ve almost always used Apple’s Mail clients, and although they don’t have the most features, they’ve always worked the best for me. The reason is that everything else I’ve tried that’s different has wanted me to treat my e-mail in a special way to take advantage of it, or tack a bunch of things onto e-mail that don’t feel like they belong. Braid is about making e-mail better, not about fundamentally changing the way you think about it or turning your inbox into a to-do list.

One way we’re doing that is with our follow-up feature. Follow-up in Braid isn’t about pushing things out for a specified amount of time regardless of what happens between now and then, it’s about saying “If I don’t hear back from this person by a certain date, remind me to follow-up.” You tell Braid to do this at the time that you send your message, because usually that’s the time when you have the most context for what’s going on with this person. Instead of turning your inbox into a to-do list, we’re giving you an additional “waiting for” list. To us that’s a lot more useful, because the alternatives have always been flagging/starring messages — which have limited context — and apps that continuously pop the same messages up over and over again in your inbox, turning it into a to-do list.

Add to Passbook

The app can’t come out until iOS 7 does, but we wanted to give people who are interested something sooner. So today, you can add us to your Passbook. It’s be the best way keep up to date with us, and we’ll even periodically send you interesting stats about your e-mail (and possibly other goodies). Go to our website from your Mac or iOS device, select “Get a Pass”, login with Gmail and we’ll show right up in your Passbook.

As long as I’ve had my iMac (about six months), I’ve been unable to connect to it through either Back To My Mac, or even locally on the same network. Whenever I tried, Finder would spin for a second and then report “connection failed.” The solution for me ended up having something to do with the Apple ID associated with my user account, because what ended up fixing it was to go to the Users & Groups preference pane, click change, remove the Apple ID and re-add it. Afterwards I can connect remotely and locally. I couldn’t find this anywhere else as a solution to this problem, so I figured it might be helpful to someone else having the same problem.

The San Francisco Rent Explosion:

In San Francisco, the median rental price for an apartment reached $3,295 in June 2013. During this most recent quarter in San Francisco, a one bedroom will cost you $2,795, a two bedroom $3,875, and a three bedroom $4,750.

This article demonstrates exactly how insanely expensive trying to rent an apartment in San Francisco is right now. If you have a dog, it’s hard to imagine someone who’s moving from somewhere else even having a shot at finding a place.

Since I’m working in San Francisco now, I’ve been traveling back and forth a lot, and every time I talk to my mom she always asks me to let her know that I got there and home safely. A neat feature I just discovered in Find My Friends is that if you go to the “me” tab, you can set it to notify whoever you want every time you arrive at a specific location. So, I can set it to notify Mom whenever I reach SFO or PDX.

Pat Metheny is a well known jazz guitarist with three gold albums and twenty Grammys. He also really dislikes Kenny G. Somehow I ended up on this article where he talks about it, and it’s just great from beginning to end.

The best part is that if you ever meet a Kenny G fan, you now won’t need to be a jazz expert to explain in detail why he sucks. I can’t imagine that you ever will, but it’s good ammunition to have incase you ever met that one fan who won’t let “not for me” stand¹

Besides thinking he sucks as a musician, he’s also pretty pissed about the time Kenny G overdubbed himself over a Louie Armstrong track, and in the paragraph after this one calls it “musical necrophilia”:

Not long ago, Kenny G put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old Louis Armstrong record, the track "What a Wonderful World". With this single move, Kenny G became one of the few people on earth I can say that I really can't use at all - as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music.

Read the entire original article.

The second episode of myself and Bob’s wonderful self-help podcast — North by Midwest — is available now. This week we discuss our trips out of town, soy yogurt and the risks of defying me. Check it out, or subscribe in iTunes.

Last month, before headed to WWDC I wrote a review of all the different external battery packs I’d used up until that point, and mentioned that I’d gone for a 10,000 MaH brick style one called the Satechi Portable Energy Station on the recommendation of The Wirecutter. Since then I’ve used it at home, at WWDC, and during my current six day trip to San Francisco, and it’s worked great.

I usually have my backpack with me, so if I need to charge, I can just put it with my phone in one of the pockets for 30 minutes and have my phone mostly charged. I’ve used it a few times on this trip, haven’t charged the Energy Station itself, and it’s built in power indicator is reading three fifths full.

If you need to buy one locally, or can’t order the Satechi from Amazon in your country, I’d suspect that any other similar capacity charger will probably be just as good.

Using pragma marks to organize source files is one sign that the person who wrote the class put a little bit of care into what they’re doing, but they can actually be more useful than just a way of breaking up an implementation file.

