While “obscure” and “shroud” may be synonyms for the word “cloud,” they’re probably not descriptions product managers or the marketing team at Google would want to use to describe its Google Drive service, which is a cloud-based storage service for storing and accessing files online. However, for the past several days, users of Google Drive's desktop app have been flummoxed and frantic after discovering files and folders they’ve stored over the course of many months on Google Drive have gone missing.

The problem seems contrary to how Google Drive has generally been perceived by the public and by tech review sites. For instance, by and large, most tech review websites rate Google Drive as secure, reliable, and safe. But, to quote a line from folk singer Joni Mitchell’s song, “Clouds,” perhaps we, “really don’t know clouds at all.”

Will Google Drive users be able to recover their missing files?

At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a solution for this problem, which was first brought to light by a user about a week ago, who posted that his “Google Drive files suddenly disappeared.” The Drive, he said, also reverted to the state it was in in May, 2023. He also noted that the folder structure reverted to the status it had in May, as well, and that any recovery process that Google's support team offered had failed thus far. He posted that it was “very devastating and the files are very important to me.” Others on the forum voiced similar frustrations.

However, one user posted that he was able to recover his lost files and that the “crux of the problem is that the desktop client has not uploaded your data to the cloud, and something in the latest version has reset your local profile. That means that your local, cached, un-uploaded files are now hidden away in a backup folder.” In effect, it may be that the files are not gone, but hidden--or shrouded, so to speak--from view!

At press time, Google has not posted a resolution for this problem yet, only that they’re “investigating reports of an issue.” But if there are any further developments to this story or a solution, we’ll update this post.

More from iMore

• Google Drive: Everything you need to know!
• How to move your files from Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive to ...
• Google Drive File Stream will get M1 support in April

Passkeys promise to replace the username and password combination that we've all been using for decades and you're probably going to need a way to manage them. 1Password was already known to have plans to support passkeys and now that support is closer than ever.

1Password will reportedly allow people to take its passkey support for a spin starting June 6, although there are some caveats that need to be noted before you go diving in.

Obviously, passkeys aren't yet supported by all websites, but beyond that, there are some issues specific to 1Password — like the fact there's no mobile support for passkeys. Not yet, anyway.

Pass on passwords

Passkeys allow people to sign into their accounts and apps without entering a password with authentication handled by on-device biometrics. That's an over-simplification of course, and passkeys could be awesome. But perhaps not just yet.

The Verge reports that 1Password will allow people to store passkeys in their vaults starting next month, but you'll need to use "the 1Password beta browser extension for Safari, Firefox, or Chromium-based browsers," we're told. Those browsers obviously include Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Arc. But there's no word on official Mac app support as yet.

What's more, there's no mobile support yet, either. Replacing your 1Password master password isn't a thing yet, but that's coming in July 2023 according to 1Password chief product officer Steve Won.

It's still early days for passkeys of course, and 1Password will eventually no doubt support them across all of its apps. But for now, anyone who wants to use passkeys and have them sync from device to device should probably just use iCloud Keychain while 1Password gets all of its ducks in a row.

Once it does though, 1Password could well be the place to save everything — at least until Apple gives us a proper iCloud Keychain app.

Though iCloud and other storage services are great for storing data and personal information, it's not always easy to pick and choose what data you want to save. Having an internet-connected backup for your iPhone or iPad is an excellent safety measure. Still, if you need a locally-saved copy of your messages, voicemails, and other data on your best Mac, PhoneView is an app that can help you out.

There are many advantages to keeping track of your data with PhoneView. To use just one example, if you use your phone for both work and personal use and need to keep track of your work communication for billing and tax purposes, you may want to keep a detailed record of your call history, messages, and other communication in one handy location.

How to extract messages and voicemails from your iPhone and iPad with PhoneView

Whether you have an M1 Mac, like the iMac (2021), or an older Intel Mac, PhoneView works the same.

1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac with a Lightning cable.
2. Launch PhoneView.
3. Click OK.

4. Click on the type of Data you want to copy to your Mac.
5. Click on the content you want to copy.

6. Click Copy from iPhone.
7. Choose your Save Settings.
8. Click Save.

As you can see, PhoneView can copy a lot more than just messages and voicemails. Your call history, contacts, media files, notes, and more can all be copied to your computer for safekeeping.

Request a copy of your data using Apple's data and privacy portal

Of course, you can always get your data directly from Apple. By requesting a copy of your data through Apple's privacy portal, you'll get much more than messages and voicemails, but everything else you've got on your iCloud account as well.

Updated February 2022: Updated for macOS Monterey

I probably can speak for a lot of people when I say that hearing your alarm blasting each morning, rudely awakening you from your slumber, is the most annoying part of the day. After all, who wants to get up and deal with reality when you can be comfortable and in dreamland?

Related: Best Sleep Trackers and Monitors

I have trouble getting up and out of bed, and I have for years. Now, part of that is my fault — I have a habit of watching trashy TV until the wee hours of the morning — and part of it is science! Many years ago I went searching for a better way to wake myself up and found Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock (referred to as Sleep Cycle from here on out), and I haven't looked back since.

• Free, with subscription - Download Now

What is Sleep Cycle?

In short, Sleep Cycle is an alarm clock that aims to track your sleep and wake you up in a more peaceful and less abrupt manner, allowing you to feel less tired and more alert when you hear the alarm going off in the morning. How does it do this? With a little bit of science of course!

The method behind the madness

When we sleep, we go through something called a sleep cycle (where have I heard that before), which means not all sleep is equal. Without getting too technical, we drift through various stages of light and deep sleep as our body and our brains rest. We go through multiple sleep cycles a night, and on average one sleep cycle takes about one or two hours to complete.

Now when you set a regular alarm clock to ring at a particular time, it will go off at that set time and wake you up regardless of where you are in your sleep cycle. This can rip you out of a very deep sleep very abruptly, and that's why someday you wake up feeling groggy and tired. This is where Sleep Cycle comes in and saves the day.

Sleep Cycle aims to wake you up when you are are in the very light stage of your sleep cycle which means you aren't being ripped out of a deep sleep. This leads to waking up feeling more refreshed and less tired.

How does it work?

Sleep Cycle has two ways of monitoring your sleep. You can choose to use the microphone or the accelerometer; both work practically the same, but require a slightly different setup.

When you use the microphone, the app will tell you to plug in your phone and lay it flat, screen side-down on a nightstand or table beside your bed after you set the alarm. This allows the app to listen to your movements and snoring and judges where you are in your sleep cycle.

Using the accelerometer practically works the same; however, you need to put your phone on the bed with you. Once you set the alarm, you can lift off the corner of the sheet (the one that covers the mattress), place your phone screen side down, and plug it in.

Some limitations

To use Sleep Cycle as an alarm is free and you won't have to pay anything, but if you want access to all the features, it will cost you a yearly subscription fee of $29.99. That subscription gives you access to long-term sleep tracking, graphs and charts that show your sleeping trends, and a few other goodies. You can always sign up for the free trial month to see how you like it before diving into the subscription.

Sleep Cycle works better when you're alone in the bed. I have tried it with my partner and I sharing a bed (using both the microphone and accelerometer), and while it didn't ultimately fail, it did seem to have trouble waking me up as peacefully as it does when I'm alone. It seems like a given being that it's two primary methods of tracking your sleep are pretty easily interfered with.

Does it work?

Well, that's a bit of a loaded question, but I can tell you from my personal experience that I love it. I used it most nights during the week to wake up for work, and I often find that I don't have to hit snooze and I feel more refreshed than the nights I opt not to use Sleep Cycle.

While the app has helped me greatly, it's no miracle worker. If you go to bed too late and don't allow yourself to get enough sleep, waking up will be harder and you likely won't feel as refreshed; however, since Sleep Cycle wakes you up during the lightest stage of sleep it will probably be easier to wake up even on less sleep.

I highly suggest anyone who has trouble waking up in the morning to give Sleep Cycle a try because of worst case scenario, you just stop using it and delete it off your phone, but best case scenario, you just found your new favorite app.

• Free with subscription - Download Now

Do you like Sleep Cycle?

Do you use Sleep Cycle or a different app? Let us know in the comment below.

Best apps to help you sleep!

After seven years, Panic has released its latest major version of its file transfer software, Transmit, for macOS. Transmit 5 features a number important updates, with everything, from the user interface to the file transfer engine, getting either overhauled or at the very least spruced up. Panic is also making another big move with Transmit 5: this version of Transmit is not available in the Mac App Store, and you'll have to download and purchase it from Panic itself in order to check it out.

Here's everything you need to know about Transmit 5.

What is Transmit 5?

Transmit is a file transfer application that lets you manage files on a host of different servers, uploading, downloading, tweaking, and transferring them however you need. Originally, Transmit was primarily an FTP (File Transfer Protocol), but over the years it's grown to support a wide variety of different server types, and Transmit 5 features support for 10 new cloud services.

What are the big changes in Transmit 5?

While Transmit 5 features several updates across the app, including a new user interface, the big changes the Panic focuses on are servers, sync, and speed.

When it comes to servers, Transmit now supports additional servers and new cloud services. The app uses Panic Sync, the company's own syncing method, to sync your sites between Transmit on multiple Macs, as well as Transmit for iOS. Transmit 5 also features a new version of its file transfer engine that offers improved transfer speeds, along with more intelligence about complex folders.

What types of servers and services can I connect to with Transmit 5?

Transmit features support for connections to the following server types and cloud services:

• Amazon Drive
• Amazon S3
• Backblaze B2
• Box
• DreamObjects
• Dropbox
• FTP
• FTP with Implicit SSL
• FTP with TLS/SSL
• Google Drive
• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft OneDrive
• Microsoft OneDrive for Business
• Rackspace Cloud Files
• SFTP
• WebDAV
• WebDAV HTTPS

What's new about sync?

Transmit 5 uses Panic's in-house syncing solution, Panic Sync, to keep your files up-to-date across multiple Macs and Transmit for iOS. Panic notes that Panic Sync is encrypted and that the company can't see your data.

You'll also find local-to-local and remote-to-remote sync in Transmit 5, along with finer control over what gets synced.

How has the speed of operations been improved in Transmit 5?

Panic completely rebuilt their file transfer engine for Transmit 5, making not only faster, but smarter as well, with the new engine offering better handling of complex folders. Transmit 5 also makes speed improvements with folder multithreading, which transfers the contents of folders asynchronously, as well as instant file transfers, which begin operations without the need to retrieve the sizes of all of the files in question.

There have also been tweaks to the UI to let you more quickly access everything you need from a single window.

What else is new in Transmit 5?

There's quite a bit, actually. You can now manage and generate secure server keys without needing to leave Transmit.

There's now a feature called the Places bar, which acts much like the Favorites bar for bookmarks in Safari or Chrome's bookmarks bar. It allows you to place all of your favorite folders in an easily accessible place that lets you get to them in one click.

Other new features include batch rename of files, tag support, two-factor authentication (2FA) support, file copy and paste, Touch Bar support, and selectable file syncing.

Transmit 5 also supports v4 of the Amazon S3 API.

How do I purchase Transmit 5?

Transmit 5 is available directly from Panic. You can try it free for seven days, after which you'll need to purchase Transmit 5 to unlock the full app. For the first week, you can buy the app for $35, though after that, it will be available for $45.

What about an upgrade discount?

Panic is not offering a discount for most Transmit 4 owners, so the price is the same for almost everyone. I say "almost" because there is an exception. If you purchased Transmit 4 from Panic after June 1, 2017, you can head here with your Transmit 4 serial number and get a free upgrade to Transmit 5. Mac App Store customers that purchased Transmit in the same period need to contact Panic directly about upgrading.

Is Transmit 5 available in the Mac App Store?

No. Panic says that distributing outside the App Store allows for a full demo. However, the company also says that it will continually reassess the Mac App Store and hopes to return at some point.

Other questions?

If you have any more questions about Transmit 5, be sure to tell us in the comments.

Moom was just removed from the store due to a patent that, I kid you not, claims ownership of "positioning windows on a screen via a grid". Yeah, I'll pause while you finish screaming.

From the Many Tricks blog:

Obviously, I'm not an intellectual property lawyer and can't speak to the specifics of this case, but to the rationally minded, most of these come off as complete bullshit. In general, patent trolls should be ashamed of themselves. So should the USPTO for simply granting any application, no matter how obvious, and no matter how voluminous the prior art, and leaving it to be figured out in crushing, sometimes bankruptcy-inducing litigation for the indie developers involved.

Hopefully, someone at the EFF can help. Or Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the like could set up some sort of combined defense fun for apps in their collective marketplace that could serve as a deterrent for frivolous patent litigation against smaller, more vulnerable developers.

Associate is a new tool for iPhone and iPad from the developers behind the Blink affiliate link generation app. The app is specifically targeted at the Amazon Associates program, and can be used to generate Amazon affiliate links with just one tap. You can even generate three different Markdown link formats, and product names can be automatically added as link titles.

While you can browse Amazon and create links directly within the app itself, that's not your only option. Associate also features an extension, which you can use with Safari or even Amazon's own app to create affiliate links without even having to open Associate. The app also supports Split Screen and Slide Over multitasking on iPads running iOS 9 or later.

Amazon Associates program members should check Associate out on the App Store now.

• $4.99 - Download Now

Developer Cromulent Labs has released the follow up to its versatile Notification Center utility, Launcher. With Launcher, you can create a custom widget for the Notification Center on your iPhone or iPad, and Launcher 2.0 expands on that ability by letting you create multiple widgets. This update also lets you backup and restore your launchers from iCloud.

Here's what's new in Launcher 2.0:

• Multiple Widgets!
  • With new in-app purchase, you can create 5 more widgets for more space for launchers and better organization.
  • Set up widgets to show or hide based on the time, day and/or location. Create specific widgets for home, work, weekdays, or the gym.
  • Not available on the iPhone 4S
• Backup and restore launchers to and from iCloud
• More icon customization. Choose from round icons or create your own custom icons
• Bug fixes and improvements.

You can grab Launcher 2.0 from the App Store now.

• Free - Download Now

"The Rock Clock" is both an alarm clock and a goal management app. It features daily motivational videos and 25 custom alarms created by The Rock, himself. You can learn all about The Rock's snooze-free motivational alarm clock in our video.

Have you ever wished you could wake up to the smell of whatever The Rock is cookin'? Well, while it doesn't contain any smells, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's new alarm app can bring you one step closer to that dream.

Called The Rock Clock, the free alarm app is billed as a "motivational alarm clock from Project Rock." To help you cut down on excuses and stay motivated, the app lets you set goals that are intended to keep you on track. And if that doesn't work, you can look forward to new messages from The Rock every morning to kick your butt into gear. Oh, and there is no snooze button, so don't even think about it.

As if that weren't enough, the app also includes 25 ringtones created by The Rock himself. And yes, they do get ridiculous (think The Rock personally serenading you to guitar-laden tunes). To top things off, you can even set yourself to "Rock Time," which will sync your alarm with The Rock's own so you can wake up together.

If you're smellin' what The Rock is cookin', you can go ahead and grab the app from the App Store link below.

• Free - Download Now

Every Friday, The Network column brings you the perspective and charm of the best and brightest minds in the Apple and tech community. This week we have iMore alumni Peter Cohen. A 30-year Apple industry vet, Peter had careers in tech support and IT before writing for Apple magazines and web sites beginning in the mid-90s. He's currently a technology writer at Backblaze.com and you can find him on Twitter at @flargh.

Developers who can find ways to do it are migrating to a subscription-based publishing model instead of what's become known as a "perpetual license" (pay once and forget about it). Expect this trend to continue. Case in point: Smile Software's newest release of TextExpander, the popular keyboard shortcut utility. Even if you don't welcome this change, it's important to understand what's going on here that's brought us to this point.

TextExpander goes pay-to-play

New versions of TextExpander for OS X, iOS, and now Windows are available for download. Unlike previous releases, the new release requires you to have a new TextExpander.com account. After a free "test drive" period, you'll be asked to pay $4.95 a month for to continue using it (annual discounts and upgrades are available).

The subscription model does more than just enable you to use the app, though. Smile is centralizing online syncing of TextExpander. Owners of the previous release could use iCloud or Dropbox in order to sync text snippets between devices and workgroups. Now that's gone and everything is handled as a service through TextExpander.com, which introduces a web interface to enable you to manage snippets and how they're shared. To help entice businesses to migrate to the new service, Smile's incorporated new team sharing management capabilities.

All told, There's a lot more going on under the hood with the new TextExpander service, which is why Smile wanted to roll its own sync service rather than continue to depend on iCloud or Dropbox.

There's no gun to your head to upgrade, if you're an existing TextExpander user. Your version of TextExpander still works. You got what you paid for. Just don't expect too much more in terms of new features or new operating system support unless you migrate to the new product.

Apps as services

Smile joins some big players at it seeks to reinvent TextExpander as a service instead of as an app you pay for once until the next major upgrade. Take Adobe, for example. The company went all in on the service model a few years ago by focusing development of their creative apps as the Creative Cloud. An ever-growing constellation of new apps and services continue to give creative professionals reasons to subscribe to Creative Cloud products.

Microsoft has done the same with Office, and while Office 2016 is also available with a perpetual license, Microsoft gives users plenty of incentive to subscribe to Office 365 instead, with more flexibility and better features. Office 365 users got the earliest look at Office for Mac 2016 when it made its debut last year.

Even Apple's gotten into the act. Buying an iPhone or a Mac is just the start. If you want to use Apple Music, that's another $10 per month. iCloud is free, unless you need more space. Family plans, added iCloud space and optional services like Apple Music have many of us tithing to Cupertino faithfully every month.

(In the interest of full disclosure: I work for one of those companies I'm talking about: Backblaze.com - we sell cloud-based backup services for Mac and Windows users. Our subscribers pay a flat monthly fee and in turn, we back up their computers to our data center.)

Software as a Service certainly doesn't work for everyone, and Smile is bound to lose some customers as it makes this migration. Other text expansion and shortcut utilities for Mac and iOS are available. Smile's move is likely to spur at least some of those developers to redouble their efforts to win hearts and minds away from Smile.

Likewise, some designers still hold out with their Adobe Creative Suite 6 software or have migrated to other non-Adobe products all together. There are plenty of other productivity apps and suites besides Microsoft Office.

Devil's advocate

As hard as it may be to shift perspective, consider the developer's point. A subscription model offers a regular flow of income, and stops the developer from having to run on what Smile CEO [Greg Scown calls](/e?link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.shareasale.com%2Fr.cfm%3Fb%3D1215646%26m%3D81274%26U%3D885495%26afftrack%3DUUimUdUnU37197%26urllink%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fsmilesoftware.com%252Fsoftware-releases%252Fentry%252Fthe-new-textexpander&token=yVmevOG- "the upgrade treadmill."

That helps to predictably support current and future development efforts, instead of having to plan development cycles on the expectation of a big windfall whenever there's a major new release.

