I self-host a lot of the tools and services I use on a daily basis, meaning that rather than relying on iCloud or Dropbox or GitHub, I run a comparable (usually open-source) service on a server I control, either in the cloud or out of a server in my house. One thing that has been missing from that setup has been a tool to manage documents (receipts, tax forms, bank statements, etc). I recently stumbled onto Docspell and have been trying it out in that role for the last few days. The only problem is that it didn’t have an iOS app to use to upload receipts and documents to it. Rather than try to make an app myself, I saw that there was a simple HTTP POST API for uploading documents, which was compatible with the iOS Shortcuts app.

So I built a shortcut to do that. When you add it to your Shortcuts app on an iPhone or iPad, it’ll ask you a few questions, like what your upload API URL is and what kind of document it’ll prompt you for (e.g. if you wanted a shortcut specific to receipts). It’ll default to having the name “save to Docspell”, but you can change that to something else like “save a receipt”.

There are four main ways to use this:

1. You can tap it as a button from the Shortcuts app or widgets. It’ll ask you the name of the thing you want, and then prompt you to either select a file or capture some photos with the camera.
2. You can ask Siri to “save to Docspell” (or whatever you named it), and it’ll prompt you for those same things.
3. You can use the share button to save stuff from across your device. Attachments in mail, downloaded PDFs, screenshots, or really anything that could be treated as a file. In theory you can even share webpages to it and it should make an archive of the page (though my server times out when I try this).
4. You can use it as an export target for other workflows, meaning if you wanted to use a Shortcut to generate a PDF, you could then feed it into the Save to Docspell shortcut and upload it there.

When you run it without input (#1 and #2 above) it’ll ask whether you want to upload a file or take some photos with the camera. If you take multiple photos, it’ll stitch them into a PDF for upload. All photos will be converted to JPEG, even if your phone is set to save as HEIC by default, and the orientation will be fixed to make sure OCR works. If you select a file, you can use the phone’s file browser to pick one from your device, iCloud, or any storage providers (e.g. Nextcloud) that you might want to export from. And it’ll notify you when the upload is successful, using a message directly from the API, so it can’t fail silently unless there’s a problem on the server. You can also setup multiple copies of the workflow with different public API upload URLs and names, so if you wanted one for receipts and a different one bank statements.

The New York Times has written a great dive into mobile apps that harvest data off your device, such as location data. Many of these companies feel entitled to harvest and store your data for things like location when you give consent for location access, and are in the business of selling that data to advertisers.

The book ‘1984,’ we’re kind of living it in a lot of ways.

Bill Kakis, a managing partner at Tell All

I’ve been removing a lot of the native apps I’ve relied on recently in favor of mobile web apps. I won’t let Facebook run code natively on any device I own, precisely because I know they go out of their way to capture every scrap of data they can. Running Instagram in a mobile web browser provides a much stronger sandbox, limiting the amount of data they can steal dramatically.

Apple and Google have largely destroyed any real marketplace for paid apps that don’t need to rely on selling data, and app review mechanisms have been unwilling or unable to protect customers from it. They deserve a huge share of blame for the status quo being what it is.

Beyond impressive. This is more than some governments have contributed so far.

Ars Technica:

ChangeWave queried 4,068 current and potential smartphone consumers last month and noted that a full 21 percent said that they would prefer Android on their next smartphones—a jump of 15 percentage points from the year before. Comparatively, 28 percent of respondents said they would prefer iPhone OS; this makes the iPhone the leader in this category, though this number dropped four percentage points year over year.

Many iPhone developers and Apple enthusiasts are quick to shrug off the Android platform, for a variety of reasons ranging from aesthetic and design, to functionality and developer tools. Many of these criticisms are certainly valid. But iPhone has its own share of problems, and certainly is deficient in many ways to the Android.

With Google’s press conference tomorrow, and CES for the remainder of the week, there will be a lot of focus on the Android platform. It will become a much stronger platform in 2010. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds with iPhone OS 4.0 (which history suggests they’ll probably talk about in March).

VillainousStyle is a drawing library for defining a visual style from a chain of individual drawing instructions. Each instruction modifies the drawing context to perform common operations; such operations include shadows, fills, borders, and shapes. It allows for multiple style sheets which can be used to theme an application in multiple visual contexts. VillainousStyle sits on top of CoreGraphics, and does not use WebKit for rendering at all. It is a fork of the VSStyle and VSShape classes, originally from the Three20 project.

Stylesheets

VSStyleSheet is an abstract superclass for a set of styles. Subclass it and add methods for each style you wish to add. You will likely want to create a protocol for your styles to implement, to ensure that your stylesheet implements all the necessary styles.

There is a global stylesheet, which can be thought of as the “active” stylesheet. Call +[VSStyleSheet setGlobalStyleSheet:] to change the active theme, which will fire a VSStyleSheetChangedNotification. When that gets fired, you’ll want to tell your views to update their styles and redraw.

Styles

Styles affect drawing and positioning. Most will affect the next VSStyle objects in the chain.