My favorite trick is to use how I name my pragmas to jump to protocol definitions more quickly. I always use a pragma mark before the implementation of a protocol in my source, and in most of the code I’ve other people write, they do something like this:

#pragma mark - Table view data source

A better way is to use the actual name of the protocol you’re implementing instead, like this:

#pragma mark - UITableViewDataSource

Now, if you command+click on that Xcode will jump right to the protocol definition, and option+double-click will take you straight to it’s documentation.

NetNewsWire has been my favorite feed reader for the Mac since I’ve known what a feed reader is. When the great folks at Black Pixel took it over, I knew they’d do something great with it and — since I love being right — I’m happy to say the new beta really is just as great as I’d hoped. Syncing will come in time, and in the meantime it’s absolutely worth it to download the beta and spend the $10 to pre-order the final version.

The hardest, scariest, thing I can imagine is to take something so many people love, and that does so much, and dramatically simplify it without ruining the essence of why people loved it in the first place. The public beta of NetNewsWire 4 shows not only that Black Pixel gets it, but that once again they can deliver on taking something outstanding and making it even better.

Go download it for free.

My friend Bob Cantoni and I first met at Çingleton Deux about nine months ago, and came up with the idea of starting a podcast together. So, we’ve done that, and we’re calling it North by Midwest (I’m from Portland and Bob i s from Cleveland).

In our first episode we talk about Skype ringtones, expensive dates, my crazy ergonomic keyboard and self checkout lines at the grocery store. Go check it out and subscribe in your favorite podcast listening app.

This interview with Kim Jong Il’s personal chef of ten years kind of blew me away. The man himself is from Japan — and does not come off as a great person — but for several years he was maybe the only person who was able to talk to the dear leader like a human being without getting shot for it.

Brent Simmons slides from AltWWDC on how he made Vesper are really informative. I’m strongly reconsidering my use of Core Data in a new project partially because of them.

Really good article that covers most of the high level changes in iOS 7 that designers need to be aware of:

We’ve scoured Apple’s Transition Guide and picked out the 10 most important considerations for designers. Read on to find out what you need to know about iOS 7 and how it will necessitate changes to the way you present your content.

You can read the entire thing here.

If you’re near Moscone West during WWDC and looking for coffee, you might find yourself defaulting to the nearest available option: Starbucks¹. If, however, you want something a lot better and a lot more local, there’s no reason to settle for something you’re not crazy about. San Francisco is full of great local establishments. I know of at least three within walking distance I can recommend.

Blue Bottle (0.3 mi)

Right around the corner from Moscone West, there’s Blue Bottle. It’s definitely the place you’ll see the most fussy coffee loving Apple nerds are headed to, partially because its great, and partially because its great. They also have a good variety of other snacks². On more than one occasion I’ve run into other conference goers while waiting in line who I either knew or didn’t know but was able to start a conversion with. Speaking of the line: it’s usually around the corner. It can be a bit unpleasant when it’s hot out — like it was last year — and although you will meet people in in the line, it’s probably not a great choice if you want to sit down and talk since seating is very limited.

Besides being long, the line actually tends to move pretty fast. If you just want to grab a coffee to go, Blue Bottle is a really good choice.

Sightglass Coffee (0.6 mi)

A little further — but still totally walkable if you’ve got a little time to kill — is my personal favorite place in the city: Sightglass Coffee. The shop itself reminds me a lot of some places here in Portland, and I actually get their beans from a local shop that sells them here pretty often.

When you walk in, the first thing you notice is that it’s surprisingly large. I’m used to things in San Francisco being a little smaller, and Sightglass is the exception. Because of that there’s ample seating upstairs, making it the best place I know of to meet someone if you want to sit down and talk for a while.

You won’t run into as many people from WWDC as you would in the Blue Bottle line, but they make all the same things you’d get Blue Bottle at least as well, and you can actually sit down and relax for a bit.

Philz Coffee (0.9 mi)

Granted, I walk a lot at home, and I’m not attending the actual conference this year, so you may be less willing to walk nearly two miles round trip for coffee than I am. If you do want to explore a bit though, Philz is worth checking out at least once. It’s a chain, but only in the Bay Area. The atmosphere is nearly the opposite as Blue Bottle or Sightlass — more hippy than hipster, and what they specialize in making is a pseudo-pour over in these metal pots I’ve never seen anywhere else. Instead of stating a country of origin, the coffees at Philz have names like “Philharmonic” and “Ambrosia Coffee of God.”