Rather than having to save big ideas for major version releases, new features can be rolled out gradually and incrementally as service improvements, instead of dangling them as enticements to get people to spend money on upgrades. The developer has the incentive to keep service excellent and new features coming, otherwise subscriptions will drop off. When it's done well, it works out better for everyone.

In Smile's case, owning the sync stream makes sense too — it enables them to do more, going forward, with snippet syncing than they could before, as evidenced by the new web-based interface employed by TextExpander, its greatly enhanced workgroup sharing capabilities, and other features (and possibly new products) Smile undoubtedly has planned for the future.

The value of the software has changed for many users, however. There's a big difference between paying once for a utility that you'll use indefinitely and paying every month. Without a discount, you're going to spend $60 a year on TextExpander, a utility whose previous release cost $35, once. Are the new features worth it? What happens if Smile pulls up stakes on the service?

As evidenced by the outcry on social media, some TextExpander customers are not happy with the change. And why should they be? This is getting exhausting.

As I said before, when it's done well, it works out better for everyone. When it's done poorly, customers get screwed. Another case in point: Revolv, a recent Google acquisition that was folded into Nest, the business started around a smart thermostat. Revolv goes dark next month, and anyone with a Revolv hub is going to be stuck with a very expensive doorstop. Televero CEO Arlo Gilbert recently took Tony Fadell and Nest to task for abandoning Revolv.

Death of a thousand cuts

Ever since the personal computer debuted in the 1970s the software business has existed to support it. Personal computer software has gone through multiple iterations and reinventions in that time, just as the computer hardware has.

For years, retailers ruled the roost. Boxed software and heavy bound manuals sat on store shelves. We paid for software when we needed to, and we were done.

As more of us went online, we discovered that we could download shareware. Once the Internet became ubiquitous it became possible to just buy apps through app stores instead. Constant downward pricing pressure in those app stores forced developers to figure out other ways to produce a sustainable income. Once Apple had a mechanism in place, some developers began giving away apps and offering in-app purchases.

To that end, selling software as a service is simply another reinvention. There are already successes, there are already casualties, and there will be more.

The problem, of course, is that all these services add up. And they add up fast. Office 365 costs $10 a month. Adobe Creative Cloud is another $50. $5 for TextExpander.com. Another $5 for Backblaze. Netflix. Hulu. It piles on. Before you know it, you're spending $100 or more on top of whatever your Internet costs.

It feels like the death of a thousand cuts - paper cuts inflicted by small bills. Microtransactions.

Of course, you don't pay your electricity bill or your phone bill just once - you pay it every month, because it's a service you find useful or necessary to your life.

Paying for software in the same way as we pay for electricity may seem odd. Most software isn't as essential as a cell phone or working lights, but the same rule applies for service - you should expect to pay something for its continued maintenance and development.

That is, of course, predicated on the assumption that you find that service worth paying for to begin with. If you don't, you can vote with your wallet. The choice is yours.

TextExpander recently shocked customers by switching to a subscription model. It's an attempt by the developer, Smile, to create a sustainable business that'll let them continue working on the app for years to come. It's forced many people, however, to take a long, hard look at the value of not on Smile's software, but software in general.

Joe Cieplinski, writing on his blog:

Joe is an app designer and part of the Release Notes podcast and conference. So, this is his business and his business, and his take is sharp. Read all of it.

I use TextExpander a lot. I type a few keys and most of an iMore show post magically appears in my editor. I'm pretty sure it'll be worth my money to get on the subscription train. But I had to think about it.

Others didn't. My Twitter feed is full of complaints. Nay, outrage. So are TextExpander's reviews. Part of that was Smile not doing enough to set expectations before the business model change. Part is casual customers feeling abandoned. Part is just the new normal.

Expensive software isn't a problem in a world where the average person wants or needs six apps a year. But when they want or need 60? 600? More?

Many continue to lament the loss of value in software. Yet, when developers resort to new apps or new business models, there's a backlash. That highlights the disconnect — how does traditional software thrive in the age of pop apps?

Smile, the developers of text-expansion tool TextExpander, have launched a brand new version of the app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. While the apps all sport a new look and feel, the big new is the launch of TextExpander.com, which allows you to sync and manage your snippets on the web for a small monthly price.

Though previous versions allowed you to sync with Dropbox and iCloud, the latest version of TextExpander requires a TextExpander.com account in order to sync. For $4.95 per month, you can use a TextExpander.com Life Hacker plan to sync your snippets to all of your devices, and share them with a circle of friends. If you're a current TextExpander customer, you'll receive a 50% loyalty discount on this plan for your first year. Additionally, if you purchased TextExpander after December 1, 2015, you'll get this plan for free for three months.

But TextExpander.com goes beyond individuals and small groups, letting companies get in on the action. For $9.95 per user per month, businesses can get all of the consumer features, plus organization-controlled snippet sharing, team snippet management, permission management, and more.

Smile is also launching a public beta of TextExpander for Windows. The beta is expected to run for several months, and can be downloaded from the TextExpander website. If you don't want to pay a continuing subscription, you can still use TextExpander 5 for Mac, along with version 3 for iPhone and iPad, in order to use Dropbox or iCloud syncing.

You can grab TextExpander for Mac on directly from Smile, while the new iPhone and iPad app is available now on the App Store. While both are free to download, you will need a TextExpander.com account in order to use them.

• Free (Mac) - Download Now
• Free (iPhone and iPad) - Download Now

iStat Menus 5.1 adds support for Apple's latest MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models, while also improving support for the iMac with 5K Retina display. You can also now style iStat Menus for OS X Yosemite's dark and light modes independently.

Checkout the full list of changes and improvements below.

• Improved performance and reduced memory usage.
• Improved support for 5k iMac.
• Added support for 2015 MacBook Airs.
• Added support for 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro.
• Added ability to have different skin settings for light and dark menu bar modes in Yosemite.
• Added more memory details when using Memory Pressure mode.
• Added an option to show activity for individual disks in the menubar.
• Added an option to show activity for each disk in a fusion drive in the disks dropdown.
• Added ability to rename cities.
• Added an option to only show MB/s or Mb/s for bandwidth in the menubar.
• Added new hardware info to network connection submenus.
• Fixed some issues where disk activity was missing for some disks.
• Fixed an issue with disk activity not working with SoftRAID disks.
• Fixed an issue where disks could show 0KB free.
• Fixed an issue with 12 hour time formats if system is set to 24 hour time.
• Fixed an issue in the network extra where the primary interface setting may not have been working correctly in the menubar.
• Improved per app network monitoring on Yosemite.
• Improved GPU monitoring.
• Improved disk activity monitoring.
• Improved layout in disks dropdown when a disk has multiple partitions.
• Improved display of some menubar text modes in Yosemite.
• Improved event dots in calendar.
• Improved moon item display when using Simple city layout.
• Improved city database.

iStat Menus 5 launched last year with battery shaming, world clocks, and support for OS X Yosemite. You can download the latest update by opening the app and clicking the Check for Updates button.

• $16 - Download Now

OneShot auto-detects screenshots taken on your iPhone. Select the screenshot you want, then get to editing. You can crop the image down to your favorite section, and highlight particular passages. You can choose your background color by sliding your finger over the color pad.

Finally, you can select the source that should be detected from your image. Then you can share your final image on Twitter or save it to your Camera Roll. OneShot is available on the App Store right now.

• Free - Download Now

Since my early Mac-using days, I've been an avid shortcuts user — keyboard commands, QuickKeys, launchbars, you name it. I probably use my keyboard more than my trackpad for navigating through programs and windows, though I've grown to love the multitouch gestures for swiping screens on my 11-inch Air.

Given that I'm also multitasking with my iPhone almost all the time, it makes a crazy amount of sense that a launcher utility like Alfred would take advantage of that second screen to create a remote control. Enter Alfred Remote: The app uses local sharing with the Alfred app to turn your iPhone into a launchbar for your Mac.

I'll admit: It's taken me awhile to integrate Alfred Remote into my daily workflow, and I find it easier to use it with my iMac than my laptop. But that's me — I love shortcuts, but I have to intentionally force them into my routine for a few weeks before they actually stick.

And the good news is that Alfred Remote has a wide selection of the kinds of shortcuts you might want for your Mac. My favorite section to use with my iMac is Alfred's iTunes controls: My iMac runs most of the music in my household, and often I would drag my wireless keyboard into the kitchen to control songs while doing dishes, cooking, and the like; now, I need only have my iPhone with me.

I also love being able to zap my computer to sleep or launch a website from across the room using Alfred's system commands and URL bookmarks.

The app's real strength is as an auxiliary input to Alfred itself, however (and you will need Alfred's Mac app to use the Remote): You can launch applications, files, folders, URLs, preference panes, system commands, AppleScripts, and even one of Alfred's Workflows if you've built any.

I use these features less often largely because I have key commands set for my most-used triggers, but I've been finding folder-launching to be really useful. I have folder shortcuts set for Screenshots, Downloads, and my Dropbox's Public folder, all of which allow me to quickly and easily get to files without having to click or mouse my way through Dock items and menus.

I do wish you could set up and rearrange Alfred Remote's various items on your iPhone or iPad, but sadly any organization and workflow-adding is limited to Alfred on your Mac. Rearranging the grids is a bit of a pain, too, as you must have an open space to drag icons around, and they won't swap with each other — a la the iPhone home screen — if you move one icon atop another.

I also want a way to sync Remotes between computers; right now I have Remotes for both MacBook and iMac, and each is set up completely differently. That could be a boon to some, but personally, I'd like my settings the same for each computer.

These are minor 1.0 quibbles, though; overall, the app is well built and a nice addition for people who use Alfred's launchbar utility on their Macs already. It just may take a bit of adjustment to use it in your workflow.

• Alfred Remote - $5 - Buy Now

Mac and iOS app developer Panic pulled its Coda software from the Mac App Store last October amidst issues related to Apple's "sandboxing" requirements. Turns out that decision wasn't a bad one for the company, according to a new blog post.

Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser recently posted a state of union address, of sorts, on the Panic blog, recounting the company's successes and challenges for 2014. Among them Sasser mentioned Coda 2.5's release, and Panic's decision to pull it from the Mac App Store. And after analyzing data since then, Sasser says Coda's sales "have not suffered significantly" since then.

Sasser added that Panic benefitted from the fact that Coda is a mature product with a dedicated customer base — he says pulling it from the store would have been a much harder decision otherwise.

Sasser offered some criticism of the App Store that we've heard from developers and users alike, before — specifically, that there's no mechanism at present to handle "traditional discounted upgrades." This affected Panic because the company released a new version of its SSH client for iOS, Prompt, and decided to make Prompt 2 a new app instead of an update to the original, to help cover development costs.

Sasser also offered some comments on the app review process — Apple first rejected, then allowed an iCloud Drive feature to be included with Transmit for iOS. From Sasser's perspective, the system didn't work very well.

It's interesting reading. Even if you're not a user of Panic's products, Sasser's comments will give you some great insight about what it is to be a Mac and iOS app developer today, and from that perspective, it's certainly worth a read.

Source: Panic

Swype, one of the third-party keyboards that launched with iOS 8, has received a large updated adding support for several new languages, better emoji support, and more. Users of Swype on the iPad will also be pleased to find that the tablet layout of the keyboard has been improved.

Swype now supports twenty-one languages, and has sixteen new languages available for download. These include U.K. English, Greek, and Danish. To download these languages, bring up the keyboard, then press and hold the Swype button in the lower left corner, and slide your finger over the gear icon. Tap Languages, then select one of the new languages to download.

Other improvements include intelligent emoji support for English, both for the U.S. and U.K., French, Italian, German, and Spanish. You can now customize your keyboard layout, with the existing QWERTY layout, or with QWERTZ or AZERTY. There are also now options for keypress sounds, as well as auto spacing.

You can download Swype 1.1 from the App Store right now.

• $0.99 - Download Now

Launch Center Pro, the action-centric utility for iPhone and iPad, has updated to version 2.3 on both devices, with a load of nice additions, including location triggers and support for connections service IFTTT. The update also includes QR and barcode scanning, custom notification sounds, and more.

The major new feature in Launch Center Pro 2.3 is support for IFTTT. Launch Center can serve as both a trigger and endpoint for any recipe, with a channel now available on the service. As part of this support, Launch Center now has a free service called Launch Center Pro Connect. Connect requires you to sign up with Facebook, Twitter, or email in order to take advantage of the IFTTT Launch Center channel.

Location triggers are now supported. Launch Center Pro supports both Geolocation-based triggers, as well as iBeacon. These triggers work as actionable prompts to trigger any action or URL. Location triggers can be filtered by three criteria: time range, days of the week, and iterations within a given number of minutes. There is also now a Places section in the app's settings, which stores particular geofences or iBeacons.

Launch Center Pro 2.3 has some smaller, but still significant enhancements. Giphy has been directly integrated to help easily find animated GIFs. Lists, a powerful feature introduced back in version 2.1, can now be created directly from the prompt button when editing a URL. This update also contains improved Encoding Helpers, custom notification sounds, and nested input tag support. Unfortunately for anyone using it, this update also removes support for the Fleksy keyboard, as the Fleksy SDK no longer allows the keyboard to be enabled or disabled programatically.

There is a lot to this update, so if you want to know more, I highly suggest that you read the release notes from the developer. You can download the updates for both the iPhone and iPad apps right now from the App Store.

• $4.99 (iPhone) - Download Now
• $4.99 (iPad) - Download Now

Have an iPad or iPhone that's used by multiple people in your home? Ever experienced rage when your high score in Flappy Bird gets overwritten by your 6 year old kid? How about that time your wife posted photos of her girl's night out on your Instagram account on accident? If you are rocking a jailbreak on your iPhone or iPad running iOS 7 you can put an end to the madness with Slices!

Slices is a newer jailbreak tweak that brings account management to your jailbroken iPhone or iPad. Store multiple accounts on one device and toggle between them without having to sign out. When you create a new slice in an app like Instagram or Snapchat, you'll be asked to log in again. Slices will then remember that login for that particular Slice. In the setting panel of Slices you can set the option for Ask on Touch which means every time you launch an app that Slices supports, you'll be asked which account you'd like to load.

The great part about Slices is that it works with just about any app or game. From social networks to Candy Crush, easily create Slices and load them on launch. Slices is ideal for shared devices as well as folks who have multiple accounts. When I ran a business I would have killed for a tweak like Slices so I could switch between personal accounts and business accounts on social media. It would have eliminated the headaches of signing out and back in as well as accidental posts to the wrong account.

If you're jailbroken on iOS 7, I highly suggest giving Slices a look. It's probably one of the most useful jailbreak tweaks I've seen in a long time. The only request I'd have is the ability to pin code protect slices. This way each person can have their own level of security if they choose to. If you happen to give Slices a go, let me know what you think in the comments!

• $1.99 - Cydia link

I've already shown you not only what I have on my iPhone and iPad Home screens, but what I've got in my Mac dock too. A lot of our staff members here at iMore have also shown you what they're using on their iPhones, iPads, and Macs. That means the only thing I have left to show you are the apps and utilities I think are important enough to earn a place in my Mac's menu bar. Follow along to find out!

Off to the right of my menu bar is all the basic stuff that comes standard on every Mac including current user, date and time, volume controls, wifi and bluetooth toggles, and Time Machine. For the most part, you'll see some kind of variation of this setup on every Mac out of the box. Now that we have the boring stuff out of the way, here's what else gets a spot:

• iStat Menus: iStat Menus by Bjango is a system monitoring app that Peter turned me on to a while back. Not only can it track CPU usage, but RAM usage, network traffic, and pretty much every other chip or connection your Mac has. It's a huge help when you have to pinpoint an app or process that's causing problems. It has become one of the first things I install when setting up a new Mac. $16 - Download Now
• AirPlay: If you have an Apple TV floating around your house that's connected to the same network as your Mac, you'll probably recognize this icon. We have three of them between the bedroom, office, and living room. Whenever I want to beam content from my Mac to any one of them, the AirPlay icon in my Mac menu lets me do it in just two clicks. There's nothing to download or install, OS X will automatically show AirPlay anytime there's a capable device within range.
• Google Hangouts: We use Google Hangouts quite often for conference calls and meetings across Mobile Nations. That's why I find it essential to be able to sign in or access it quickly. The Mac app lets me do that in just one click. I can also initiate a private chat with any colleague just as easily. I don't use this feature all that often since we use Skype regularly, but it's nice to know it's there.
• Fantastical: I use Fantastical across the board on both OS X and iOS. It is one of the absolute best calendar replacement apps, if not the best. Fantastical supports natural language input and reminders all in one app. That clears up two places in my dock. I can also access it from virtually anywhere as well as assign shortcut keys to create events without ever taking my fingers off the keyboard. It doesn't get much better than that when it comes to calendar and reminder management. $19.99 - Download Now
• CloudApp: CloudApp is a link shortening and image storage service. It is available on most platforms and integrates with many third party apps for both Mac and iOS. I use it frequently to share screenshots, links, and documents. Since it integrates nicely into the iOS apps I have, it means I have one central account to review and access all the media I've uploaded. It's just that much easier to keep track of socially shared stuff in one central location. Free - Download Now
• TextExpander: We use a lot of links around here at iMore. I also respond to a lot of similar emails. Text Expander makes is super simple to create shortcuts based on the things I do the most. I can't even imagine how many keystrokes I've saved by using TextExpander snippets. You can also share them via Dropbox in order to create snippets for a group. We do it here on iMore and it works amazingly well. I add a snippet and everyone else has it too. The only caveat is that the Mac App Store version is somewhat limited, that's why we recommend buying it directly from SmileOnMyMac instead so you get the full feature set the way it was intended to work. $34.95 - Download Now
• Dropbox: Not only is Dropbox my main cloud storage service, I use it to share documents with colleagues, family, and friends. It integrates into pretty much every platform I use and could ever want to use. Almost every third party app that hooks into storage services supports it. It sits in my Mac dock because I access it countless times a day for everything from PSD templates to imagery to PDF documents. It's all there, on every device I own. Free - Download Now

That's it! I don't like to keep an over abundance of apps in my Mac's menu bar or I feel it looks too cluttered. Now it's your turn, let me know what you're must-have menu bar items are in the comments below! Do we share any of the same ones? Let me know that too!

pushNotify is a jailbreak tweak available for both iPhone and iPad that lets you forward all of your notifications to any Mac running OS X Mavericks or later. While you won't be able to reply to notifications with pushNotify, it is a handy way to keep an eye on your iPhone or iPad without interrupting your workflow.

The idea behind pushNotify is that you can see what notifications you have on your iPhone or iPad without actually having to have either right in front of you. Once you've linked them to your Mac, your iPhone or iPad will forward notifications from any app to your Mac.