• Fills
  • VSSolidFillStyle – Fills the current shape with a solid color
  • VSLinearGradientFillStyle – Fills the current shape with a gradient between two colors
  • VSReflectiveFillStyle – Fills the current shape with a glossy-style gradient between two colors
• Borders
  • VSSolidBorderStyle – Draws a border around the current shape with a solid color
  • VSBevelBorderStyle – Draws a beveled edge border for a 3D effect around the current shape
  • VSFourBorderStyle – Draws a border around the current shape with four colors, one for each edge
• Shadows
  • VSShadowStyle – Draws a shadow behind content with a given color, blur, and offset
  • VSInnerShadowStyle – Draws a shadow inside the content with a given color, blur, and offset
• Positioning
  • VSBoxStyle – Adds a margin or padding to the content area
  • VSInsetStyle – Adds edge insets to the content area
• Content
  • VSTextStyle – Draws text inside the current shape
  • VSImageStyle – Draws an image inside the current shape
  • VSMaskStyle – Clips the drawing area to an image mask
  • VSShapeStyle – Clips the drawing area with a VSShape object

Shapes

Shapes affect the fills and borders, but do not clip the content styles.

• VSRectangleShape
• VSRoundedRectangleShape
• VSRoundedLeftArrowShape – a rounded rectangle with a left-facing arrow
• VSRoundedRightArrowShape – a rounded rectangle with a right-facing arrow

Future Ideas

• iPhone static library
• Cappuccino library
• File-based stylesheets that can be read/written from VSStyleSheet objects
• GUI builder for styles
• More styles!

The templates that ship with Xcode are not the greatest. Some of them are inconsistent and don’t enforce good coding standards (e.g. missing a dealloc method). Other templates which would be useful just flat out don’t exist (e.g. an NSOperation subclass, or a protocol header file). This project aims to supplement or replace the built-in templates for Xcode to speed up coding and improve the quality of code.

Coding Standard

All files will be processed by Xcode. The generated source files must produce consistent, readable, commented code. The code must have these characteristics:

• Each file must have a comment block at the top describing the file.
• Each class must implement its superclass’ designated initializer and dealloc.
• Stub methods must be organized by their purpose, class or protocol. — Each group must be organized by their class hierarchy, with protocol stubs following. — Each group must be prefaced by a pragma mark naming the class or protocol the methods were implementing. — Clusters of methods (such as relating to KVO) should be organized along the lines above, with a pragma mark.
• All method implementations should contain a method call to their super implementation if needed.
• All method implementations should contain a commented out stub line that will signify where to insert their code.
• All comments must be in the form of two slashes //, and none using the /* */ form. This will allow developers to comment out large blocks of code as needed.

Wish List

• Different people want different things in their template. For instance, someone may want to include an implementation of observeValue:… for every class. Would be nice to have a template generator application (yeah yeah, very meta) which would make templates customized to the developer.

URL Shrink is a new OS X tool with a very simple purpose – converting URLs to shorter permalinks on various web services. As the internet has matured, and services like IM, IRC, and Twitter have forced us to write shorter messages, it was clear that a system was needed that was as ubiquitous as Quicksilver.

For now, the main service of URL Shrink is just converting a URL that is on the clipboard, although this will be expanding over time (including things like a system text service, a command line client, a Quicksilver plugin, etc.). To do this, there is a keyboard shortcut (option-shift-space) which will convert the URL in the background to a tiny URL using one of the services provided. If you’ve selected one as your favorite, it’ll choose that one. For example, I’m personally partial to is.gd, so all the URLs that are processed by URL Shrink on my machine go through is.gd.

At a low level, URL Shrink is a system where multiple shrinking engines can be added. It was designed to be extremely easy for developers to write just a little bit of code to integrate with other web services, including private URL services. For information on that, see the project page below.

URL Shrink is licensed under the BSD license. I encourage its adoption within other applications; I’ll be adding .framework and .a targets for building this into Mac and iPhone apps respectively. Indeed, the project was born out of the URL shrinking capacity of another app I’m working on.

Tim Cook, acting CEO of Apple:

We’re not going to play in the low-end voice phone business. That’s not who we are, that’s not why we’re here. Goal is not to lead unit sales, but to build the world’s best phone.

Hopefully this kills the stupid iPhone nano rumors. Kills ’em dead. It’s not coming, people.

The EFF is submitting requests for DMCA exemptions to the US Copyright Office. Among others, they are asking for an exemption for iPhone owners to be able to jailbreak their own devices.

Note that this is different from exempting the iPhone Dev Team, who create and distribute the jailbreaking solution, from lawsuit and/or persecution under the DMCA. This is solely for iPhone owners to do what they want with the device they paid for.

A lot of people have been asking for this on #iphonedev, so here’s a snippet for making a thumbnail of a CGImage.

A man and wife write a Whack-a-Mole game for the App Store. The game gets cracked and posted online for free. The couple seeks out the pirate and asks why.

While the announcement of the game is itself awesome, this represents another major console publisher bringing a well-known brand to the iPhone.