❂ A Milestone

~ Ben Messick

MakePastie In the App Store

Today is the first day that I have an application available in the Apple app store. That means I actually “shipped” something. Pause for dramatic effect.

Learning to program in Swift has been fun, but challenging. All of the programming I have done in the past has been procedural in languages C or Pascal. But, it’s past time to update my skills and start thinking in objects.

After attempting and deciding the iTunes U Stanford Class, is too advanced for me, I joined Treehouse at end of September and have worked through their Swift and iOS tutorials. So far, so good. The slower pace and hand-holding is nice.

Am I on the road to be an Independent iOS Developer? No plans for that, but I am going to finish the Treehouse tutorials and see where to go from there.

The app is a native client for the pastie.org website. It is a free app with an iAd banner. You can find it on here.

Update:  A good exercise, but the app was removed when pastie was shuttered.

The Gift of Presence

~ Ben Messick

Josh Becker:

“Life clutter” may take on many forms: physical belongings, technological fillers (such as alarms or apps), non-life-giving calendar items, even unhealthy relationships.

It’s important for me to remember that clutter isn’t just the stuff in the corner. It’s also my notification settings.

Compton’s 10 Commandments

~ Ben Messick
  1. You have to give people a mission, a clear understanding of how to achieve that mission and a road map for choosing the appropriate steps for action
  2. Either serve the customer superbly or don’t even try.
  3. Change is not something that happens. It’s a way of life. It’s not a process, it’s a value. It’s not something you do, it engulfs you.
  4. How do you get the people who built the box to think outside it? You get new people.
  5. Forget outside consultants. They come in, make a mess, then walk away.
  6. Technology is never really the problem. The problem is how to use it effectively.
  7. The wrong answer rarely kills you. What it does is waste time. And time is an absolutely limited resource.
  8. The weak link in reengineering is will. It is a huge job and it is agonizingly, heartbreakingly tough.
  9. Once people catch on to reengineering, you can’t hold them down. It’s a lifetime venture.
  10. When I see somebody more radical than I am, I’ll know we’re getting somewhere.

Source:  Unknown.  I found a photocopy of this in one of my old folders and thought they were worth passing along. If you know the source, let me know so that I can cite it properly. ↩︎

A Life Worth Waking Up For

~ Ben Messick

Joshua Becker:

Why do productive people always seem to have so much time for everything they do? Are they working harder? Better at time management? More disciplined than the rest of us?

An interesting insight into why some people have so much time to do everything. The article that is based upon is also worth reading.

Exercise, healthy eating, sleep… all seem to be repeated over and over again as keys to productivity. I’m trying…

The weight of our possessions

~ Ben Messick

People bring stuff into their home and then keep it forever because:

    • It cost money. (I paid good money for this!)
    • It was free or a bargain. (How could I pass up such a great deal?)
    • It would just become more trash on an overpolluted planet.
    • It has significance for someone else.
    • Guilt. Someone thought enough of you to buy you a concrete garden statue of a squirrel. Your grandmother left you her teacup collection in her will.

Source:  Boston Globe

❂ A Better iPhone Keyboard?

~ Ben Messick

I love the idea of a better way to input text on my iPhone. I celebrated when Apple announced alternate keyboard support last year with iOS 8. I was finally going to join my Android colleagues in swiping bliss1. There are so much better ways to input text into the iPhone than that traditional keyboard. I love inputting text with swipe keyboards2 and am constantly amazed at how well it does. But I don’t use them. Here’s why.

Flakiness. Many of the third-party keyboards are unreliable. I switch apps or use the launcher to find another app and things don’t work right. There is a several second delay or I don’t get a keyboard at all. I must admit that the flakiness has improved significantly since launch, but I still have problems. It also seems to vary by the developer.

Globe Button Position. How hard is it for alternate keyboards to put the “globe” icon in the same place and do the same function? It should be on the bottom row, the second one from the left and take you to the next keyboard. Simple. Easy to go through them quickly. But no, Emoji++, WordBoard, Switftkey, and Swype all have different ideas about the placement and the function of the globe key. Developers, please don’t be creative here!

Emoji Integration. I love Emojii++ by David Smith. His Emoji keyboard is easy-to-use, stable and much better than Apple’s solution. He doesn’t put the globe button where I would prefer, but I deal with it. What does bother me that I don’t want to switch keyboards to use Emoji. I only use a handful of Emoji and would like them integrated into my text input keyboard. I like how Swype suggests an emoji for the word– easy to use. I also like how SwiftKey makes a button to access emoji similar to accessing symbols. Good ideas.

Space Bar. Not a must have, but nice and preferably in the standard position. Phraseboard didn’t have one and I missed it.

Dictation. And finally, the biggest problem and the one that cannot currently be solved. Apple does not give third-party keyboards access to this iPhone function. Hopefully, a future iOS release will add the dictation option to other developers.

So now what? I have to have an alternate keyboard to use emoji and the standard keyboard for dictation.

My current solution is to use WordBoard as my second keyboard. It is a keyboard of “one-click shortcuts.” As shown in the picture below, I have set up three types of shortcuts on my keyboard– form fields, emoji, and hashtags. For example, when I press “fn”, it types “Ben.” It doesn’t give me full access to all the emoji, but I have created shortcuts to my favorites. I have been using WordBoard for over a month and passes my sophisticated not-as-flaky-as-others test.

Improving WordBoard. There are two improvements that I would like to see. First and most important, I would like categories like Phraseboard. Second, I would like to see the regular keyboard improved. It recommends that you don’t use it, but since it’s there, it would be nice if it were at least as good as the default one.

I like the idea of alternate text input methods and look forward to seeing what developers come up with this year.

  1. Not really. I only know a couple people that have Android phones and they’ve never mentioned their keyboards. ↩︎
  2. I think Swype and SwiftKey both do a great job with text input. ↩︎