For pushNotify to work, your iOS device and your Mac have to be on the same wifi network. After you've paired them you've got a few options for configuring pushNotify. I personally like the Suppress mode which allows you to forward notifications to your Mac while suppressing them from actually appearing only our iPhone or iPad. This is convenient for times when your iPhone or iPad is in another room or while someone else is using it. You can also selectively choose apps you want to forward and what ones to leave on your iPhone or iPad.

pushNotify is available in Cydia now for only $0.99. The Mac version is available for free via the link below as a companion to pushNotify for iOS. If you decide to try it out, let me know what you think of it in the comments. Is this a feature you'd like to eventually see in iOS or do you still prefer keeping mobile and desktop separate?

• $0.99 - iOS - Cyda link
• Free - Mac - Download Now

Every day dozens and dozens of new and updated apps and games hit the iOS and Mac App Stores. It's impossible to keep up with them all, but it's not impossible to pick out the very best. Here they are! Today we've got a slew of updates large and small, including stuff from Skype, Amazon.com, games, and more!

New and updated iOS apps

• IMDB 4.2: Everyone's favorite movie and TV information app now has U.S. TV listings, Amazon Prime availability, a new showtimes page, and more. Free - Download now
• Skype 4.17.3: The latest version of Microsoft's popular voice, video and chat client for iOS sports "general fixes." Free - Download now
• TextExpander 2.5.1: TextExpander lets you type short abbreviations that expand into long snippets. The new release sports a slew of bug fixes and and enhancements. $4.99 - Download now
• Kindle 4.2: Amazon's latest e-book reader app for iOS lets you access the book's table of contents from within the left panel navigation menu, and sports a new X-Ray Smart Look Up feature. Free - Download now
• Squarespace Metrics for iPad 1.1.0: If you use Squarespace for your web site, you may be interested in this app, recently updated with native iPad support. You can keep an eye on your Squarespace web site's metrics. Requires Squarespace 6 account. Free - Download now
• Plague Inc. 1.8: This game has you spreading worldwide plagues. The new version introduces "Mega-Brutal" difficulty, has new cheat modes, new events and achievements, performance improvements and more. $0.99 - Download now
• Duet 1.2.0: The mesmerizing game in which you control two rotating spheres through mazes has been updated with new extreme challenges, tweaked final Acceptance stages and more. $2.99 - Download now
• Medium 1.0.425: Find and read content published via Medium.com easier with this app. The new release has minor bug fixes and stability improvements. Free - Download now
• Spotify 1.1.0: The app for the popular streaming music service adds Your Music and Repeat One features, and fixes rough track skipping and some crashes, as well as adds the ability to delete radio stations. Free - Download now
• Audiobooks from Audible 2.0.12: The app to help organize and listen to Audible audiobooks gets bug fixes and performance improvements. Free - Download now

New and updated Mac apps

• Mac Game Store 2.5.14: The companion app to manage downloads from the popular Mac game download service has been updated with bug fixes. Free - Download now

More apps and updates?

If you try any of the apps or updates, let me know how they work for you. If you got any new or updated apps today that you loved, but don't see here, let us know about them!

I've written before about some of the limitations that Apple imposes on game developers who want to sell their games through the Mac App Store. The problem isn't limited to games — Apple's rules for how Mac App Store apps work keep lots of different apps from being distributed.

The year after the Mac App Store launched, Apple announced that apps sold using the service would have to be sandboxed. Sandboxing is a security technique that's been around since the dawn of iOS apps — it restricts the access that an app has to other user data and other system resources other than what it needs to get its job done.

Sandboxing in the Mac App Store means that users can be reasonably assured that the apps they're downloading won't compromise the security of their computer or damage the system in any way; it also makes sure that apps won't interfere with each other.

Sandboxing enforces the idea that good fences make good neighbors — that applications work better if they don't interfere with each other or the operating system itself. That's all great in theory, but in practical terms it's not always the best solution, at least not on the Mac.

Take an app I use every day - TextExpander from Smile Software. TextExpander is a handy utility that enables me to type shortcuts (or as they call them, "snippets") that then get expanded into longer text. For example, when I type:

taapl

TextExpander knows and automatically expands it to:

[AAPL](/aapl)

So with TextExpander, I can save myself a lot of keystrokes in the course of a day. But in order for it to work, TextExpander needs to keep an eye on what I'm typing. So-called keylogging apps violate Apple's sandboxing guidelines because they require systemwide access, so Smile had to go outside the Mac App Store in order to sell it.

Customers who want the app can download it from their web site, and Smile no longer has to fork over 30 percent of their gross sales to Apple. But it does reduce the potential market for the product, because many more Mac users — especially those new to the platform — are more likely to buy something from the Mac App Store than elsewhere.

TextExpander is hardly the only app I use which has been affected this way. Another app that I rely on, Bare Bones Software's text editor, BBEdit, is available for sale in the Mac App Store. But that version doesn't support authenticated saves, because by their nature, authenticated saves allow you to change files you don't own). What's more, command line tools aren't included. In both cases, you can work around these limitations by going to the Bare Bones web site and downloading additional scripts and packages, but it's an inelegant hoop to have to jump through simply to obtain full capability.

There are lots of examples of apps that simply can't be sold in the Mac App Store altogether because of Apple's sandboxing requirements. Many apps that use plug-ins, apps that rejigger aspects of the operating system (some audio recording apps and screencasting tools) and others won't pass muster with Apple, and have no choice but to live outside the Mac App Store environment.

Like I said at the outset, sandboxing makes good sense for Apple from a security standpoint. That's one reason why Apple's Gatekeeper software, built into OS X, is restrictive — by default, it's set to only allow apps to be installed that originate from Apple or from "identified developers."

You can Control-click those installers to open them individually, or you can reset the Mac's security settings to allow apps to be downloaded from anywhere instead. But it's another barrier against the installation of software that might give a casual user pause when they try to download an interesting app from a perfectly legitimate developer.

It's hard to argue with the success of the Mac App Store. Since it launched in 2011 it's created a vibrant marketplace for Mac software developers to sell their goods. Its use of Apple ID credentials means that millions of customers can use it right away, even if they've never purchased Mac app software before.

But access to the Mac App Store, at least for the developer, comes at a price: working within Apple's restrictive requirements. And for some eminently useful software tools, that's simply not possible. Those developers will have to remain on the outside looking in, at least for now.

Is Mac app sandboxing a big deal for you? Have you had to go outside the Mac App Store to get the tools you need to do your work? Sound off in the comments, I want to know.

We've told you about what's on our iPads and Macs before, explaining our choices in apps, desktop wallpaper and more. It's my turn again so I thought I'd share with you the contents of my Mac's menu bar. I've customized the bar with a bunch of applications and tools that I think are indispensable.

I'll skip most of the basic Apple stuff like Date & Time, the system's standard battery gauge, volume level and Bluetooth. I assume you're familiar with them and know what they do. You will notice, however, that Time Machine is active. I feel very strongly that Time Machine is the best way to make sure you can easily recover from a major problem and strongly advocate that you use it by whatever means you prefer - external hard drive, Time Capsule or compatible NAS system.

• iStat Menus: One of my favorite system add-ons, usually one of the first tools I'll install on any new Macintosh. iStat Menus lets me visualize CPU and network traffic, memory status, disk usage, battery life and even temperature and voltage readings with a single click. $16 - Download now
• Creative Cloud : I was skeptical at first about paying for software as as service, but Creative Cloud has changed the way I use Adobe products. They're frequently updated with new features, and it's an impressive range of features across the different apps, most of which I underutilize, if I use at all. I mainly stick to Photoshop, InDesign, Lightroom and Acrobat Pro. $49.99 per month - Download now
• TextExpander: Smile Software's typing shortcut utility is a godsend for anyone who writes or has to input repetitive data on their computers. We use it to add snippets of information and links to pages quickly and easily when we're writing the content you read on iMore. (Buy it from Smile's web site — the Mac App Store version is crippled thanks to Apple's sandboxing requirements.) $34.95 - Download now
• Airspace: The control software for the Leap Motion Controller. The Leap Motion Controller lets you gesture in space rather than using a trackpad or mouse; it's a bit like having a Kinect on your Mac. Terrific fun, and loads of games designed to support it. Airspace acts as a portal to the Airspace Store, where you can download new Leap Motion Controller-optimized apps. $79.99 - Buy now
• Crashplan: While I depend on Time Machine for regular backups, that's not where my backup strategy ends. Having offsite backup is important if a catastrophe occurs. I can't rotate out Time Machines on a regular basis, so I've retained the services of CrashPlan instead. This service enables me to back up every Mac on my home network, including the ones used by my wife and kids. It's my second line of defense. Family plan: $149.99 - Download now
• gfxCardStatus: I use a Retina MacBook Pro, which has both integrated video and a discrete video system for higher-power work like image editing and gaming. This handy little passive tool shows me at a glance if the energy-saving integrated video mode is on, or if the more battery-hungry discrete graphics system is being used. What's more, I can use it to force the integrated video on; it slows down graphics-intensive apps but helps my battery live a bit longer between charges. Donationware - Download Now
• Dropbox: The popular cloud storage service is vital to us at iMore - we use it for common files we use throughout our work, templates, source art and more. What's more, I use it to share files I need to get to other people - it's as simple as moving a file into my Dropbox folder and control-clicking it to get a link I can drop in an e-mail or share via social media. Free - Download now
• SugarSync: Dropbox is great for shared repositories, but those files need to live in the Dropbox folder. SugarSync helps me synchronize the rest of my files. My Documents folder contains dozens of subfolders I use for various work and personal files - my archive of iMore articles, for example, receipts, stuff I've written for other publications and much more. Those are files I want instant access to regardless of what Mac I'm using - SugarSync makes it happen seamlessly. $7.49 per month - Download now
• Flint: Campfire is an essential communication tool for the iMore staff - it's our editorial bullpen, for all intents and purposes. Flint is an excellent Campfire client that lets me know at a glance if there's anything going on that I need to pay attention to. It maintains transcripts and can also ping me with a Notification Center alert if messages containing any words (like my name) are posted. $7.99 - Download now
• Echofon: My favorite Twitter client for the Mac. Syncs between its OS X and iOS counterparts, so I don't have to read the same tweets twice. Clean interface, fast, and well supported. $9.99 - Download now
• Fantastical: Flexibits' calendaring app provides me with an instant view of my upcoming appointments along with reminders, and lets me enter new items in my calendar using natural language parsing. It's a great replacement for Apple's own Calendar app. $19.99 - Download now
• Skype: I have to admit that I'm not the most enthusiastic Skype user. But Skype is an essential business tool. I used it to talk with other iMore folks, I use it to interview people, I use it to get in touch with friends and colleagues. The big advantage to Skype is that it's multiplatform - something that despite Apple's initial promises, FaceTime is not. Free - Download now

That's it! Those are all my menu items. See any common tools that you rely on? What other menu tools do you find completely necessary? Sound off in the comments.

If you're iPhone or iPad is jailbroken on iOS 7 or above, ProWidgets should be the very next app you install on it. Why you ask? Because it takes multitasking and gesture support to a completely new level.

ProWidgets is a collection of apps that can be multitasked in completely different ways than before. By default ProWidgets gives you control over many native functions such as event creation, quick reply messaging, setting alarms, and much more. You can configure icons in Control Center, Notification Center, on your Lock screen, or use Activator to assign custom ones.

The rest of ProWidgets works as a stack of cards that you can manipulate and interact with. For example, invoke a gesture for quick reply messages and a card appears that you can start typing a message in. If that process is interrupted, ProWidgets minimizes this card on the side of your iPhone or iPad's Home screen until you're ready to finish up. You can drag these cards around and reorder them as you see fit. They'll remain until you complete the action or close them. By default they stack but you can unstack and organize them however you'd like.

Since ProWidgets lets you install other types of actions via URLs, the possibilities of what you can create with it is pretty much endless. It reminds me somewhat of the functionality offered by Launch Center Pro. If you use that, you should be right at home with ProWidgets. One of my favorites so far is the ability to launch a browser window with one gesture. This is extremely useful for times I want to look something up quickly without exiting the app I'm currently in.

It'll be very interesting to see where ProWidgets goes from here and how quickly developers and users alike start creating useful actions for it. The developer includes support for the following apps built-in to ProWidgets:

• Messages
• Mail
• Reminders
• Calendar
• Browser
• Notes
• Alarm
• Timer
• Dictionary

A near future update should also include support for Spotify and Google Authenticator natively as well.

If you happen to check out ProWidgets, let me know in the comments what you think of it. Does it eliminate your need for other jailbreak tweaks or apps — and if so, which ones?

• $2.99 - Cydia Link

Launch Center Pro lets you create actions for all the things you do regularly on your iPhone and iPad, from emailing a specific person to sending a boilerplate text message, it can do it all. What's more, if you create a particularly cool action, you can easily share it with friends, families, co-workers... anyone at all!

How to share an action in Launch Center Pro for iPhone and iPad

1. Open the Launch Center Pro app on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap the Edit button in the upper right hand corner.
3. Tap on the action you'd like to share.
4. In the next menu, tap on Share Action.
5. Safari should now launch and show you some information about your action. Fill in anything you'd like the person to know and remove any personal information. Then tap on Create.
6. *Copy the URL** from the Address Bar.
7. Share the URL with anyone you'd like to have the action.

The person you shared it with can just go to the URL and Launch Center Pro can import the action all on its own. You can alternately tap the Share button in Safari to share an action. I prefer the URL method so I can paste it wherever I want. You can, however, use whichever suits your needs best.

If you use Launch Center Pro, have you ever shared actions with other people? And if you have any cool actions you've created, feel free to share their URLs in the comments below along with a description of what it does!

The United States Federal Communications Commission has re-released their FCC Speed Test app for iPhone and iPad and iPad. It lets you directly measure upload, download, latency, and packet-loss over both cellular and Wi-Fi. You can also choose to anonymously submit information to the FCC about your results through the Measuring Broadband America program which aims to create transparency about actual network performance.

FCC Speed Test looks at a couple things when measuring network performance — download, upload, latency, and packet loss. Each time you run a test it'll give you some general information about your cellular network. When testing WiFi networks I didn't get the same amount of information so I'm not sure if there was an incompatibility with my provider (Comcast) or if FCC Speed Test simply doesn't monitor ISPs the same way.

You can then break out data from FCC Speed Test in different time lengths such as a week, month, or year. The expanding graphs give you an overview of what kind of data performance you've been getting. You can choose to share this data with the FCC or you can keep it just for your own reference. You can set limits in settings as well for how much data you want the app to be able to transmit so you ensure you aren't hitting any data caps you may have.

I tested FCC Speed Test against the popular Speedtest.net app by Ookla. Overall, they seemed pretty close on both WiFi and over the cellular network. You can see the results in the screenshots below. FCC Speed Test measures a few more statistics than Speedtest.net does but lacks the server options. In my experience server options can make a huge difference in results. Also, FCC Speed Test is U.S. only while Speedtest.net is available internationally.

I'd recommend the FCC Speed Test app if you're in the U.S. and want more detailed information on the quality of your cellular network connection, especially if you want to contribute to the FCC monitoring program. If you give it a try, let me know — how fast and how well does your connection measure up with FCC Speed Test?

• Free - Download Now

If you're using Launch Center Pro on a daily basis, you may come across a time or two when apps you've recently installed aren't showing up as installed inside Launch Center Pro. Luckily there's an easy fix built right into Launch Center Pro itself. Here's how to fix it:

1. Open Launch Center Pro on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap the Edit button in the upper right hand corner.
3. Tap on an empty square and choose Action.
4. Now choose Action Composer.
5. Tap on Installed Apps.
6. In the upper right hand corner, tap on the Refresh button.

Launch Center Pro will automatically detect any new apps that you've installed since the last time it checked and import them. That's all there is to it. Any new apps should now show up in Launch Center Pro and be available to create actions with.

If you've started creating your own actions in Launch Center Pro, you may find that after a while you run out of grids on the main menu. Organizing your actions into groups not only lets you create more actions but helps keep them neat and organized so you can get to them easily. Here's how:

• How to create a group in Launch Center Pro
• How to move an existing actions into a group in Launch Center Pro

How to create a group in Launch Center Pro

1. Open Launch Center Pro on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on the Edit button in the upper right hand corner.
3. Tap on a blank space on the main menu.
4. On the popup menu, select Group.
5. Name your new group and choose an icon.
6. Once you're finished tap Done in the upper right hand corner.

How to move an existing actions into a group in Launch Center Pro

1. Open Launch Center Pro on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on the Edit button in the upper right hand corner.
3. Now tap on the action you want to move.
4. Scroll down and tap on Move Action.
5. Now tap on the Group you'd like to move the action to.
6. Select a blank square you'd like the action to now be located at.
7. Tap Done in the upper right hand corner.

That's all there is to it. Your actions are now organized into groups. Sometimes you may have to play around with a few different layouts to find the one that suits you best. I've moved actions around numerous times and eventually I get them right to where it's muscle memory. What about you? How have you organized Launch Center Pro actions on your iPhone or iPad? Are they the same across devices or different? Let me know in the comments!

Launch Center Pro is all about productivity and getting to the things on your iPhone or iPad that you use the most. We've already looked at some basic actions such as how to launch apps but that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of functionality. Launch Center Pro can even launch into specific tasks for some apps such as creating a new calendar event. Here's how to get started:

How to create an advanced action in Launch Center Pro

Before beginning, keep in mind that Launch Center Pro doesn't support every app in the App Store. It supports a good amount of productivity apps though such as Fantastical, Clear, Byword, and more.

For this example, I'm going to launch directly into creating a new reminder via Fantastical. You can choose a different one if you'd like though.

1. Open Launch Center Pro on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on the Edit button in the upper right hand corner.
3. Either tap on an empty block or tap into an existing group and choose one.
4. In the popup menu, tap on Action.
5. Now tap on Action Composer.
6. Choose an appropriate section. Apple made and system apps are under System Actions while the other sections contain third party apps. To be on the safe side, tap on Installed Apps and choose the app you'd like to create an action with. You'll notice that apps that have more than one app action outside of simply launching it have a carat off to the right indicating there is more than one action available.
7. Choose the event type you'd like. In my example, I'm going to choose New Reminder.
8. Now I'm going to name the action. For this one, I'll just put Add Reminder in the Name field and then tap Done in the upper right. I could fill out additional fields if I'd like but for a general reminder, I don't need to.
9. Make any other changes or tweaks you'd like on the summary screen and then tap Done in the upper right hand corner.
10. Exit editing mode by tapping Done in the upper right one more time.

That's it. Your new action is ready to use. Advanced actions are where Launch Center Pro really shines. While you could always use Siri to launch apps, you can't always get Siri to behave when it comes to performing more specific tasks in a timely manner.

Give an advanced action a shot and then let us know how it went. Are there any apps missing in Launch Center Pro that you'd really like to see get some advanced action treatment? Let us know that too!

