So why an announcement for such a minor upgrade?
Version 3.0 got no announcement because it was not the release I wanted.
Having downloaded the Xcode 6.2 & 6.3 betas, I had worked out what icons were needed to a WatchKit app. This, combined with several other changes, made me bump the version number to 3.0.
Sadly, Apple rejected the update because it referred to pre-release products. So I pulled all mentions of WatchKit out of the interface and meta data and got 3.0 released.
After the Apple keynote on March 9th, I re-enabled the WatchKit portions of the app and re-submitted to the App Store, hoping that with the WatchKit SDK now part of the official Xcode release, Apple's reviewers would allow it to get through this time.
Apple now allows app developers to add a video preview of their app when uploading to iTunes Connect. This video is shown to potential purchasers when they are looking at an app in the iTunes App Store, just like the screen shots.
I have been working on an update to 19th Hole and since it uses a custom method for data input, I decided that a video would be really useful in this case.
The first step was to work out how to record video from my iPhone. In OS X Yosemite (10.10), this can be done using QuickTime Player. Connect your device to your Mac using a Lightning cable (I think it has to be a Lightning cable - the old cables will not work). Open up QuickTime Player and choose "New Movie Recording" from the File menu. By default this shows input from the Mac's FaceTime camera, but just to the right of the red Record button, there is a down arrow that shows a popup menu. Click this and you can select your iPhone as the Camera. Since I wanted the sound effects included, I also selected my iPhone as the Microphone, but if you want to provide a voice-over or sound-track, you might want to change this.
Today I am experimenting with automating post generation.
Firstly, there is the structure of the post Markdown document, which really boils down to the file name and the header.
I have set up a macro in Typinator so that I just type the title of the post in a text document. I copy that title to the clipboard and type the shortcut. The header is then created with the title and the formatted permalink.
To save the document, I use another Typinator snippet to convert the title (still in the clipboard) to lower case and to replace the spaces in the title with dashes.
So here is where I need to get used to Jekyll and how things are done. I will end up automating this when I am sure of the process, but for now, I am just going to work my way through it.
Start up the local Jekyll server:
cd to get to the folder containing my site.jekyll serve.http://127.0.0.1:4000/ - so I went there in my browser to see the default
page.My goal is to write a new blog post (this one in fact).
Read More »It appears that I am not alone in deciding to move away from WordPress. WordPress is great - easy to set up and with lots of cool themes to allow customisation of your site. But it is slow, especially if (like me) you are running on a low-cost shared server.
I had been reading about Jekyll, so I decide to give it a go and also host my site on GitHub, taking advantage of their faster servers.
I followed the advice given by Girlie Mac and performed the migration from my self-hosted WordPress site. I am using the Pixyll theme by John Otander with a few tweaks of my own. The site is much faster to load, and I am hoping that the easier editing will inspire me to write more posts.