Jump ahead to the proposal In 2016, Apple debuted the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro. It’s a strip of touch-enabled screen meant to add functionality to the user’s active app. It exists where the function keys used to reside, and it’s something that developers go out of their way in order to support. The… Continue reading How Apple could navigate its touchy Touch Bar dilemma
Update: CurrentKey got approved. The story: The day after Christmas this year I spotted some bugs in my app, I fixed them – I also added a cool new feature, and submitted the new build to the App Store for review as soon as the holiday downtime was over. Within a few hours, my app… Continue reading [Updated: it’s been approved] Why is CurrentKey Stats not in the App Store? Because it’s been stuck in app review purgatory for weeks.
Last May I launched my Mac app, CurrentKey Stats, which helps you keep track of how you spend time across Spaces (virtual desktops) and apps, as well as navigate between your Spaces. It was not always a foregone conclusion that I’d distribute the app through the App Store. In fact — I had round-tripped the… Continue reading Key takeaway from developing for the Mac App Store: it’s unreliable
Entering into a vacation, I have learned it’s best for me to just let go of building anything hard. As someone who stays in rigid routines the rest of the year, pulling out of the endless creative drive creates its own rare advantages. For one, it incentivizes working on easier things. These are often worthy… Continue reading Holidays as a creator
A year ago I published this and it struck a chord on the internet, hitting #4 on Reddit and #1 on HN (it actually triggered the “flamewar” detector there). So I thought I’d republish the post since the default UI for incoming calls remains the same. Otherwise, what’s publicly changed on Apple’s side of things… Continue reading In 2020, Apple needs to change iPhone’s call UI because robocalls are killing us
Power users of CurrentKey have requested a faster way to jump to specific Rooms. Arguably setting hotkeys for specific Rooms (a feature since v1.6) will always be the fastest way, but otherwise, clicking the popover dropdown is too slow. [App Store link] Enter Room Explorer, which displays to the left of the pop-up with a… Continue reading More quickly switch workspaces with Room Explorer in CurrentKey Stats 2.5
Seeing a popular post about a very hit or miss change to Slack’s product (the new WYSIWYG input box) made me think of another thing in Slack that has annoyingly changed (without an option to toggle off). Its “Drafts” feature – where leaving a channel with an unfinished message means that the channel itself gets… Continue reading Slack’s Drafts (“Where did that channel go?”) feature, misses the mark
It’s that simple! You know how CurrentKey Stats already lets you add custom icons per your named Spaces. Well now you can add any character, including emoji. Enjoy! [App Store link]
For the past several weeks I’ve been focused on 2.0, a bigger release that includes: Dark Mode support and a design refresh Quick access to previous days’ stats and an ability to share them The ability to swap already-assigned Rooms quickly via dropdown Last but not least, until the end of the month, I’m dropping the price of the… Continue reading CurrentKey 2.0 launches with Dark Mode support, the ability to quickly view and share previous days’ stats, and much more
Some stats about my stats app In the spirit of John Siracusa’s posts about his OS X reviews, here are some stats. They don’t account for auto generated, 3rd party files, or media management scripts written to support the app: 45 .swift files 48 .xib files (Interface Builder documents) 41,419 total lines in Swift files… Continue reading About CurrentKey 2.0 and What’s Next