Launch Center Pro focuses on giving you access to the things you use most on your iPhone and iPad, as fast as possible. That includes launching your favorite apps. Here's how:

• How to add an app to Launch Center Pro for iPhone and iPad
• How to launch an app with Launch Center Pro for iPhone and iPad

How to add an app to Launch Center Pro for iPhone and iPad

1. Open Launch Center Pro on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on the Edit button in the upper right hand corner.
3. Here you can either tap on an empty square in the main screen to add an action, or open a group and create one within. In this example, I'm going to create an action inside the Apps group.
4. Now tap on Action Composer.
5. Choose an app category. Again this choice is yours and you can browse through each section to see which apps they contain.
6. Tap on the app name in order to start creating an action. In my example, I'll choose Fantastical.
7. For this example, I just want the app to launch so I'll select Launch Fantastical 2.
8. Give your action a name if you haven't already and then tap Done in the upper right hand corner.
9. Tap on Done on more time to confirm.

That's it, you're now ready to start using your new action.

How to launch an app with Launch Center Pro for iPhone and iPad

1. Open Launch Center Pro on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on your action to launch the chosen app or tap and hold on a group to expand it.
3. Now slide your finger to the action inside the group and release it on the action.

That's it. The selected app will launch instantly.

Launching apps with Launch Center Pro is a great alternative to using folders that you have to continuously open and thumb through. Give it a try and tell us what you think as opposed to using folders!

Launch Center Pro for iPhone and iPad lets you create incredibly convenient shortcuts so you can access your most commonly performed actions with light speed. One thing that Launch Center Pro handles wonderfully is contacts. From messaging to FaceTime to phone calls, Launch Center Pro lets you do it in record time. Here's how to get started:

• How to create a contact shortcut in Launch Center Pro
• How to use a shortcut for a contact in Launch Center Pro

How to create a contact shortcut in Launch Center Pro

1. Launch the Launch Center Pro app on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap the Edit button in the upper right hand corner.
3. For this example, I'm going to create an action inside the Contacts group. So I'll tap on Contacts. You can however place it inside any group you want or on the main Launch Center Pro dashboard.
4. Tap on an empty tile to start creating an action.
5. Give your action a name. In my example I'll name mine Email Rene.
6. Now tap on Action Composer.
7. Now tap on System Actions. What you choose may depend on what kind of action you're creating. But for my example, I'll choose System Actions.
8. I'll now select Mail.
9. Now I'll choose Send Email to Contact and find Rene in my contacts.
10. Now that I've created my action, I'll select Done in the top right corner.
11. Again I'll tap Done to confirm I'm done editing.

That's all there is to it. I know have a super quick shortcut to emailing Rene that takes a quick tap and a gesture. Obviously what options you select for creating contact actions will vary depending on what you'd like to do. You would just choose the different type of communication such as FaceTime, Message, or something else.

How to use a shortcut for a contact in Launch Center Pro

1. Launch the Launch Center Pro app on your iPhone or iPad.
2. If the action you created was on the main dashboard, simply tap on it and you're done. If it was in a group however, tap and hold the group name to bring it up.
3. Now just drag your finger to the action inside the group in order to perform it.

That's all there is to it. Once you create your actions you'll always be able to access them with just a quick tap and perhaps a gesture or two.

Try it out and let us know how it works for you. If you use Launch Center Pro regularly, let us know in the comments how it's improved your interaction with your iPhone or iPad. Does it help you get to commonly performed tasks a lot quicker and easier?

Droplr has just announced an overhaul to their pricing structure along with new account types, an updated Mac app, and more. Free accounts are going away but paid accounts are getting larger upload limits and unlimited file sharing. Account types have also been added such as business plans. Single file uploads have also been increased to 2GB.

Where pricing is concerned, personal accounts start at $4.99 a month for Droplr Lite or $9.99 a month for Droplr Pro which adds extra features such as password protected sharing. Business accounts also start at $9.99. Enterprise accounts are also available but you'll need to call as they are dependent upon your organization's individual needs. All paid plans will have unlimited sharing. To ease the initial cost, Droplr is offering a 30% lifetime discount for a limited time on all paid plans to existing customers. For example, the Lite account would cost an existing customer $3.50 a month or $35 a year.

Droplr for Mac 4.0 brings a new refreshed interface plus some updates in usability such as one click access to drop title editing, share options, privacy and password settings, and more. Anyone who already has the Mac app can grab the update for free in the Mac App Store.

While no one likes when a free service goes paid, Droplr isn't offering a bad deal. The ability to upload tons of file types and share them instantly is invaluable to a lot of folks. Droplr says they have plans to increase the 2GB upload limit even more in the near future. For those that don't want to pay, the new referral service lets you get 10% off your subscription for life every time someone uses your link to sign up. If you get 10 people, you've got Droplr for free for life, so there's always that route.

If you currently use Droplr, are you planning on paying for it going forward? Let us know in the comments!

Screens by Edovia is my favorite VNC client for iOS and Mac, because the developers and designers care about what I care about - a great, focused user experience. And now they've brought that sensibility - and their kickass VNC apps - to iOS 7 with Screens 3.

It looks like you'd expect it to look. Clear. Deferential. With just the right touch of translucent depth. If you've used Screens before, everything is just where you left it. If you haven't, everything is just where you'd expect it to be. In addition to the new design, it's got better keyboard support for Screens Connect users, as well as enhanced gesture support.

I've been using it for a few weeks, since the beta, and it's performed spectacularly. It's so fast on the iPhone 5 and iPad mini, I can't imagine how it will feel on the iPhone 5s. But I want to try. Like now.

Screens 3 is a new app, which means if you previously bought Screens 2, you can keep using it, but you won't get the new design or features now or in the future. I bought it without hesitation because, frankly, it's less expensive than the a family dinner at KFC, I use it every day, and I want to support the developer so I'll get Screens 4. I expect my boss to pay me when I work, so I'm happy to pay developers and designers when they work.

Having watched screens go from stately wood in version one to elegant gray in version two to futuristic layers in version three, yet stay true to its purpose and experience has been amazing.

Congrats to Edovia, thanks for the hard work, and if you're looking for a great iOS 7-style, Apple-style VNC client for your iPhone and iPad, go get it now.

• $19.99 - Download now

Don Melton, former Engineering Director of Internet Technologies at Apple, returns for a special follow-up episode with Guy and Rene to discuss the newly announced Google Blink and Mozilla/Samsung Servo HTML rendering engines, and to tell us what us which new bear he's trying to get dancing.

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Show notes

• Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project
• Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine
• Úll conference

Guests

• Don Melton of donmelton.com

Hosts

• Guy English of Kicking Bear
• Rene Ritchie of iMore.com

Transcript

Rene Ritchie: The world needs to calm the fuck down a bit, I think. Sorry. [laughs]

Guy English: Alright, this is Guy English.

Rene: This is Rene Ritchie, and welcome to debug. Today we are revisiting Don Melton because the minute after we let him go the last time Google announced Blink, Samsung and Mozilla announced Servo, and the entire world went topsy-turvy. Is that fair Don?

Don Melton: Yeah, to talk about Blink first. By the way, I don't normal comment on Apple's current efforts, policies, and things like that but since Webkit is an open source project, I'll keep my comments narrowed to that. I was surprised it was that particular day from the announcement, but this was not unexpected. Something like Blink, well the name was unexpected, "Blink," who the hell came up with that?

I've really been expecting them to fork for a while. I figured they would fork after we announced Webkit2, so it's not unexpected. They're allowed to fork, Webkit is open source. Essentially, I did the same with KHML AND KGS almost 12 years ago.

It's not that big a deal. To get to it, everybody needs to chill the fuck out, to use the f-bomb again. It doesn't mean the death of Webkit, or the ascendency of Blink, or anything else like that. Some things just got easier and some things got harder for both projects and both teams. I get real annoyed at the press because Blink isn't suddenly more streamlined, since it's left the quote unquote crusty old Webkit.

I can guarantee you code is being jettison from Webkit2, maybe even more so than from Blink, but who knows? It's not that big a deal.

Guy: Do you think that the stated goal was to jettison a bunch of platform support that they don't need and try to clean things up a little bit?

Don: I think that's the stated goal, but in a way it's really about control.

Guy: OK, yeah.

Don: I mean all forks are about control. Doing a big cooperative project like that there's always body checking. [laughs] Especially when you have big companies and big personalities, but it's not really that big a deal. The thing is when you're in the web browser or web content engine business you know everybody after awhile.

I mean I've worked on... well depending on how you count three of these systems, and I know a lot of people, and there's nobody that I don't want to talk to. I mean, I still talk to folks from time to time. I still talk to Brandon Ike on occasion. Mike Shafer even though he's over at Facebook now. I talk to Dean Hasimovich at Microsoft every once in awhile. Hell, he's a Facebook friend.

These things are complicated and I don't want to project something onto the situation that was not there. I don't think anybody is particularly panicked or all that upset on either side. You have to remember that the projects are still more alike than they're different now and they probably will be for awhile.

Rene: Was it a reasonable fear that you know people would wake up and it would be IE 6 all over again and you would have to add special exemptions for Blink, and different code for Chrome, and the web would go back to having isolated islands? I think that was the panic response when the announcement came out.

Don: There's been a panic for awhile about the whole Webkit mono culture thing, and it may be the only good thing that comes out of this in the short term is it calms those people down because you've got two of these things now. I think that was some concern, but let's see what happens. It's too early. Anybody that claims to know what's going to happen here is full if shit. Including me.

[laughter]

Don: The other the thing to keep in mind is that like I said the press that I read about this was really annoying me because you know it's all the, "It's great for Google, it's bad for Apple," kind of thing, and that's kind of horseshit. It cuts both ways. Google is not going to have the crew that started Webkit.

They don't have Maciej Stachowiak, David Hyatt or Darin Adler, that are still working on Webkit. They don't have Adele Peterson, Sam Weinig or Jeff Garret. Those are kinds of things that they miss, too. They don't have the other resources. Apple's not going to have, obviously, some of their people and some of the other things, but it's not death. It's OK.

Guy: You feel it got spun into being a massive corporate kind of battle...

Don: Yeah, it's not really that big a deal. It's big corporations, and I think when you work on Webkit, you try to ignore that as much as possible. If you talk to some of the Webkit and Blink people, probably, dealing with W3C and other organization's more of a hassle that that, that's always been a headache over the years.

Rene: You're basically telling the kids that mommy and daddy won't live together anymore, but everything's still going to be OK?

Don: The thing is they're still going to have to live together. If you think that if Apple does a security patch in a piece of code that it needs to be shared, fixes some bug. You don't think Google is not going to go over and figure out what the div is patch and put that in. They're going to have to do that kind of work. They're going to have to work together and talk to each other still for that kind of thing, and it goes both ways.

If Google comes up with something in a piece of shared code they used to have, and Apple thinks that would be useful, the Apple guys...It's not just the Apple guys. There are lots of other people besides Apple working on Webkit, and there are other people besides Google working on Blink. Maybe, this is something that doesn't completely last.

There have been times when projects have forked and they've come back together. Who knows. One of the more interesting announcements was Servo. I wasn't quite expecting that.

Rene: Apparently, from the rumors at least, that was deliberately done right in front of Blink just to get out ahead of them. It was interesting.

Don: [laughs] If [indecipherable 7:55] , I would have done that...

[laughter]

Don: ...to get everybody distracted. They needed some press there. It's a...

[crosstalk]

Guy: What do we know about Servo? It's a whole new thing.

Don: Nothing. It that they're wanting to go out and rewrite their engine, and use the new language that they've been working on for several years called Rust to rewrite the engine. They're not rewriting everything in Rust. They're rewriting the core. They're essentially rewriting large parts of Gecko in Rust.

I don't think they're rewriting everything. I think it would probably be crazy to rewrite everything. I'm not sure. One of the reasons they said they needed to use Rust was for performance. I'm not quite buying that because C++ seems to have been working fine for Webkit and the LLVM Teams for years. I'm not buying that.

Guy: The other one was they said security, too, right?

Don: Yeah. I don't know why the language really...You can write secure code in COBOL.

Guy: [laughs] I think it has affordances that makes it easier to avoid buffer overruns and the basic stuff.

Don: That kind of stuff, yeah. We investigated things like that at Apple. You have to be very careful with that, because you can also introduce tremendous performance penalties if you try to do it in a generalized way in places where you don't actually need it. You want to focus on where the real problems are, so you have to be careful with that.

Rewriting an engine from scratch is not always wise. When we started Safari in Webkit, I didn't want to rewrite the engine from scratch. I knew that they would fire me before I was able to get something done. That's why I used something off the shelf. We eventually rewrote it. People don't realize is that WebKit has being rewritten multiple times. It's always rewritten, refactored, [laughs] and redone.

It's a subtle thing that the WebKit team has always been doing. That's why it's so up-to-date and cool, because it's always being reengineered. But it's done in small chunks, carefully.

Guy: I does seem a little foolhardy to just publicly say that you're going to be writing an engine with a new language. It's biting off a lot to chew.

Don: Props to them for having the stones to do it, if they can pull it off.

Rene: Yeah. I think the Samsung angle is really interesting here too, because they do Android, but they used to do Bada, now they're doing Tizen on the side. They have the Android browser, and the Chrome browser, but now they're doing Servo on the side.

Don: Samsung, I cannot figure out. It seems to me that there's somebody with a magic eight ball over there, just rotating it and trying to figure out technology choices, at least for software. Software, I can't figure out what the hell they're doing.

Guy: Yeah, I don't understand them at all. They're making money, so [indecipherable 11:32] , but I still don't understand what their thinking is.

Don: In the mobile space, it's basically the two people making money on hardware are Apple, who makes the most, and then Samsung, and nobody else [laughs] makes really any money these days to speak of. Hey, maybe they're up to something...

Guy: So did Gecko need it? Sorry, go ahead.

Don: I'm sorry, maybe they'll pull this off, who knows. Best of luck to them. I know some of the people over there working on that. They're good people, they're smart people.

Guy: That's certainly an interesting direction to go in, rather than just grabbing off-the-shelf stuff, trying to actually roll your own. It's an interesting play for them.

Don: Yeah. Being a Web engine geek, I'm sure I'll download it, try to compile it, and stuff like that, like I do occasionally when the fit hits me for other things and see what's happening. You know running WebKit nightlies and stuff, I've done that for years to keep appraised of what's going on, and to nag people I know about some bug or something else that I've had.

I do that for lots of other projects, just hobbies, but it goes back to having the superpowers. As a geek, you can do that stuff. I do not recommend this for other people. [laughs]

Guy: The nightlies aren't for everybody?

Don: No, WebKit nightlies are very, very stable, but I don't recommend them for everybody. I think a lot of people who run them are actually not the developers. The code developers there are website developers, content developers, who run the nightlies. I think that's actually a really good thing, because that's especially who you want feedback from.

Guy: Yeah, good valid testing.

Don: You need to listen to those people.

Guy: Is that true for Servo? Is this Servo public at all yet or is it just a name?

Don: I have no idea, I haven't looked yet. I'm waiting until I see something on Hacker News, and like, "Oh, OK. I'll go..."

Guy: Yeah, exactly. It seem like...

Don: That's what everybody does, right?

[laughter]

Don: Anyway, the sure thing is, everybody calm down about WebKit and Blink and let the teams do their jobs, Servo is interesting, and best of luck with that.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: Yeah, they're all going to work. There's not a...

Guy: I don't think we're going to get back to the time where the Web is so bifurcated between totally different engines. I don't think it's in anybody's best interesting.

Don: It's not the engines we should be worrying about with the Web. It's co-opting the Web in other ways, it's what we should be worrying about. If governments take over essential services and technologies, that's when you worry, because governments always know what they're doing. That's the kind of crap I worry about.

But this...these little pissing contests between engines and other stuff like that, or supposed pissing contests, because there's not really that kind of thing going on. For example, I know some of the people in the Blink team. Some of those guys, I hired, either at Netscape, at least one at Apple, one over there. These are nice people. They're not jerks...

Guy: Yeah. I don't think this needs to be a consumer level conflict, necessarily. It's just the way the code is going, and it makes sense to split it down the middle and go in different directions.

Don: Yeah, we'll see what they come up with, and yeah, whatever.

[crosstalk]

Guy: I love that this is the big news and you're just bored by it.

Don: No. As you said, that was several weeks ago. But my attention [laughs] span is very short, anyway.

Guy: It should be, because it's certainly not now.

Don: The thing to do is that a year from now I have a retrospective and, say, we still don't know [indecipherable 16:38] .

Guy: Yeah, and even a year from now, I can't see, anything huge. Like what? Like and extra [indecipherable 16:48] .

Don: I think a year from now...I think the projects are still going to be very similar. It's not that big a deal.

Guy: It seems like a huge codebase and it would take a long time to go in a radically different direction. Not only that, but the goal is to render everything the same anyway, so from a user's perspective, I don't see this being such a big deal.

Don: No, from the user's perspective it could be an improvement because of competition. Look at what happened when we came out with WebKit and Safari. I talked about this during my talk at Google, how we made Safari fast. We started the second browser war, it was a performance war. That was just better for everybody.

Guy: Yeah. When you're building this, you're making decisions. You're like, "This is the way we're going to go," and any one of those decisions might have gone either way. With WebKit and Blink, you get a bit of an A/B test. You can try different approaches.

Don: Right, and there's competition among teams. There certainly always has been. Remember the ACID test, the silly ACID test, that even Hicks says that they're silly. There's competitions between all the different browser teams to try to get the best scores on that. Some of that was just nonsensical, but in other ways, it improved everybody's engine. It's a shame that there's not going to be an Opera engine anymore.

Guy: Yeah, I forgot about that fellow. Poor Opera, man. What happened there? They decided to go with Blink?

Rene: Ice and Blink.

Guy: Well, they've decided to go with Chromium. What I get is they're really choosing is Chromium because they needed a GUI because they were not only letting go of members of the core team, they were letting go of members of UI team and stuff like that. They needed a project that was a browser too.

They'll naturally follow the Blink path rather than the straight WebKit path because they need GUI. I mean, Apple does not open source Safari.

Guy: That's a shame. I know they had weird, spotty support at times, but I like having that sort of biodiversity.

Don: Oh yeah. You know I'm a browser geek, so I have every browser ever made. I usually have...Let me go into Launchpad here. On my top row in Launchpad, I've got Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera right up there.

Then I got VMware, so I can run, not VMware, VirtualBox, so I can run multiple versions of Internet Explorer. I got a simulator around here somewhere, so I can run the older versions of stuff just when I get nostalgic.

Guy: You have some browser cred is what you're trying to say.

Don: That's like being a browser fanboy, that doesn't mean cred. But a lot of content developers have that same thing. I've had that for years for testing purposes and stuff.

Guy: You mentioned breifly, but you were in Dublin for the Úll conference recently. You've got to talk about making Safari faster.

Don: Actually, it's pronounced "ul." Not "yul," "ul." I got dope slapped for that a couple of times at Úll conference. It was the best conference ever. Let me tell you, it was fantastic. The hosts, Paul Campbell and Dermot Daly, are just wonderful people.

They put together this conference that's not only wonderful for all the speakers but wonderful for all the attendees. If I was a sponsor of the conference, I think for the sponsors too. It was fantastic to go to Dublin, I'd never been to Dublin, and to meet all those wonderful people and listen to just some amazing folks.