It’s worth checking out for a couple reasons. First, you get to walk by AT&T park to get there, which I recommend. Second, the coffee is surprisingly good and the atmosphere seems like something you’re unlikely to see outside of San Francisco.

Let’s Get Coffee

If you’re the kind for whom half of the fun in a new city is exploring the local coffee culture, San Francisco is a great place to go, and these are just three of a bunch of great options. If you’ve got any suggestions for me, or want to do some exploring, or just want to grab coffee this week, get in touch.

Like everyone else, I have no idea what Apple might announce tomorrow morning. Tim was clearly not blowing steam when he said they were doubling down on secrecy. So here’s my one prediction:

• Helvetica Neue as the new system font for OS X 10.9.

I was hoping for Myriad Pro – It has similar proportions and I think would fit great as a direct replacement for Lucida Grande that looks better on retina screens, but I’m pretty sure it’s Helvetica Neue.

Gabe has one of the best takes on the dangers of giving away our privacy to companies like Google and Facebook I’ve heard:

The danger in Facebook collecting conversations in a restaurant is not that they will know what kind of perversions you might enjoy and sell you appropriate paraphernalia. The danger is that Facebook holds an enormous index of identifiable, personal information in one place.

Read his entire post.

Of all the people I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with over the past few years, three of the smartest and most talented are Brent Simmons, Dave Wiskus, and John Gruber. Today they’ve released Vesper, an app I was lucky enough to help test. Vesper is a note taking app, but instead of being a replacement for Evernote or Notational Velocity — it’s sort of its own thing.

While other apps do a lot more, the amount of more that’s there usually makes getting to the simple things kind of a kludge. Vesper — in contrast — is painstakingly simple, and designed by someone who was totally okay with people either loving or hating it. I don’t mean that I think anyone was inflexible in creating it — during the beta I saw them take a great deal of care in selecting the best feedback and integrating it into the app. What I mean that I can’t imagine anyone being “just okay” with this app, and that I think the reason for that is that there was a clear vision for what Vesper is and isn’t, and that it’s been adhered to without compromise. My guess is that a lot of people are going to fall into the love it category.

Buy Vesper on The App Store.

If you’re attending WWDC next week, the one piece of gear that I think is more essential to getting than any other is getting some kind of mobile batter pack for your phone. No-matter what you do — including not using it — your phone will be constantly running out of battery the entire week. It’s important — and not too late — to get one before leaving, because the local Apple Store is likely to be sold out of all but the crappiest models¹. As far as type, there’s three varieties you might come across, and over the past three years I’ve now tried all three.

Dongle Style

In 2011, I ended up getting one of this style for a good reason — I didn’t buy one before leaving and it was the only kind available at The Apple Store. It seemed practically useless, and was also pretty unwieldy. I’m not sure these are even being made for the iPhone 5, or if you’ll run across it, but if you do avoid this type as it’s going to end up being more trouble than it’s worth.

Case Style

Last year, I was at least a little smarter and made a decision on what to get before leaving, and so I bought one of the case style chargers that are probably the most common. I found this style to be a big improvement over what I had the year before, and with the side benefit of being a pretty substantial case².

It seemed to give me enough power that if I started off the day with both it and my phone fully charged, I could end the day just about running out of battery. It’s also nice, because you don’t need to do anything extra to bring it with you. The disadvantages were that it does make your phone kind of hard to pocket, it’s not enough power to last more than one day and it’s going to be useless once Apple changes the form factor of the iPhone. Because of that, I was only able to use this for a couple months until the iPhone 5 came out, and it’s sat in a drawer ever since.

Brick Style

This year, I sized up and bought a brick style charger. Instead of connecting directly to the iPhone at all, it’s just a brick with two USB plugs on it. It also holds about 5-6 times as much power as the case style charger I had last year, which means that it should theoretically last more than one day if I’m the only one using it³.

It does mean that I’ll have to have something to put it in wherever I go (a lot of people could probably fit it in a front pocket), but I’m likely to have my backpack with me, anyway. It does require bringing an extra cable everywhere I go, but that tradeoff bothers me less than it being worthless to me should the shape of the iPhone ever change. On The Wirecutter’s recommendation, I bought the Satechi Energy Station 10000 for $60 on Amazon (their affiliate link), but I think that any of this style with a similar capacity (10,000 MaH) that you can get before leaving should be fine.

Link: The Cheapest Generation

Article in The Atlantic about how millennials just aren’t as interested in buying houses and cars as our parents:

The largest generation in American history might never spend as lavishly as its parents did—nor on the same things. Since the end of World War II, new cars and suburban houses have powered the world’s largest economy and propelled our most impressive recoveries. Millennials may have lost interest in both.

