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Tag: ios

Simplified Unsplash Widget

December 12, 2020
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My old boss Steve Makosfky was singing the praises of Scriptable the other day — it’s an iOS app that allows you to run Javascript in a number of ways, including as a widget. It’s also free (but tip the developer if you like and use it). So I modified an existing script that displays random photos from Flickr to replace my clunky Unsplash photo widget.

It’s way better than my previous solution. It doesn’t clog up my photo library, plus it’s mildly configurable. (Could be more so, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.) I’ve set mine up such that it only pulls down nature photos, which means I’m no longer seeing people I don’t know on my iOS home screen.

I stuck my code in a gist in case anyone finds this useful.

Automating Unsplash Widget

October 5, 2020
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iOS 14 allows you to put widgets on the home screen, which is very exciting to those of us who aren’t Android users. For Android users, it’s an opportunity to point out that Apple is late to the party. The new capabilities resulted in a wave of widget apps, which allow you to customize widgets and put your own stamp on your phone. I like tinkering, so I decided I wanted to do something beyond the typical “calendar with a photo of my cats behind it.”

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Big Apple Bite

March 2, 2011
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Gruber has been more accepting of the new iOS App Store rules than I am, but I like his latest post on the subject. New information to me: there’s a limit of 3,500 items in the in-app purchase catalog for any iOS app. As he notes, this has obvious implications for Amazon. It also occurred to me last week that the 30% Apple cut wouldn’t work terribly well for the oft-rumored NFC implementation. If Apple wants us to use iPhones as payment devices everywhere, they’re not going to be taking 30% of all transactions made via the iPhone. So I keep on thinking there’s more to the picture than we’ve seen so far. I’ll say this: Apple continues to be annoyingly opaque.