I met Matt Gemmell and his silky smooth Scottish voice. I told Matt that I wish I could bottle that voice and take it back to America. I got to meet Gruber finally in person, he's hysterical, along with my old friend Michael Lopp, and Horace Dediu, and Michael Johnson, Dr. Wave, from Pixar. I got to have dinner with them and Neven Mrgan.

Guy: Neven's great too.

Don: Horace is a brilliant man. We were in the...I think it was one of the breaks in the afternoon. In this session, we were all in this pub. I think it was one of the pub sessions that was sponsored by either Dropbox or Github.

We're standing there next to the bar interfering with other people's ability to get Guinness [indecipherable 22:31] . Horace would say things and would talk about the industry and say, "Anyway, that's my theory. What do you think Don?" I was getting the point, and I was just joking with him and I was saying, "Damn it, Horace! You're right once again." At least in my opinion, he is a brilliant guy.

Of course, Michael Johnson, he's got so many stories from Pixar. He and I had probably, between the two of us, some of the best Steve Jobs stories there. We actually were to of the people, as we were both joking, we were two of the people who, Steve actually knew our names which was a good thing and a bad thing.

[laughter]

Don: Other people there, Jamiee Newberry from Black Pixel, she was great. Charles Perry, a guy I never heard of from the company called Leaf Hut Software. He did this talk on accessibility. Oh my God, It's the best talk on accessibility I've ever heard.

Guy: Yeah, I think that's an overlooked technology at times. I'd like more attention payed to that.

Don: Of course, Jim Dalrymple was there. He talked about, I think in his podcast last week, about his "panel discussion" he had with Dave Wiskus and Kyle Neath which was not a panel discussion at all. It was a performance.

They went out and set Dave and Kyle and one of the other people, I forget who it was, were introduced by, I think it was Durment, sat on these stools as if they were going to do a panel discussion. Then they said, "Here's Jim Dalrymple," and he walks out with a guitar. The panel was actually a band.

They did 12 cover tunes, all the original songs of course which are in my iTunes playlist, I don't know about your...classic kind of rock, Led Zep, AC/DC, Nirvana, and stuff like that. It was great stuff. Then an original composition by Jim, that was fantastic.

Guy: Sounds like it was a blast.

Don: Yeah, the people there were great. I got to meet the Lord Mayor of Dublin. He's hysterical. I had to practice pronouncing his name, spelled N-A-O-I-S-E. I guess it's pronounced "Neesha." My new friend, Oisín Hurley, he was one of the sponsors and his buddy, Barry Scott, from Converser. Oisín's name is spelled O-I-S-I-N. Gaelic, it's hard.

[laughter]

Guy: It's not even a word. It's not a name? It's not even a word.

Don: What you learn to do is you have another Guinness. Let me tell you, if you go to Dublin, if you go to Ireland, you need to have a Guinness because when I went to Dublin and I drank my first Guinness, and not my only Guinness let me tell you, it made every Guinness I've had in the States taste like piss. You know what they say, "It doesn't travel well," and they're right.

My wife went with me. We went to St. James's Gate Brewery for the tour which was fantastic and had one each poured for us up in the Gravity Bar up on the, I don't know, seventh or eighth story, where you can overlook Dublin, fantastic view. It was like this marvelous beer milkshake. Oh, my God!

Guy: [laughs] That sounds great. I got to go there. I'll try to go next year.

[crosstalk]

Guy: Don't worry. They'll put in a good word for you.

[laughter]

Don: Paul Derman! I love you guys. No, seriously, they're really fantastic.

Guy: You gave a talk about speeding up Safari. Do you want us the gist of it?

Don: It was a bit of history about how we made Safari fast. One of my jokes in the talk was, we made it fast by making it slow first. [laughs] Fortunately too slow. Why I wanted to do the talk is I wanted to delve into a bit of history, and inside baseball for people, because they seemed to enjoy that, and things that they may not have heard, that nobody had ever heard, as far as I know, outside of the fruit company.

Outside of my little sessions, I would do at Apple in my department...The new people in the department would sometimes say, "Gramps, tell us a story. Something about back when you and Al Gore invented the Internet."

Guy: You'd sit around the campfire in the office?

Don: Yeah, pretty much. Around the couches and stuff like that. I would tell stories, usually with Darin Adler hanging around too because Derin's got...Hell, he's got even more stories than I do in a way because he was back at Apple back in the late '80s and early '90s. He and I would have dueling bullshit going on sometimes. That was a lot of fun.

We, as you well know from talking to me, he and I could both talk for hours, so a lot of fun. The new folks would actually listen and were semi-respectful. Hopefully, they'll learn something from those talks. I'm hoping they make a lot of stories of their own now. That's what they're doing.

Guy: I'm sure that's happening. It's the way things go, right?

Don: Yeah.

Guy: What was the gist? What's the take away from your talk?

Don: Well, the gist was that...What the hell? I had my speech laying here. I'll just get out my notes. The gist of it was, I asked, at the end after I told the background story was, "What do you want to learn from this?" It's real simple principles that a lot of people know is you set the bar high and performance. You don't optimize ahead of time. You measure first.

This is something people always do wrong. You focus on the bottlenecks, and you just lather, rinse, repeat that. You make sure over time you add metrics. You never ever regress, ever, never. Did I say never? You never ever...

Guy: I think that's the big one.

Don: The other one is you make it your religion. Dante's sixth, not the seventh, circle of hell, it's good to be precise, has a place for people who invent their own religion. I'll probably be there right next to L. Ron Hubbard one day.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: I told a thing at the conference. I said, "Some teams out there like to have a performance month at the end of their projects." After they have an 18-month project and they have a performance month where they focus on performance before they ship, and we used to joke on the Safari team, we have perform months too, 12 times a year.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: Either you make it your religion, and you get serious about it, or you're not really focused on performance.

Guy: Yeah. When I worked on games, obviously performance is an issue, and so often, before some big milestone, there would just be a giant push to try to get everything performing well. It just felt like exactly the wrong thing to be doing. We should be more conscientiously keeping the frame rates up and keeping the times down.

Don: Yeah. [indecipherable 31:29] all the time.

Guy: Throughout the entire process.

Don: Yeah, yeah, that's what we learned. That's what the object lesson from the...The joke I made, it's how did we make Safari fast, well we made it really slow first. It was my fault. We took our eye off the ball. I was so focused in the beginning of the project, just getting that bear to dance that I was unaware that it was shuffling across stage, not dancing. We fixed that.

Guy: OK. [laughs] One interesting thing about Web engines is that the content isn't under your control.

Don: Oh. Interesting is not that's the word that I used for that.

[laughter]

Guy: What's your word, Don?

Don: That's like the Chinese [indecipherable 32:18] we live in interesting times.

Guy: [laughs] Exactly. What's your word? You can be as impolite as you like.

Don: O God, that would take more that the [indecipherable 32:33] .

Guy: [laughs] It's difficult to make something perform when you don't control the input, or you have no hope of controlling the input at all.

Don: Right. You have to realize that you have to approach a Web engine the way you would approach a operating system. It's almost as complex. Very, very close. People will do crazy-ass things with your APIs. You have to keep that in mind. That's why, when I said Webkit nightlies, I'm always delighted when I hear content developers are out there using it. I was like, "Yes! Yes! Please do that!"

Because if you notice something stupid in terms of capabilities, breakage, or, more importantly, performance on your site, we always encourage a lot of the big JavaScript framework folks, "Please use the WebKit nightlies, and tell us if you notice something going south right away," because one, we'll fix it, and two, we'll figure out a way to turn that into a test, another metric, because a lot of those systems are so complex they're very hard to test.

Guy: Was that something new that you...When you were at Netscape, did you guys do a bunch of tests all the time? Did you have a test suite and did you do the time test suite, the similar stuff that you do in Safari?

Don: It was not as rigorous back then as I'm sure the Mozilla team is doing now. They're much more rigorous now. Because after WebKit debuted and Safari really shot up there in terms of performance compared to other browsers and people were publishing stats on that, the Mozilla team had their "come to Jesus" moment and they really got serious about performance, too.

They adopted a lot of the same techniques and they developed other things. Especially the Mozilla conformance test, they're open-source, so everybody uses those. Some of the ones that we have, they use, because they're open-source. They do that now, but back in the old days, we didn't really have criteria before shipment, we didn't have policies during development that prevented regressions. We were not as focused on that.

Guy: How does that work at a mechanical level? There's a check-in, then there's an automated test that runs, and if the timing is slower, then the check-in is just rejected, somebody gets an angry email, or what?

Don: It's usually an angry email and then a club. [laughs] In the beginning, what I was talking about, my talk, when we discovered the sloth and stuff, we didn't have the automated test on Safari in the beginning. We had a testing harness that Ken Kocienda wrote, God bless him, and that we were able to use.

But it was very hard to get consistent results from it, because you're testing the network, the IO, and other things. Believe it or not, I was one of the few people on the team who could actually run the damn test and get consistent results. I used to aggravate the engineers.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: Being able to do that calls for this anal retentive psychosis.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: That's just perfect for me. In another life, I was a QA engineer. I run the tests, and if I detected we were slower, I closed the tree. That was the beginning of my policy, that policy that I pulled out of my hiney. Boy, talk about making yourself popular on your team doing that!

Guy: [laughs] Let's say you'd literally lock down any other commit until the speed was up?

Don: The engineers, at first, were like, "Why are you locking everybody out?" I was like, "Prove to me that it was just one check-in that's the failure. Unless we know what the problem is, I don't want anybody adding to the noise. I don't want to give up any gains." Why would you give up a gain? Never regress.

The thing is, with a no regressions policy...By the way, the engineers balked at first, but they very quickly, to their credit, the team, totally got it. They're carrying on in my place now. It's jihad now over there. They totally get it. The thing that we found out from the no regressions policy is, even if you're not focused on performance and you're just checking, making check-ins on other things, but you never regress performance, dumb luck...

Guy: [laughs]

Don: ...will make you faster. Entropy will make you faster. You're going to get gains not even trying. Why would you ever regress? That's crazy. Don't give up ground on good fortune. You're winning the lottery there. Maybe one percent, but one percent is one percent. If you could measure it and repeat it, well, ka-ching!

That's money in the bank. You certainly never want to give up gains on hard work. That's just crazy.

Guy: How do you balance that with...Let's say there's a certain CSS feature that you need to implement, but...

Don: That's a story in my talk right there. That's a great example. When Dave Hyatt, the brilliant Dave Hyatt, shortly after he joined the team, we noticed that...He noticed because he's much smarter than the rest of us, and he was the first person on the team that really allowed us to actually spank KHTML, because I had the rest of the engineers focused on making everything around the engine actually work until they got enough domain knowledge to go in and actually change things.

But Dave had been working on Web engines at Mozilla for a while, so he had the experience. He came in and, first things he started on, because he joined the project a year in, was that KHTML was really awful at DOM whitespace handling at the time. This would mean you would get an incorrect DOM being created, and it was causing all sorts of compatibility problems.

Dave worked on this huge patch for over a week, and we really needed this correctness improvement. He told me he was working on this and I thought it was a great idea. He came to me and said, "OK, the patch is ready." I said, "OK, what's the performance impact? How did you test?"

We put it on the scope, and it was eight percent slower. [laughs] I was like, "We really need this feature, Dave, but you can't check it in." [laughs] He was like, "But it's doing so much more work!" because it was doing a lot more measurements and stuff like that, and, "It has more features."

I would hear that thing from people over the years, and I was like, "Nope. Find a way to make it faster." He grumbled at first, but he went away for a few days and he came back with another version of it that was one percent faster than what was in the tree. He made a nine-percent improvement and posted on the line. Not only do we get the new feature, but we get a one-percent performance improvement.

That's what you do. You never regress. When I hear about people that are, "Well, it's doing all this extra stuff..." Now, you have to be very, very careful about what your metrics are, what your benchmarks are, upfront.

Guy: I was just going to ask that.

Don: Yeah. You don't want to bite yourself in the ass later on. Engineers have learned showing me demos of little things that they're working on at that time, not just showing me something that's really performing because it's not using real data or not connecting over the network, not a simulation, because if they show me the real thing after that and it's slower, that, I don't like it. Don't show me that's not going to be the real behavior, because that's going to make me angry.

Guy: [laughs] Yeah, I think that's a good point about the metrics. If you're not measuring the right thing, then this Middle Ages fervor to meet the metrics is just going to end up being misguided. I think that's probably the key is trying to dissect and figure out exactly what you want to measure and what you want to stick to.

Don: It's really hard. It took us a while the get the hang of that on Safari and Webkit, it really did. We had too many simplistic metrics in the beginning. These benchmarks are really hard, especially when you're dealing with live content, and making this stuff consistent. You have to deal with static pages, and then you have to simulate live connections, in other ways, it's maddening. But there are smart people working on this, much smarter than I am.

Guy: So there's hope. [laughs]

Don: Yeah, there's hope. The thing that I interjected in the process was anal retentiveness and a willingness to be an asshole, because that's what you have to be. If you're going to lead a project, you have to say, "No, we're going to do this and you have to be willing to be unpopular."

It's tough work, but in the end the engineers work is much harder. They were the ones doing the real heavy lifting. I just got to sit back and be a jerk.

Guy: [laughs] Cash a paycheck.

Don: Yeah, I'm sure they had a [indecipherable 43:59] . Obviously, I did more than that.

Guy: Of course, yeah.You haven't been writing. Last time we chatted, you said you were going to be writing, but you've been typing instead.

Don: Well, two things happen. One was the Úll conference. When I first wrote my talk, which was supposed to be for...25 minutes talk, and I wrote a 4,000-plus-word outline, and I just tried to stand and record myself and do the outline. I hit over 90 minutes and I went, "Oh, God! I'll have to stop and cut this," so I cut, cut, cut.

I was actually cutting until the night before Dublin again. [laughs] I cut some more stuff out there to try to fit in into 25 minutes. I was focused on that, and I just exhausted myself in terms of writing with that. But the other thing that happened was our family member, our dog, our little girl, a Labrador retriever, Penny, passed away.

When I say, "passed away," what that means is we had to make a decision, and life was not very pleasant for a while.

Guy: Yeah, that's tough. I've been there myself.

Don: Yeah. I just walked off the end of something, and just didn't want to anything for a while. But I had to get my stuff together and do something for Úll and focus on that. When I got back, [laughs] unfortunately I had to deal with the fact that we had a plumbing disaster in our house, water everywhere, and ruined carpeting, and walls with holes in them, and stuff like that, so I was...

Guy: Oh, that stinks.

Don: Yeah, literally. It did stink.

[laughter]

Don: Plus, we're having to get carpet pads replaced this week and some other stuff done, so we had to do that. The other thing is, I started writing again, but it was not on my website. It was code, stupidly. I don't know why. I just got a hair up my ass and started writing some code.

Guy: You're going to tell us what it is?

Don: Oh, yeah.

Guy: [laughs] You don't have to.

Don: No, no, no. It's fine. I'll probably put it on my git hub project page after a friend or two of mine looks at it and tells me, "Well, this isn't embarrassing, and won't ruin your career, or your street cred."

Guy: [laughs]

Don: But just to explain, it's not a big thing. I'm not trying to sell this. It's just a little utility. I feel embarrassed that it took me a week to write that damn thing. But I haven't been coding, especially...This is written in Objective-C. I hadn't written in Objective-C in a long time. People probably think I write iPhone apps every other day, or something like that. I just don't do that. I'm too lazy for that.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: I stopped my development of Objective-C and Cocoa geekiness when John Sullivan joined the Safari project, because he was so brilliant at it.

Guy: Yeah, that's the thing about being a manager. It's that you stop doing your trade and you start doing a new trade, which is managing people, which is a very different thing.

Don: Yeah. There are managers who can code and still code, but I didn't want to be the kind of manager, because there was so many things I had to deal with on, at first Safari, and WebKit, and then all the other projects I was managing, and then be the asshole that blunders into the tree, stomping around and ruining it for the developers.

As a manager, what part of your job is, as I always say, you stand at the backend of the elephant and you let it shit on you so it doesn't shit on your team. You deal with all that stuff, and you make your...

Guy: [laughs] That's graphic.

Don: Yeah, it's graphic, but it gets the point across. When I would have people in my department who wanted to be managers, who wanted to move into that role, I always gave them the talk, at first, to frighten them. I gave them the "shit's in," I like to call it, which is "Here's the good news. Glad you want to be a manager. Here's what it's really like. That's the poop in-between the layers of tasty bread. Yeah, I think you can do it, be on your way." Anyway, enough fecal humor.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: In this little project, basically, I just had a piece of software that was annoying me for a trivial reason and I decided to do my best at rewriting it. I'm a encoding geek. I like to encode video and audio and test it out, play with stuff. Before the podcast started today, Rene and I were talking about encoding a little bit. I was boring him about it.

Rene: Not boring me at all.

Don: [laughs]

Guy: Do you like the math side of it?

Don: No, not at all. In fact, one of the problems with doing this project was, I forgot...When I started writing it, I was like, "Oh, shit! They told me there was not going to be any math!" No. At least in this code, I like dealing with the whole system, but in terms of encoding itself, I like getting good video quality and good audio quality with the minimum amount of work, and time, and size, and figuring out what the tradeoffs are there.

I've gotten very good at that as a hobby over the years. Trust me, folks, this is something that you'd never want to do. By the way, I always say there's three tiers to consuming video and audio. What I always advise people when they see what I'm doing, "Oh, could I do that?" I always say, "Well, you could, but really, what you should do is, you should go to iTunes Store, or Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or something, and stream stuff and not worry about this crap.

Or if you have Blu-rays or DVDs, what you should do is, you should use a tool like MakeMKV, rip them, and play them back that way. Only an idiot like myself reencodes the Blu-rays and DVDs they have." In fact, as we're having this podcast, I've got a batch script with the Handbreak command line app that's been running for weeks now. Actually, since I was away at Úll, re-encoding my close to 300 titles of Blu-rays, in the background, because I want to see what the results of that are.

Guy: It's a bit of dedication.

Don: No, it's not dedication. This is insanity.

[laughter]

Don: Normal people should not do things like this. It takes a lot of disk space and time, but I'm retired, I'm patient. Anyway, I do this encoding stuff and you have to test it. I'm a command line geek. I obviously like GUI's and stuff. I spend, I swear, the...

There's a few apps I spend most of my time at. There are, Terminal, VBedit, Safari, mail. things like that, but Terminal I spend a lot of time in. Not to disparage my friend [indecipherable 52:31] who's in charge of the finder. I do well, too.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: I spend a lot of time in Terminal. I test stuff with Nplayer. The Nplayer command line utility. It's really good and because you can pass all sorts of different options to it and things like that.

It tends to decode h264 more consistently than actually VLC does or something like that. It has other problems, but anyway there's Nplayer on a Mac can actually put up a window and have it show you video and stuff like that.