I don’t know if I’m different than other people my age — this article says I’m not — but debt of any kind has always scared the crap out of me. It’s difficult for me to paint buying a new car or a house in any other terms than a lot of money I’m going to owe someone else. I just can’t get more excited about either of those things than I am scared of the debt they represent.

After several months of running this blog using the static blogging system Octopress, I‘ve moved back to self hosted Wordpress. There’s a lot of things I liked about Octopress, and there’s a lot of things to not like about Wordpress, so like everything, it really it just came down to which tradeoffs I could live with.

The main benefits you hear about when moving to a static system like Octopress are:

1. Your site won’t go down when you get Fireballed.
2. Your published site is all static files, so it loads really fast.
3. You get to write in Markdown, and your files get stored that way.
4. Easy to keep posts under source control.
5. The default theme is pretty nice (on Octopress specifically).

Some of this, I think, gets oversold, and no one ever seems to focus much on the disadvantages (some of these apply more to Octopress than other systems):

1. Your posts all get saved and stored as plain text — which is great — but because of that if you ever want to move to another system that doesn’t happen to use static files formatted exactly the same way, it's non-trivial to get them into that system.
2. If you're not a Ruby developer, setting everything set up and working correctly is probably going to be a pain in the ass.
3. Using an app like MarsEdit probably isn't going to be an option. I tried a couple times and could never get OctoMars working correctly.
4. It's going to be pretty hard to blog from your iPhone/iPad unless you set up some kind of Rube Goldberg machine involving Dropbox or SSH-ing into a server. That's adding a lot of friction.
5. If you don't like the default theme, there's a lot less out there to use, and I found writing one from scratch to be pretty inscrutable.

Of course, a lot of this applies to just me. If you’re not worried about migrating out of a static system later, don’t have a favorite blogging app or don’t care about being able to publish from your phone, most of this isn’t really going to apply. And, for what it’s worth, a few of my other issues — including the fact that Octopress hasn’t had a major update in two years — probably would have not have been an issue had I chose Pelican instead of Octopress.

Octopress to Wordpress Migration Script

If you search for guides on how to migrate from Wordpress to Octopress, you’ll get a lot of results, but not so many the other way that describe how to actually migrate a large number of posts the other way. I also had to think of someway to maintain a bit of my nerd cred, and so I wrote a script to do the migration.

What it does is parse an Octopress _posts directory, reads the YAML front matter and content, and then sends it to a Wordpress blog using the Wordpress XML-RPC API (there was a good Python module for this part). I can’t guarantee that it‘ll work in your specific case, and it won’t retain categories from Octopress, but it did work for me. I’ve put the script on GitHub for others to use and improve.

Although I didn’t buy a ticket this year, I’ll be in San Francisco all of next week during WWDC. On Wednesday I’ll be speaking at AltWWDC on tips and tricks for writing fast apps. Be sure to get in touch to grab coffee or beer if you’re around during the week.

Currently in the process of moving blog engines, so I apologize in advance for any repeats in the feed.

About a month ago, I posted about how I was switching my work e-mail from Google Apps to Fastmail, and how it was just super. Well, after a month it wasn’t, and a couple of nights ago I switched back.

Ultimately FastMail had a major issue I didn’t see any easy way to get around: the spam filtering. It just isn’t nearly as good as Gmail. There’s two ways spam filtering can fail: it can let spam into your inbox, or it can mark things spam that aren’t. Between the two, I can live with spam making it into my inbox occasionally, but I can’t live with it marking important things I want to see as spam. The other issue I had that it would greylist messages it thought might be suspicious and cause them to be delayed by up to an hour.

The biggest thing that I was hoping to get out of switching was to use something that worked better with Apple’s mail apps than Gmail, and it did in the way that there was no concept of labels to contend with, but I think the better solution is just to suck it up and use a native iOS client for Gmail and its web interface when I’m on a Mac. The side benefit is that I’ll never send work e-mail from my personal account and vice-versa this way. It also turns out that there’s some pretty great Mail apps for Gmail on iOS I had no idea existed. The biggest downside is that I don’t have direct access to my regular address book through Gmail, but maybe separating work and personal contacts isn’t the worst thing I could do anyway.

Nick Bradbury (FeedDemon, Social Sites, Glassboard) has taken a job at Automattic (the people who make Wordpress). It sounds like a great fit. Congratulations, Nick!