It does annoying things, like they put up this beautiful video window and then the bottom corners of the window have turds in them, like white turds. When you go full screen there are these white turds in the corner. It's like, guys how hard is it not to put these white turds in the corner of the window?

Guy: Weird, it's what? Just part of the window chrome?

Don: It's the way they're rendering the open GL later, that they created, into the window. They're screwing up the mask or something.

Guy: That's weird, OK. Don: I'm looking at the code and it's hard to figure out. I thought at first about just going in and debugging it and running a patch. I hate running patched versions of things because then you have to keep running the patch when there are updates, running the patch and stuff like that.

I went, "Well there's this project out there called Inplayer OS10, and Inplayer OS10 Extended, Inplayer X. I think I'll actually all embed Inplayer, how do they do that? I bet I could do that, and write a littler wrapper for that."

Because I didn't like the way that they operated either, you can't operate them from the command line, and they do other annoying things even though they are nice pieces of software. I thought, "How the hell hard was that?" That's hubris and ignorance, once again. It twisted my arm and I'm such a sissy when they gang up on me, and so I just started typing. I had to relearn coco and objective c and stuff. I had this little app, its only about 600 to 750 lines of code. It's a command line app, which wraps Inplayer and dynamically becomes a coco app, which is fun.

Guy: Well that's a bit of a trick, right? Because you got to...?

Don: Yeah, because Nibs is for sissy's, and I'm doing all sorts of things I really didn't use before, core animation, OpenGL, Local event monitoring for the sense, nstask, nsconnections, because I've got to run Inplayer in another process and communicate with it. Having to use grand central dispatch and blocks, you know all the new toys the kids like.

Threaded connections and threaded rendering, full screen shenanigans with nsview and stuff like that. I actually asked a question on Twitter the other night because I got stuck, I got some good help from a friend of mine. It's fun and it works. It took me a while to reverse engineer Inplayer even though I have the source code in front of me. It's huge, it's old, and it's kind of corrupt, but it does work. To their credit it does work very well.

Don: It's almost done, I've got to do a few other things and make the code not look like it sucks and then I'll put it on my git hub page, and I thought, "You know, what I really need is a better player app," and so I may have convinced myself to actually write a real coco application that's a media player.

Guy: That could be good.

Don: Quicktime Player's full screen mode annoys the hell out of me, because it uses Mountain Lion full screen mode. I hate that.

Guy: Yeah, that used to be an awesome app, Quicktime 7. The current Quicktime player basically seems like a wraparound QT kit, effectively, which is fine, but...

Don: It actually is a nice GUI and I'm glad that they did something that a lot of people don't do with apps, they just sliced off an enormous number of features. The problem was, they sliced off the features and they didn't put them anywhere. [laughs] You have to have both apps around. If you're going to take features out, you have to make sure people have a way to do those things. That was a problem.

It was a nicely designed app, but I don't like the full screen mode. I've never liked the Mountain Lion full screen mode due to the slow ass switch. I want something instantaneous. It doesn't play very many formats. It's really good for MP4s and certain kind of AVIs, but if you have other things you can't play them with it.

Rene: Like MKV, it's just not...

Don: It just doesn't work, you need VLC, or one of the in player wrappers for that.

Rene: VLC is ugly. I don't like VLC either.

Don: The issue with VLC is it's got the iTunes disease. It's become everything. Now that works for iTunes. iTunes, especially the new interface in iTunes, people have laid a lot of hate on the iTunes team for I think is actually great.

Guy: It's definitely an improvement over the old one.

Don: It's definitely an improvement. It's simplifying the app without actually simplifying it. Which I think is a great thing. What I meant with the iTunes disease was a joke we used to make every once in a while, you keep putting features into it. VLC has too many features right now. I'm a maniac about, before I release any code or release anything, what I always go, "What features can I cut out of it? What don't we need?"

Even before I released my little piddle-y Magneto, my site generator? I cut features out of it. Not that it has a lot of features right now, but I thought, "Why am I doing that?"

Rene: Features that you weren't using yourself?

Don: No, they could be done another way, and one that I wasn't using myself, so why would I want that in there? They were pretty minor features, as an example. There are features in Safari that I've tried for years to cut out. I can't do anything about it now. Look at the preferences in Safari, I think you could probably take about half of those preferences out of there.

Guy: Yeah, that's a good focus.

Don: A really smart man, Darren Adler, taught me something years ago. He was talking about assessing features, assessing preferences, deciding on how to do a preference, and the thing to do when you're arguing back and forth about something. He said, "OK, it's a preference. But which is the default? If you're going to have a preference, you have to have a default setting."

You decide on what the default setting is, and then you get rid of the preference, because you decided on the default, and you never ship that. That's the whole point. Make decisions. Limitations are clarity, they're features too. That's really an Apple approach. Back in the old days at Netscape we used to joke, "How many preferences does Netscape Navigator have? All of them."

You could get really lost inside that preferences dialogue back in the old days. To the team's credit, with Firefox they've vastly improved that, but it's still pretty complicated.

Guy: I think not only is it good for the user, a giant preferences box is confusing, but it's good for the team and the software itself because it's just fewer places for things to go wrong, really. There's fewer pathways to disaster.

Don: Exactly. Exactly. Less stuff to test. Less things to confuse people. I know I've been responsible for features that I thought at the time were really good ideas and they turned out to be not popular or confused people about something else that you wanted people to use. I think Apple is one of the best companies out there doing software and hardware for keeping things simple and keeping the focus right. We still didn't do everything great.

That's why I really applied the iTunes team and the idea of trying to focus things down. That's very hard to do. It takes courage to do that and possible annoy people.

Guy: Especially with such a high visibility app, right?

Don: Yeah. I think they did a really good job walking that line. I use it. I find it's fine. It still has way too much stuff in it but they're doing a much better job of hiding it.

Guy: Hiding it without it being totally inaccessible, tucked away maybe more than hiding.

Don: Yes. Very, very hard to do.

Guy: You're working on an iTunes killer?

Don: No, no. When I say media player I'm considering writing something basically a video player, something that's very simple and straightforward, and something that could sit alongside QuickTime player to be pretty and to play other formats. MPlayer X has the potential to do that but it seems to be maintained sporadically, and there are certain design decisions in there that are just maddening to me.

Guy: I would like that because a lot of that stuff just seems janky to me. A lot of it seems like it came from the Linux world and got a Mac paint job.

Don: Right. Literally it did because it's got MPlayer which started out as the Linux movie player. What was his name? I don't know if I can even pronounce his name, [indecipherable 64:33] . I don't know where he's from. The guy who did the original MPlayer OSX project back in the turn of the previous decade. That's essentially what he was doing is he was putting a Mac wrap around MPlayer.

You can do that and you can do it the right way. You can basically hide the fact that that actually exists and make it look like a real McIntosh application. I think [indecipherable 65:12] , the guy who does MPlayer X, made a good stab at that, but there are certain behaviors and other things that still don't very well.

Then we have VLC whose interface looks like VLC. It's a good app, though. Anyway, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it.

Guy: I'd encourage you to do so.

Don: I'll probably come to my senses.

Guy: [laughs] Please don't. Stay crazy.

Don: The worst thing about doing it, though, is then I'd have to maintain it. [indecipherable 66:01] because he has a real job and he's doing that on the side. I don't have a real job. I'd really have to maintain it. That's the worst thing about putting stuff out there is maintaining it. I don't want to just throw something over the wall.

Guy: You could. You just toss it out and have somebody else pick it up and run with it.

Don: Oh yeah, but I've got way too huge an ego. I put these pretenses on about being a humble guy but I'm just as much of an asshole as everybody else out there about that stuff. When I've worked on other open source projects I've obviously tried not to do that, back when I briefly worked on Lame, the MP3 encoder. I tried to play nice with that community and it worked pretty well back there. Thankfully, they've rewritten all my code by now. I had to stop contributing to it when I went to work for Apple.

Guy: I hadn't realized you'd been involved with Lame.

Don: Yeah. I didn't do any of the really hard stuff. I did the easy shit. Early on somebody had added the ability to do ID3 tag support, ID3 version tag support, and the world had moved on to ID3 version two, which was, in a way, an over-engineered, wacky...

Guy: Yeah, it's a nightmare.

Don: Yeah, it's a nightmare, but it was what everybody was using. I hated running a tagger after I would encode something so I started doing a hack and it just got out of hand. I developed it into a set of patches and asked the team if they wanted to use that and they accepted it in the tree. Robert eventually rewrote all of my stuff, thank God.

Guy: Would you say that that's how a lot of open source contributions happen? There's two things. We were just talking about Google and Apple and their splitting and forking and they've got full time employees working on stuff.

Don: Yeah, that's actually very rare.

Guy: I was going to say, most open source is just random people getting annoyed with something and fixing it.

Don: Yeah, it's scratching an itch.

Guy: Was that true for Webkit at any point or is that more of a professional?

Don: I think that's true for some of the people who joined the team from the open source world. They went in because there was something they wanted to do and it got out of hand and became a career because it was scratching an itch.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: I've hired plenty of people like that, just amazing engineers, that way. The projects that I've contributed to, which are very few, sometimes they started out that way, or this program that wrote this last week. It's like, "Oh, damn it, I want it to work this way. Not that way," and I did something really stupid. I wrote a completely separate program, rather than develop a patch for what was there, which is the height of ego-maniacal stupidity.

Guy: I don't know. I'm looking forward to it. [laughs]

Don: We'll see. I've got to make sure I don't have any bugs. I ran into a hideous big last night. There's this protocol in MPlayer, that I think was developed by originally one of the OS 10 contributors for communicating with a gooey app, and I supposed it was a good idea in its day, but it's really hideous. It sends the host app through an NS connection that you create.

Guy: Yeah. You mentioned that. That seemed odd to me.

Don: Yeah. It sends you the height, and width, and the aspect ratio. It sends you the aspect ratio as an integer.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: Which is just completely useless, so I had to come up with...Yeah, so all the arguments are integers, so it's completely nuts. It defines some functions that can be called. Start, render, and stop, which are supposed to be called in that order. Of course, except when they're not called in that order by Mplayer as it's running in the background. I had a crash error last night, I discovered, when it was calling stop before it ever called start.

Guy: I hate that kind of stuff. [laughs]

Don: That's classic communication protocol stuff.

Guy: Yeah, that's the worst.

Don: It would do that for every AVI file I would flow through it. I'd stupidly been testing it the whole week with MP4s and MKVs and stuff like that. I hadn't run an AVI file with xbit in it, and it was like, "Here's I'll stop before I start."

Guy: Why? It's weird that AVI is different. Is there a command stream in an AVI file, or something?

Don: I have no idea. This is why I'm such an idiot to do something like this, because a lot of those kinds of internals, I never really pay attention to. I'm more concerned with [indecipherable 71:41] . I actually enjoy writing all the pluming. It was just a boat load of fun figuring out how to run something as a separate task. I had set over code before, and talked to my engineers before, but I never actually sat there in an editor and wrote all the stuff, or put the distributive object type connection and stuff like that, done it myself, it was a lot of fun.

You know, I had other code to look at, some of which was very nice examples, and some of which was like "Ahh!"

Guy: [laughs] Yeah, distributive objects are cool, but crazy.

Don: Yeah, crazy. It's just a pseudo-distributive object. Basically what you do is you create an object locally, and say it has this protocol, and then you register via connection of this name. The crazy thing was it usually worked the first time I did it. I couldn't believe it. I thought I'd done something wrong.

That actually turned out to be one of the most straightforward parts of it. It was like the renderer. I spent all this meticulous time not even testing the open GL code, but just writing it and code reviewing. I ran it and I didn't get anything rendered at first. I went "Oh well...it's too hard".

Guy: It's open GL. That's...it never happens. It never works the first time. It doesn't do that.

Don: But the open GL code was perfectly fine. It rendered perfectly. I had passed the wrong parameter to one other function down the line, and that was the entire reason why it didn't work.

Guy: I don't know about you, but I never am more nervous about my code then when I run it and it works perfectly. Every time, like if I type it and it works, I'm like "Whoa, something is screwed up here, something really bad is happening."

Don: [laughs] Yeah, some of the more trivial things that didn't work that threw me...like, I ran into every noob's screwjob with NS notification center. I've got two threads running in the app, and I stupidly tried to notify the other thread with notification center, forgetting that that doesn't work at all. I was getting called back on the same thread.

Why does it work that way? That's because that's the way it's designed to work that way. That's a feature, not a bug. I go, "Oh, shit. What's the best way to communicate with another thread?" I gave it a quick iMessage to my old buddy and former engineer Ricky Adams, and I said, suggestions? He said "GCD is your friend", I went "oh yeah". A little asynch dispatch call took care of that painful swelling, and all was well.

Guy: Yeah. I'm pretty sure you got a contact list that can help you with a lot of these problems.

Don: [laughs] It's like crib notes during a test.

Rene: Or a lifeline during a game show.

Guy: It works, come on. Exactly

Don: Yeah exactly, lifelines that's what it is. Rene, that is perfect. I got a lot of lifelines, and they're all brilliant people, a lot smarter than I am. I'm sure they could have written everything I've written in like a day. [indecipherable 75:03] They probably wouldn't have wanted to write this. Who the hell would? We'll see what comes next, but I've got to get back to my website writing.

Guy: Yeah, please do.

Don: What I'm going to do is probably take this 4,000 plus pages of notes that I wrote for that talk, and turn some of those into blog posts. I just get so tired of repeating and rehearsing the talk that I don't want to look at the material. I actually told you...

Guy: Just read it into Siri. Have her dictate the posts for you.

Don: [laughs] A question for you. How often do you guys actually use Siri?

Rene: A lot.

Don: Wow. I'm impressed.

Guy: Yeah, seldomly. I use it for setting timers and alarms and shit that it can't fuck up.

Rene: I dictate posts while I am driving so I don't forget the hook that I had when I thought about it.

Don: Apple loves people like you Rene.

Rene: [laughs]

Don: I always think whenever I use it and it just works perfectly, and it does what I want, I think to myself why don't I use this more often?

Guy: Right, yeah.

Rene: Yeah, then it screws you.

Don: Occasionally it will get confused, but usually that's an amusing interlude...

Guy: One thing I do find cool about Siri is yeah, it's an amusing interlude. If I'm telling it to remind me or something and it gets it wrong, at least when the reminder comes up, there is enough phonetic information there that I know what it's talking about.

Rene: Yes.

Guy: Maybe it screws up the name and it says "Rave" rather than "Dave", and it's like OK, fine I know what it's talking about.

Rene: It's much faster UI to enter reminders, and calendar events, and anything that's touch based.

Don: Oh yeah, yeah. Doing it with Siri is much easier than typing it in on a phone. My friend [indecipherable 77:15] , he is the person probably most responsible for the keyboard interface for the phone, I still prefer talking to Siri for doing long things like that, rather than typing.

Guy: Really?

Don: I'm all thumbs, literally. I can actually type very fast on my Mac compared to some people on the phone or the iPad. I do type very fast. In fact, typing is probably the most useful thing I learned in high school. I swear, it's the thing...Not the math, not even English lit., it's typing, learning to type. I still hit the Cupertino's all the time and it drives me crazy.

But I never turn it off, because it also saves me more times than it screws me up. Yeah, because my spelling is atrocious. What I would write would look like Middle English. Spell checking.

Guy: Yeah. Spelling is over. Computers can do that now. Yeah.

Rene: I think I said this before, but I have a godson who is four years old and can't write, but he uses Siri to send me text messages, which is awesome.

Don: See, that's what it's perfect for. That was like Charles was saying at Úll. Charles Perry, saying at Úll, you don't realize it but there are sight impaired people out there who can use a phone right now to see. There are apps out there that exist that they can hold up to take a picture with a camera, and they can tell them the colors of what's in their room, or their garden.

Guy: That's so cool. I'm really fascinated by this kind of stuff. I think there's...so the way that the accessibility software works is that you basically describe the functionality, or the...I don't know, how would you describe it, Don? You don't describe the layout, it's not about the visuals or anything. It's about what the content represents.

Don: Right, and you have to realize that iOS, like MacOS is one of the most advanced operating systems out there for providing accessibility support, because most of the stuff you just get for free. You don't have to do anything, but there are parts, like the stuff you're talking about, Guy, that you do. But I'm not an expert on this.

Guy: No, no. Neither am I, but it totally fascinates me, and I love the idea that if you set everything up correctly in your iOS or Mac App, there can be a totally different interface to your application, put on top of it via the accessibility stuff.

It just so happens that voice over is the one that works, but the way the content is described when it works out, can work in so many different ways. It blows my mind, fascinates me.

Don: Charles had this video that he played during his talk, of Stevie Wonder talking. This was before Steve Jobs passed away, I believe it was the Spring when it was known he was very sick. It was from Stevie Wonder, one of his sessions, and he got up in front of the crowd after his set and asked people to pray for Steve Jobs, because he talked about how much he loved his iPhone. He said "Here, I finally have a device where I can do everything you can do."

Guy: Wow.

Don: It was very powerful and moving. That's why I loved Charles' talk, because it was just intellectually precise and then it was emotionally moving, which is both the best speaking coming from being trained as a Minister, and the best writing there is, you want to be able to ever do. When you think about it, it's not just prose. I always want to impress upon people when they create software.

You don't need to just make software that makes sense, that's well designed. You need, if you want, your software to be used you need to make software that delights people.

Guy: I agree.

Don: That tugs at them, right? That gives them a reason to use it even when they don't need to use it. That's the best stuff in the world. If you can do something like that, man that's...you know, I've had glimmers of being able to do that over the years and that's the kind of thing that always gets you back to writing.

Guy: Well I think that people feel that they should be playing all the time. That software should be a toy. That it's to be enjoyed.

Don: Yes, and that's the right way to approach it. That's what you want. You want people to play and get a shitload of useful things done. Even if that play is in a game itself. Gaming isn't just frivolity.

Guy: Well that's why I never really found the animations frivolous in OS standards.

Don: Exactly. Well, the...

[crosstalk]

Guy: OK, there's some of the animations.

Don: I just have this quirk in my personality I just don't like the full screen transition. And, I know the guy who wrote it. He's a friend of mine, but it just always bugs me. They're not frivolous.

Guy: Right. Yeah, it could bug you but it's not frivolous, like you know why it's there, right? It's for...

Don: Right.

Guy: Not you. It's just...

Don: Oh, no, it's not for me. In fact, the reason why the full screen animations transition there's a very good reason. It's to give people context for what's happening.

Guy: Exactly.

Don: The way people try to solve their problem before is what they would do is they would, the first time you went into full screen they'd put up a dialogue and say "Do you realize we're going to full screen now?" and it was like, "What the hell?"

I like instantaneous full screen but that's because I'm a geek working at a command line. That's what I like. The reason why it's done that way on OS 10, it's brilliants because people go "Oh, I can see my other desktops sliding away. I can see this other thing coming in." There was a lot of work put into that.

Guy: Right. It is quite slow. Yeah sure, it's quite slow but I think it's the right speed that people see what's happening.

Don: Yes. Yes.

Guy: Like they're thinking during that process, "Oh my desktop is going away, and here's my new thing coming in." For me, it's like just do it, just get it out of my way and just do it. That's fine. But, I can understand why it's so of laborious in that way.

Don: Let me ask you two, the first time you used OS 10, you didn't get the light and the animations. When I was trying to think of what I was going to do at easel as it was auguring into the desert floor dying. I borrowed that G3 iMac from Andy Hertsvel, and I was playing with OS 10, the thing that got me going back there even though I didn't have a lot of apps there.

I had like Terminal and Text Edit and something else. Whatever was in that first version of Cheetah. I would go down to the dock and I would minimize and expand Windows, and just watch that kind of thing happen. Drag stuff around, and I thought, "Man this is so cool."

Guy: I love that. At that time I was writing video games, and just the graphic stack on OS 10 just seemed, to me, to be the way of the future. To steal a phrase. Draw everything into a backing store and then blit it to the screen with a Windows Server.

Don: It's a video game approach. That was the great thing about it, right Guy?

Guy: It felt like that. Like put everything in a texture. It wasn't in that earlier version, but I could see the way it was going to be. Everything is fully buffered, just draw into the buffer and then throw a bunch of textures around the screen. Awesome.

Don: By the way, it's very mature doing that stuff now. I was really stunned and delighted when I was writing this little app about all of the wonderful stuff in there, like the first time I created a CG, or core animation texture cache. It was like totally easy.

You just attach a layer to a view. You say to the view, "Set once, layer, set layer," and it automatically re-sizes and moves around. Everything is taken care of for you magically.

Guy: It's so good, it's so good.

Don: It's like one of those Japanese toilets that wipes your butt and it's just so good. It's like an art.

Guy: [laughs] I don't know if I would have said that.

Don: Well that's OK, it's me being fecal again. This is the first time I've actually written something in Ark. It's like, "Oh my God," I'm never going back.

Guy: Yeah.

Don: It's like retain release, screw that. Before I do release, I have to put the scope on this and see if I actually am leaking anything and do some other measurements. Performance is really good, but you can have really good performance because you're leaking the world.

You can use Ark badly and having multiple threads and stuff like that, you have to be careful with. Syntactically, and the clarity, and the code, and everything else you're doing, I'll never go back from that. But, I still like the original name for Ark that we had.

Guy: Oh yeah, it was ARR.

Don: Yeah. ARR. Because we were walking...

[crosstalk]

Guy: Yeah, you were telling me that [laughs] .

Don: Yeah. Automatic Retain Release. ARR. But the marketing guys got a hold of it then it became Ark. Damn it. Because you can write C, because that's what objective C is with this weird syntax from small talk. You can write C like it's Ruby or Python.

It's just so easy. You have to take a few precautions, like this stunt where you have a command line app that becomes another application, I have to have my main function, I have to wrap that in an at-auto release pool, little thing there. You have to remember to do that on your thread entry.

Guy: Yeah, it's whatever.

Don: It's not that it's not a nice attempt. An at-auto release pool, the great thing about it is even if you're not using Ark, those directives will do all the other old stupid nonsense for you, anyway.

Guy: Yeah. There's a bunch of good stuff to consider. It still hurts my brain looking at, just calling eloquent on something, then not releasing it someplace later. I just still trip over that mentally, but I'm just being an idiot.

Don: It took me about a half an hour, and then there was no looking back. [laughs]

Guy: My main product that I work on is not Ark yet, but I'm working on a bunch of other stuff that is Ark. I'm slowly getting...

Don: You know what's not Ark yet, but will be hopefully this summer is XCode itself.

Guy: I sadly believe that. You know what, XCode was GC. It was garbage collected.

Don: Right. Because XCode always was the big [indecipherable 89:51] dog food thing. You got to respect the XCode team for that.

Guy: Oh, totally, yeah. It gets a lot of hate that it doesn't deserve, I think.

Don: Although, I was cursing it this week. The online documentation thing is fantastic. XCode is the best environment to work in, even though I'm not using it now. I'll explain why. To work in, compared to everything else that is out there, like if you're developing Android apps now, XCode is so much better than what the Android folks have.

The documentation viewer is so damn slow when you type into that little search field. Oh, I just want to strangle somebody. It's the indexing. I don't know what's going on there with indexing but it just makes me nuts. I can actually go into Safari, type what I want into a Duck-Duck-Go window, what I want, even saying site: developer.apple.com, and hit return and get results faster than I can sometimes looking at the documentation.

Guy: That is exactly what I do.

Don: Yeah.

Guy: But without the Duck-Duck-Go. [laughs] I should try that out a bit more. But like the documents windows...

Don: It's not built into Safari, but I try to reduce my surface area as much as possible with Google.

Guy: [laughs]

Don: No, not to dispirit. It's just privacy and other concerns.

Guy: Yeah. That's not a bad idea.

Don: I don't recommend that for everybody.

Guy: Go ahead.

Don: I said I don't recommend that for everybody. I also don't recommend the stunt that I'm doing now to develop the whole app. I am actually not writing in XCode, I am writing in VBedit.

Guy: That's pretty old school.

Don: Yeah. Well, I'm 56 year old, so there is nothing I do that's not old school.

Guy: Come on. You're still hip with the kids.

[laughter]

Don: Yes, that new lingo. Sometimes I try to talk like the pseudo-hip person just to annoy my 22 year old son, especially when his homies come over. They were over the other night.

Guy: [laughs] You swear far more than anybody that age, so don't worry about it. You're rocking.

Don: Anyways, I like to embarrass him. Getting back to VBedit and the way I was writing this, it's basically VBedit and a make file. It's all like one file because I'm heinous. What I'll do once I'm done is then I'll break it up into separate source files and probably stick it in to XCode just to make sure everything else runs. Also, so I can do some automated tests. It's nothing for me just to whip out a text file, do a make file in like five seconds, and boom you're good to go, right?

Guy: Yeah.

Don: This is crazy, but when you start a project and it's really small, doing it in a single source file is actually very useful because it makes it much easier to search and replace, and do everything else, and understand the context of what you have. Once you get to a thousand lines, well you're screwed.

Guy: Yeah. I had to help fix a project like that. It was like a game from the jailbreak world that we ported to run on the first iOS SDK. It was one giant file.

Don: How many lines?

Guy: Oh God, more than a thousand. It got out of hand, but it was just the guy having fun and just hacking on it, and it turned into a product. Wow, that was a bit of a pain in the ass.

Don: I'm sure that program was still shorter than the original NetgetURL function in Netscape Navigator Four, still shorter.

Guy: [laughs] I bet.

Don: Sorry, I interrupted you.

Guy: No, no, no. I was going to say that, yeah, I can see that joy of just having one file, and just typing in a bunch of stuff and having it work. That's how we got into programming, right?

Don: Exactly. It's like writing a script, right? But don't listen to the old crazy man.

Guy: Yeah, do not do this, but I can see the appeal.

[laughter]

Don: For me that was useful because I can scroll...it's funny, I can scroll it up and down in my head. I don't know about you, Guy, but after years of programming, when you're not in front of the terminal, you can scroll you're code up and down right in front of your eyes. Make the edits, and stuff like that.

Guy: Yeah, I can see the structure.

Don: Yeah.

Guy: I just know where stuff is.

Don: Yeah, that's creepy. You describe this to other people and they just think that you're some kind of serial killer. It takes the same capabilities to do that.

Guy: I don't know, I've been watching a lot of "Dexter" recently. I don't want to get...

Don: Oh, really? God, I'm like two seasons behind now.

Guy: I just started. I'm like in the middle of the second season.

Don: Oh really? Oh. I got to say, the first season of "Dexter" was one of my favorite...

Guy: It was brilliant. It was brilliant.

Don: ...episodes of television. Just terrible, in a way when you think about it, the morality of rooting for a serial killer.

Guy: It's horrible. [laughs]

Don: What they do to your head, it's like, "I can't..."

Guy: It's Soprano's morality.

Don: Yeah, exactly. It's like the Soprano's. I love that kind of stuff.

Guy: Yeah, I'm enjoying it.

Don: I don't know why I'm encoding all this stuff, because I got so much stuff queued up that I still haven't watched. I probably got a year's worth of TV and movies that I still need to watch.

Guy: [laughs] It's your affectation, and it's just what you got to do. What do you do? You encode. That's it.

Don: Yeah...I want to see if I can get the best possible thing at one time. I was talking to Rene before the broadcast started about getting stuff from iTunes, and Rene's saying, "Well it's still not Blu-Ray quality".

Rene: Yeah, we did that. One of our recordings we did in 4K and we're playing around with trying to get it online right now.

Don: I just think that's insane that it's 4K. Wow, I'm impressed, 4K.

Rene: Well we'll be impressed if it works. We'll see.

Don: At those bit rates you're never going to get Blu-Ray quality.

Guy: Yeah.

Don: But you can get something that is reasonable that 99 percent of people can see on their HDTV sitting across the room at five megabits, 1080 P. That is what iTunes, most of their 1080 P video is. The odd thing is, they're 720 P video, it's four megabits.

You go, "Hmm, wait a minute, I'm watching 720 P and it's four megabits, and the 1080 P is only 20 to 25 percent larger, in terms of number of bits and bit rate? How the hell does that work when the actual viewing area is two and a half times?"

It's the weirdities of our eyes and resolutions and stretching things that actually pulls it off.

Guy: I was watching "Zero Dark Thirty" over iTunes, and in that helicopter assault scene, it's awful. It's like blocky, it's like mpeg city. I was distracted to the point of just being angry.

Rene: I saw the movie, and that whole scene was poorly shot in terms of the darkness. They could have shot it all through infrared and made it much more legible to the viewer.

Guy: Oh yeah? OK.

Don: Not to dive too deep on encoding problems. There's a few problems that encoders run into. H264 converting, you run into, and that's the blockiness. There's also the thing where you can get a lot of blockiness where you have very subtle color change.

Guy: Yeah, because it doesn't' capture it, right?

Don: Make yourself sad and watch a couple of animated films on iTunes and you'll see some large, very tapered surfaces which seem to have some stair-step effect. The way to fix that is simply more bits. That's the only way you're going to get around that problem.

That's the problem that a lot of people make the mistake at. The big thing these days, a lot of people are really hot for, obviously doing things like, I don't know if you're familiar with X264. That's the encoder I'm using built into [indecipherable 99:28] .

They have a mode CRF, Constant Rate Factor, which you give it a quality setting and then it goes and does stuff, and you basically get a variable bit rate encode. This sounds like a wonderful idea. Except that to use the same quality setting on every movie, if you're going to take Blu-Rays, or DVDs as source bits, you're going to have to set it to such a high quality setting that, on occasion, you'll have output that is larger than your input.

Believe it or not, the way Apple is doing it, by doing essentially a fixed bit rate, is actually a better way to go with getting consistent quality, because really noisy stuff is going to look noisy anyway. If it's complex, the original was noisy, the encoded version was noisy, and for things that are very still, animations, or very quiet movies, you want a lot of bits in that stuff because your eyes will notice the details.

You can't use a lower quality setting, a lower bit rate. What I've developed is a way to do, believe it or not, single pass and codes with X264. They get a lot of the same benefits as CRF, and it's through a very simple little option that you pass to X264. It's called Rate Tolerance Equals Infinite.

You get a fixed bit rate, single pass encode that behaves like a CRF encode. It looks a lot like what iTunes is doing. It occasionally runs into some of the same quality oops', but not nearly as many.

Guy: That's cool.

Don: I can record a Blu-Ray on average in real time on my iMac that way.

Guy: That's pretty impressive.

Don: Yeah.

Guy: That is interesting.

Don: If you ever want to waste another two hours talking about encoding, boy can I bore you, because I've done a lot of things.

Rene: It's a date.

Don: Yeah, it's a date.

Guy: Perfect.

[cuts off]

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Timer by App Cubby launched as an inexpensive way to quickly and easily set single or multiple count-down timers on the iPhone. Since Apple's built-in Clock app only allows for a single timer at once, Timer was well worth the $0.99 it originally cost. Recently, however, App Cubby made it free. And now they're further upping the ante with Timer 2.0. It's still free, but the new version comes with the option to add even more features via in-app purchase.

Thanks to the iPhone 5 and iPod touch 5 16:9 display, you still get the same 12 pre-set timers, as well as 2 customizable timers. Any of them, and all of them, available at the tap of a button.

Among the options for Timer 2.0 are theme packs at $0.99 each, including anodyne, halcyon, dulcet, incandescent, brazen, clicky, midnight, glimmer, and gallery. Sound packs, also at $0.99 each, include serene, nature, and future. The glyph pack is $1.99 and includes 400 symbols to use in your timer labels. If a la carte feels too expensive or too involved, you can also pick up all sound bundles for only $1.99, all themes for only $4.99, or the ultimate bundle for only $9.99. And bundles include not only current content, but future content as well. Buying any of the in-app purchases also removes the ad (an icon, middle bottom, that suggests other apps you might like to try).

The free version of Timer, without a single in-app purchase, is fully functional. The in-app purchases are just icing on the cake -- a way to liven up the app after having used it for a while, and to tip the developers for a job well done.

Timer 2.0 is a great app and an interesting App Store experiment. It lets users try before they buy, removing the fear of purchasing, and still gives them an option to pay real money to support the developer and ensure work on the app continues.

I had a chance to talk to David Barnard, App Cubby's producer, about all the work and the thought process that went into making Timer 2.0, and into how to best sell it on the App Store. If you're interested in development and the App Store economy, it's a must-listen:

Download MP3

Timer 2.0 is available now on the App Store at the low, low price of free. Give it a try.

• Free - Download now

iStat menu 2 is the second generation system monitoring app for iOS by longtime iStat menu-makers, Bjango. While Bjango started off focused on widgets on computers, for computers, they moved rapidly to mobile following the launch of the iPhone so that you could take your monitoring with you. That's the dream, right?

As much as real-estate is location, location, location, server administration is data, data, data. In the old days anyone responsible for big metal boxes had to sit on them like a nurse in a critical care unit, carefully monitoring every bit and atom for the slightest fluctuation, finger and stress-level ever poised over the command line keys -- and the reboot trigger. But now we carry computers in our pockets that are almost as powerful as the big metal boxes of old, and we have networks faster in some cases than the wires in our homes. Now, we can go home, go on vacation, sit by the pool, and more calmly keep an eye on everything from our devices in-hand to our ultra-light laptops across the room to our rendering and compiling pro machines across town to our co-located mini computers across continents, all right on our iPhones. All with iStat 2.

Rewritten from the ground up by Bjango, who have been doing this stuff for years, who have been testing and perfecting this process for years, iStat puts literally every single piece of information allowable by iOS and technology right on your display. (For more on the design and development process, be sure to check out my interview with Bjango's Marc Edwards.)

With iStat 2, you can monitor your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad itself and see everything Apple allows you to see, dynamically rendered, and and very well organized. And iStat 2 is a universal app, so it's optimized for both iPhone and iPad interfaces, including the new 16:9 aspect ratio of the iPhone 5.

The stats presented include battery life, along with projects of how much web surfing on both Wi-Fi and cellular that leaves you with, as well as video and audio playback time, and for iPhone, talk and stanby time. You also get storage space, free and used, wired, active, inactive, and free RAM, pages in and out, swap size and used, and up time. There are numbers, percentages, and graphs, and the information density is dizzying.

You can also monitor all the computers in your home, office, or server farm by installing Bjango's iStat server for Mac, iStat server for Windows, or the third party, open source, iStat server for Linux. If you're on the local network, setup is often as easy as typing in a pin code and going. If you're going over the internet, Bjango gives you a lot of configuration options so you can map ports back to anything this side of a Cylon-proof Battlestar. You can even secure the connection with a passcode, and reset it from the server-side app if the need ever arrises.

The amount of information available for a personal computer or server is incredible. Not only is there virtually every stat you can imagine, but you can also tap into each second to get an even more detailed breakdown of the numbers. If it's too much for you, you can reorder and even turn off sections you don't want or need, but for most monitoring junkies, the level of detail will be nerd nirvana.

On the iPad, the deeper levels of stats even slide into place using Brichter-esque layered panels. You get hour, 24 hour, and 7 day stats, and on Macs, you also get 30, 90, 180, and 365 day history as well.

iCloud lets you transparently sync iStat 2 between iOS devices, so once you set up your machines on your iPhone, they'll also show up on your iPod touch and iPad, or vice versa.

iStat 2 brilliantly sees to the needs any computer administrator, home or professional, densely yet elegantly providing every bit of information possible, literally at your fingertips.

• $4.99 - Download now

Note: Marc Edwards of Bjango is a friend of mine, and one of my co-hosts on the Iterate podcast. However, I've been using iStat since well before I met Marc. Consider both those facts when reading the above review.

If you've got a jailbroken iPhone or iPad and you've grown bored with the stock page transitions (or lack thereof), DisplayCandy can make things a bit more interesting by adding animations for opening, closing, and switching between apps.

Once you've installed DisplayCandy to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch you'll notice that some default animations may already be selected. You can pop into your default Settings app to change them. DisplayCandy currently offers over 10 transitions to choose from. Among them are page curl, ripple, reveal, camera iris, cube, flip, and more.

From Settings you can control animations for each type of action separately which means you can choose different options for launching apps, closing apps, and switching between them. The only other option there is to configure is the length of time you want the transition to take. By default it will be set on the fastest option which creates the quickest transitions. You can move the slider to the right in order to slow down the transitions if you'd like. In most cases, you'll probably want the lowest setting so the animations don't inhibit your regular workflow.

DisplayCandy is available in Cydia now and will work on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5 or higher.

$2.00 - Cydia Search Link

If you've got a jailbroken iPhone and fancy being able to draw or sketch pictures that you can text or iMessage to your contacts, you may want to check out Grafiti in Cydia. It'll allow you to do just that without adding an extra icon to your Home screen. Instead it integrates with the existing stock Messages app.

Grafiti is available in Cydia and ties in natively with the default Messages app. It's also compatible with BiteSMS for those that prefer it over the stock Messages app. Once you've got Grafiti installed you'll just need to enable it. If you've already got the Emogi keyboard enabled, you're good to do. If you don't, you'll need to activate it. To do so, just pop into Settings, General, and Keyboards. Add the Emoji keyboard (or any additional keyboard for that matter. You really just need to have the multiple keyboard option within Messages).

Now pop into the Messages app and tap and hold on the globe that's near the bottom left corner. Tap the Grafiti keyboard. That's pretty much all there is to it. You'll see a drawing palette off to the right that you can use your finder to draw in. You can adjust the sliders off to the side in order to change colors.

Once you're done drawing your message you can click done and it'll auto-insert the image as an MMS into the send field. Tap send and you're done. The recipient on the other end will receive it as a picture message.

While there probably isn't a lot of practical applications for this tweak, it's a cool little tweak nonetheless. If you like to draw pictures and be able to send them to others quickly, it can cut out an app and a few steps where traditionally you'd have to draw your image in a separate app, save it to your camera roll, and then insert it into a text message. It'd be nice to see the developer release an update that allows you to draw full screen as the current drawing area is pretty small and hard to work with.

$0.99 - Cydia Search Link

Wake N Shake for iPhone is the alarm clock for people like me -- those who hit snooze about 5 times before actually getting out of bed. We are so addicted to our precious snooze button, that we set our alarm early in anticipation of the fact that we'll be hitting snooze for at least a half hour. With Wake N Shake for iPhone, those days are over. This alarm clock requires you to rigorously shake your iPhone to turn it off. By the time you've shaken your iPhone enough to turn off the alarm, you'll be more than ready to get out of bed (and in need of a shower!).

And because I know you're thinking it -- force-quitting Wake N Shake doesn't help you either, because it'll get back at you by sending a notification every few seconds until you open the app to turn off the alarm. So. Evil.

Even the icon is evil -- a red and black smiley face. It creeps me out.

Wake N Shake comes with a good selection of annoying sounds and a slider that adjusts the shake intensity needed to turn off the alarm. The lowest level is "hard" and the most difficult is "merciless" with "painful" in the middle. I've tried out the painful intensity, and it took me at least 30 seconds of constant shaking to turn it off. You can also set the alarm to repeat on any custom set of days of the week.

The good

• Red on black color scheme is easy on the eyes when using your iPhone in a dark room
• There is no such thing as an easy intensity level
• Create multiple alarms
• Includes a built-in "flashlight" that turns on the camera flash
• Includes a sleep-timer
• Presets for quick naps (10, 15, 20, 30, 45, and 60 minutes, or custom)

The bad

• The button for the "online manual" takes you to an invalid website

The bottom line

I'm not gonna lie, I'm a bit scared to try this one out. I've grown to love my snooze button and slow wake-up process, but I'm going to suck it up and set my alarm with Wake N Shake tonight. To get an idea of what type of experience I'll have in the morning, check out the video below!

How many times do you typically hit snooze in the morning?

$1.99 - Download Now

Marc, Seth, and Rene iterate through the 4-inch, 16:9 iPhone, Coda 2 and Diet Coda, Photoshop masks and text, Windows 8 UX, and Timer, and interrogate Louie Mantia of Pacific Helm. This is Iterate!

• Our podcast feed
• Download Directly
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• 4 inch and 16:9 aspect ratio iPhone concept explorations
• Coda 2 and Diet Coda
• CSS Hat
• Masking in Photoshop CS6
• Text in Photoshop CS6
• Building Windows 8
• Timer: Apps, Apps, Every Where (Buttons!)

• Louie Mantia of Pacific Helm

Hosts

• Marc Edwards (@marcedwards) of Bjango
• Seth Clifford (@sethclifford) of Nickelfish
• Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) of iMore.com

Feedback

• Email: podcast@iterate.tv
• Twitter: @iteratetv
• Facebook: Iterate page

If you're one of the best-of-the-best-of-the-best in mobile design for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, webOS, or Windows Phone, we'd love to get you on the show, or if you've found a drop-dead gorgeous app on any platform and really want us to talk about it, contact us and let us know.

App Cubby's Launch Center Pro is the newer, shinier, big brother to the existing Launch Center app, built with a new kind of power user in mind. The original Launch Center was a great attempt at organizing and enabling URL schemes. URL schemes are a limited way -- and currently the only way -- for apps to send actions to each other in iOS. Many apps support them and the net result is that Launch Center allows users to pre-program certain actions (for instance launching IMDb and immediately grabbing current showtimes for your area) in a list form. In other words, it lets you launch actions, not just apps. It was a great start and Launch Center Pro builds on this pedigree, but adds a entirely new level of customization that new users will immediately find accessible, but fiddly (and I mean that in the best way possible) users will dive into and love.

Launch Center Pro's interface is completely revamped. The original Launch Center was list-based, but Launch Center Pro presents a chunky, easy to hit touch-target grid that can be augmented with a secondary level of functionality. You can assign actions or groups to a button: actions are single target functions, whereas groups are nested functions that sit underneath the original button. The nice thing about groups, however, is that the control scheme to access the second level relies on pressing and holding the primary button and then sliding a finger quickly to the desired group action. It takes about three seconds to figure it out, and every time you use it after that is a delight.

In addition to the new grid layout, the levels of customization for each button are impressive. You can now change the look of the button by altering its color, texture, icon and label so that it's easily identifiable at a fast glance. The iconography is very cool too -- there's a nice mix of newer emoji-style icons as well as some charming classic computing-style icons to change things up. And if you like a more default look, in many cases you can appropriate an iOS-native icon as well.

So what can you do with Launch Center Pro?

Well, everything you did with Launch Center, and some new things. Carried over from the original are standards like composing an email/message, with or without a default recipient/body, quick dialers, Safari searches and page launches, a flashlight utility, and the ability to insert a custom URL string that can either launch an app function or a web page.

A nice new addition that I'm already enjoying is a brightness toggle that can be set to two default values; I usually keep my phone brightness at about 40%, but on a sunny day it really helps to be able to snap it up to 90-100% to quickly read something and then snap it back without ever having dropped into Settings.app.

If you have supported apps installed, their functions are still listed within the configuration page, as well as apps on the App Store that you might not have on your iPhone yet. Ultimately, if you're familiar with Launch Center, then you'll feel right at home in Launch Center Pro, and likely smile as you stumble onto the little things that make it even more enjoyable than its predecessor.

A few more nice additions: quick Google search access and a full phone dialer and contact search engine (Apple should take some notes on how that one works -- it's really phenomenal) quietly add some subtle power to Launch Center Pro.

The result from all these changes is simply this: Launch Center Pro is pure speed.

Launch Center Pro launches so quickly and sends actions so fast that it feels like it should be part of iOS. It's completely fluid within a few minutes of using it and just gets better as muscle memory kicks in.

App Cubby spent a lot of time not only optimizing the code to perform more admirably, but put a great deal of thought into the interactions you will need to perform within the app, minimizing finger travel time and effort to add to the overall perception of speed. It's markedly faster than Launch Center, and that's a very good thing. One of my only areas of improvement for Launch Center would have been to reduce the time necessary to open and perform an action, and it's been addressed nicely.

My only wish is that URL schemes would catch on more!

A lot of apps already support this functionality, but I want to be able to hit all the apps on my phone in one way or another. There's so much potential and power in this method, I think I may start emailing/tweeting developers to politely ask (demand? threaten?) for the inclusion of URL schemes so I can continue fleshing out my Launch Center more fully.

The good

• Easy access to apps and actions that are sometimes screens away and stuck in folders
• High level of appearance customization
• Blisteringly fast app and action launch and response times
• Clean, clever UI

The Bad

• Not all apps will work with Launch Center Pro (yet... but it's still an unknown, especially if Apple decides to change the way URL schemes work)
• Could benefit from an instruction panel or help screen for getting started and working with advanced features

The bottom line

Launch Center Pro is a separate app from Launch Center, not an update. The original Launch Center will remain in the App Store and get its share of updates, but if you want the new version you'll have to buy it. And let me tell you, you'd better be ok with it because aside from its intent, there's almost nothing in here that feels like it was simply carried over.

App Cubby rewrote Launch Center Pro from scratch, and it shows. If you like tinkering a little, or even think you might like a new way to think about using apps, do yourself a favor: buy Launch Center Pro, support the developers, and enjoy. Leave a good review and email your favorite developers to include URL scheme support. As iOS matures, we have a lot to look forward to, but it's not now, and has never really been a one-size-fits-all mentality for some of us. Apps like Launch Center Pro enhance the experience of an already great device in some new ways, without sacrificing the aesthetics of the platform we've grown to love.

$2.99 - Download now

If you read my review of Timer earlier this week, you know I'm a huge fan of App Cubby's newest app for setting timers. Its primary attribute is its simplicity. To start a timer, you just hit the big button that represents the time you want.

Here's what App Cubby's David Barnard has to say about Timer and the theory behind its design:

And ultimate it is!

With the ability to set up to 12 timers at once from the same screen, Timer is incredibly efficient at setting timers. It's also very beautiful.

Now, one of the main negative responses I received about Timer, despite its efficiency, was that asking Siri to "set a timer for 5 minutes" is actually faster than opening Timer and hitting a button. And this is true. However, Siri uses the iPhone's internal clock and timer which has a couple of limitations including the inability to set multiple timers. Also, if you ask Siri to set a 30 second timer, she'll reply with "I can't set a timer with seconds. Sorry about that."

Timer doesn't have either of these restrictions. Now, I'm not denying the convenience and just plain awesomeness of using Siri to quickly set a timer, but for those times when Siri and the iPhone's built-in clock can't do what I need, Timer is the perfect substitute.

Just the other day, I was baking a banana creme pie from scratch. This recipe required about 3 different timers going at once and Timer was my hero. The huge buttons made it super easy to start the timer I needed while covered in various ingredients (knuckles work great on the iPhone's touch screen!). I also appreciated the count-up timers for those times when I had to perform a task for, say, 8-9 minutes.

Seriously, Timer is the ultimate app for setting timers. Super easy. Super fast. Super awesome.

$0.99 - Download Now

Fullscreen for iPad is a jailbreak tweak that allows you take full advantage of the iPad's screen real estate complete with multitouch and gesture support. It integrates right into Safari so there's no second browser to download or deal with. Just install it and start enjoying fullscreen browsing.

Once you've got Fullscreen for iPad installed you can hop into Settings to configure how you want it to behave. You have single, double, and triple tap actions as well as one, two, and three finger swipes. There are multiple actions you can choose from such as closing tabs, going back or reloading pages, toggling fullscreen mode, and opening bookmarks.

While Safari is a great browser on its own I've always found that tapping the menu bar to bring down the bookmarks menu or having to tap consecutively to close tabs to not be a very fluid experience. Fullscreen for iPad solves this problem by adding gesture support for the most commonly used browsing commands. I've set double tapping with two fingers to enter full screen mode. From there I can swipe down with two fingers to close a tab without ever leaving fullscreen mode. The only thing I really need to go to the main menu for anymore is to type in an address or a search term.

You can also disable any gestures completely that you don't want to accidentally use by mistake. Just set that gesture to "none" under Settings and it won't do anything. The thing I like so much about Fullscreen for iPad is that it works flawlessly with the built-in browser and there's no new browser or window to use. Tweaks and apps that use their own browser become a problem when you open a link in an e-mail or other application since it will natively want to use Safari. You won't have that problem with Fullscreen for iPad since it just integrates right into the browser you already have.

$2.19 - Cydia Search Link

Additional Resources

• Best jailbreak apps for iPad
• Best jailbreak apps for iPhone
• Jailbreak apps, hacks, and themes forum
• More picks of the week

NCSettings for iPhone and iPad adds a row of system toggles to Notification Center for commonly used settings such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, brightness, and airplane mode. It's very similar to the system toggles you'd find in SBSettings but integrated in a way that's much more consistent with the default look of iOS.

When you first install NCSettings to your iPhone or iPad you'll have to hop into Settings and enable it under Notifications. Move it up and down to wherever you'd like it to appear in Notification Center. I prefer it all the way at the top above the weather widget but you can place it where you'd like. Once you've done that, just pull down your Notification Center shade and you'll notice a new row of icons. These are system toggles just like many are already used to having in SBSettings.

You can edit and remove toggles you don't want to use by adding, moving, and reordering them under Settings. You can also change things like the icon spacing and how volume and vibrate toggles function. NCSettings currently has options for brightness, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, flashlight, airplane mode, 3G, cellular data, private browsing, location services, auto-lock, power, silent, vibrate, lock rotation, and volume.

The thing I really like about NCSettings opposed to SBSettings is that it blends really nicely into iOS and doesn't look like it's out of place. It isn't as full featured as SBSettings and won't give you options like changing the carrier banner or managing memory but if you don't require those features and just want access to system toggles, NCSettings is a great choice.

The good

• Blends in with Notification Center perfectly for a cleaner look and feel
• Supports a good amount of toggles stock
• Allows you to rearrange your toggles in whatever order you'd like

The bad

• Not as powerful as SBSettings
• Doesn't have themes and additional toggles

Conclusion

NCSettings natively supports almost every system toggle you'd want or need and it's super easy to configure. Many jailbreak apps have confusing Settings panels and are overloaded with options. That's not the case here and it's about as Apple like as you're going to get.

If all you want is system toggles and don't need all the additional options SBSettings provides, NCSettings is a great choice. Many users may actually prefer it.

Free - Cydia Search Link

Additional Resources

• Best jailbreak apps for iPhone
• Best jailbreak apps for iPad
• Jailbreak apps, hacks, and themes forum

If you've been on the hunt for an app to replace Apple's Clock app, Timegg for iPhone is a beautiful choice. It features a very stylish, easy to use UI and allows you to set up to 8 custom alarms, 8 custom timers (with intervals), due date reminders, and interval reminders.

When you first open Timegg, the interface is overlaid with help on how to use the app. It's very informative and is easily accessible for future reference.

At the top of the screen, you'll see the settings for the currently selected timer or alarm. Below that, you'll see a big dial with all the cost alarms, timers, or reminders inside. In each corner, you'll see an icon that represents each of the alarm types: Reminder, Alarm, Timer, and D-Day. You can also swipe along the top to switch between categories, if you prefer. In the center of the dial is a giant ON/OFF button that lets you enable/disable the currently selected alarm. If an alarm is set to off, holding your finger down on the circle associated with it will pop up options to edit or delete the alarm.

The alarm in Timegg can be customized to go off on any combination of days of the week. For example, I have one alarm for Monday-Thursday, one for Friday, and a third one for Saturday and Sunday. With each alarm, you can also choose if you want to have the ability to hit snooze. You may want to turn snooze off for alarm that are not intended to wake you up.

The sound options include with Timegg are nothing amazing. Most of them are really annoying. I prefer to wake up to something that doesn't want to make me throw my iPhone against the wall, but Timegg doesn't provide many such options. The makers of Timegg must really like animal sounds, because out of 16 provided sounds, 6 of them are of birds, cows, dogs, and ducks. As far as I'm concerned, all 6 of these sounds are worthless. Every alarm is also required to have a sound. There isn't a vibrate-only option.

The timer options in Timegg are very nice. You can set up to 8 presets for the things you time often. For example, I have one timer created and labeled for coffee, and another for laundry. With each timer, you can give it a label and also set an interval timer. For example, you can set an timer to go off in 1 hour, followed by 4 more timers every 10 minutes.

Timegg uses the term "D-Day" to refer to due date alarms, so don't confuse this with the Invasion of Normandy during WWII. A D-Day alarm is simply an alarm that reminds you of an important date (like your anniversary) one, seven or fifteen days before it arrives. Unfortunately, you can only set one alert for each D-Day.

Reminders in Timegg are actually rather disappointing. The reason is because you can't set a reminder for a specific time or day. The way that reminders work is that you set it up to remind you about something in intervals of 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month. The countdown will start as soon as you set the reminder. You're better off using Apple's Reminders app, instead.

The Good

• Stylish
• Set up to 8 alarms
• Preset up to 8 timers
• Set alarms for important dates 15 days, a week, or a day in advance
• Can disable/enable snooze for each individual alarm

The Bad

• Reminders must be set as a countdown. Reminders in general could us a lot of work.
• Not a wide variety of alarm sounds
• Sound effects (navigational) are audible even when iPhone is on silent
• Alarm, due date, timer, or reminder must be set to OFF in order to edit or delete
• Every alarm must have a sound. No vibrate-only option.

The bottom line

Timegg is a great iPhone app for setting alarms and timers. The UI is gorgeous and very easy to use. Unfortunately, the reminders are essentially useless and have less features than Apple's Reminders app. Due date options are also very limited. But if you're looking for great alarm and timer settings that are better than Apple's Clock app, Timegg does a satisfactory job at just a buck.

I should also mention that Timegg must be running in the background in order to work. So if you want to rely on Timegg to wake you up in the morning, double check that it's running. If you have to turn off your iPhone for any reason (including resets), you must re-open Timegg. This is a condition of the iOS SDK and is out of the developers' control.

$0.99 - Download Now

Maybe you're used to the signal bars being on the right of the screen like they are in Blackberry OS, and are curious how to rearrange the status bar icons on your iPhone? Good news -- there's a Jailbreak for that! And we'll show you how after the break!

ArrangeStatusBar is a simple little tweak that allows you to rearrange your status bar icons to whatever your liking may be. This may be great for users that currently migrated from another OS and are used to a different configuration.

Once installed, just hold down on a status bar icon and move it in whatever position you'd like. And if you ever want to restore to the default arrangement again just go into Settings followed by ArrangeStatusBar and tap Reset StatusBar and your status bar icons will fly back to the normal positioning.

One update I'd like to see made is an option to completely remove icons from the status bar. I really have no need to see the iPod or carrier banner. I'd rather replace it with something more useful.

Any other updates you'd like to see?

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you'd like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it's especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we'll even give ya a reward...)

Annoyed by the having to use Cydia to delete Jailbreak apps and wondering how to delete them faster? There's a new tweak on the block that makes this process much easier. In fact, CyDelete lets you delete jailbroken apps just like you would delete an official App Store app. Follow us after the break for a rundown of how to use CyDelete.

To delete jailbroken apps via Cydia can be rather irritating. You have to launch Cydia, click on manage, scroll and find the package you'd like to delete, and then wait for Cydia to reload. CyDelete aims to simplify this process.

1. First, search for CyDelete in Cydia and install it (it's free).

2. You don't see an icon on your homescreen. But you can find a few settings for CyDelete inside your iPhone settings panel.

3. Hold down any icon until they start jiggling. You should now see that jailbroken applications also have a delete X option by them just like official apps do.

4. Simply tap the X to delete the app just like you would any other. That's it!

As a side note, CyDelete does not let you delete Cydia and some mobilesubstrate apps for stability reasons. Other than that, it should work on just about any other jailbreak app. If you're jailbroken, try it out and let us know how it worked for you!

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you'd like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to news@tipb.com. (If it's especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we'll even give ya a reward...)

Apple has the App Store, jailbreakers have the Cydia Store in addition to the default App Store. And if you want to be technical, Cydia was THE first App Store. It was available with iOS 1.x and allowed jailbreakers to download apps before the App Store even existed. Those who jailbroke their first generation iPhones on 1.x have seen several jailbreak ideas and concepts become parts of iOS. We would mention the other Jailbreak App Store, Rock, but seeing as Cydia acquired Rock, there's probably no point now.

Another term you may hear when it comes to Cydia is repos, or repositories. These are simply sources you add in the manage section. ModMyi and BigBoss are two of the largest. They are already added when you install Cydia. You are always welcome to add custom repos if you choose. I highly advise only adding repos from trusted sources. If you have a weird feeling about adding it, I'd probably pass.

For more information, check out our Jailbreak Starters Guide, and if you have any questions, get help in our Jailbreak Apps Forum.