State of my Apps, hot summer 2023 edition

September 6, 2023

When it comes to the summer period that is coming to an end, the work I was able to put into my apps was much less than I would have hoped for after WWDC wrapped up. The experience Riccardo Mori eloquently described in the first part of a recent blog post reflects mine as was as painful to read as it was to live: it’s been so excruciatingly hot in Northern Italy that I have been able to tackle much less than I usually do during the summer, instead devoting most on my energy to long, fun and very instagrammable walks with Milla early in the morning, before the sun took away my drive to do stuff.

On a professional level, the limited progress I feel I made is kind of a bummer, with the feeling of having misused many potential hours of work. Taking stock of the progress of all my projects is something that therefore makes sense for me to do right now, to hopefully have a more productive sprint before Christmas, which if we’re honest is just around the corner. If you’re interested in any of my apps, or curious about the indie experience’s ups and downs (consider this a down), this post might be of some interest to you as well.

Version 4.1 of my IP camera viewer GlanceCam is coming along and will be ready for Sonoma on day one; what matters the most to me is that the most used app I work on is already 100% compatible and reliable on the upcoming version of macOS (I’ve been running the betas on my main machine all summer to be sure there were no hiccups), but the feature-set of the next update will not be vast: a few bug fixes, additional AppleScript commands, customisable double-click behavior for GlanceGrids (send the whole grid full-screen, or just the selected camera, or again spin up a separate window for the selection) and 90/180/270° rotation support.
My hope for August was to also make progress on ONVIF support, but I haven’t been able to touch this extensive and challenging protocol.
I also had a wild dream to devote the hot months to GlanceCam for visionOS and did submit a request for a developer kit, but I haven’t heard back and that’s a sign I’m willing to accept that my focus should be devoted to more commercially viable projects in the near future.

Link HUB, my URL dashboard with widgets app, is also in a reasonably good place: I’ve been testing the app, widgets, and lock-screen widgets on iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and Sonoma and everything looks good, without the need of a compatibility update: there are scenarios, like with the Desktop widgets on macOS, where the default contrast might not be perfect depending on the wallpaper, but all widgets already offer a High contrast option that is sufficient to address those scenarios.
I’ve also thought about interactive widgets – clearly, the new shiny things this autumn – but honestly Link HUB is first and foremost a launcher, so I don’t really see a use case for them. Yet.

Thorough iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 testing also confirmed that both PhotosUpload, my niche app for uploading photos to FTP servers, and my iPhone pedometer Walk More are working fine without needing specific updates for the new OSes.

MousHero, the Safari extension to trigger URLs from the browser that I shipped just a few months ago works well on Sonoma and isn’t demanding much attention right now (or ever again? It’s basically done, which is not something I’m used to with my other projects), but I still have a challenging bug to investigate as soon as I will find the time: sometimes the contextual menu item is not displayed until the MousHero icon in the Safari menu bar is activated once, which is something I’ve never seen Safari extensions require and that doesn’t really make sense to me, happening in such random fashion.

Before discussing what’s next for my other apps, I would like to address another major hindrance to my productivity (and spirit), and something I’ve meant to write about in the hope of providing some help to fellow developers googling for a similar obscure issue: in early August I started experiencing a code-signing issue when trying to submit a minor update to one of my Mac apps (TameTime), which quickly turned into a major roadblock to shipping updates for 3 of my desktop projects, including GlanceCam!
What happened: when submitting any update from Xcode (14.3.0…15b8), the binaries successfully uploaded, but a few minutes later I systematically received an ITMS-90238: Invalid Signature + ITMS-90296: App sandbox not enabled rejection email that explicitly referred to the embedded helper app I’ve been using for years to provide a Launch at login functionality, and that obviously has always been sandboxed and signed.
I am sure this rejection is caused by server-side changes on Apple’s analysis of the binaries after submission because reverting to previously approved versions of those apps and submitting them with older versions of Xcode (i.e. 14.3.0) is still to this day causing the same delayed rejection.
This issue has been pretty scary (again, I wasn’t able to submit any updates to my apps) and demotivating, but it was also too hot to fight against a black box, so I kept circling around it hoping for a breakthrough, mostly focusing on a blog post from John Brayton that referred to a strikingly similar situation (same ITMS error codes emailed after successful uploads), even though in the end it proved to be a different problem from his.
Luckily, in the last couple of days (thanks to lower temperatures and renewed energy) I have been able to work around that rejected binaries issue: I still don’t know what changed in Apple’s SPI review process, but I figured that taking out my embedded helper app from the binaries and replacing my (established and so far perfectly fine) manual approach with a well respected and widely used library from Sindre Sorhus could help, and as a matter of fact it does; clearly the LaunchAtLogin library handles the procedure better, in a more compliant way than my previously fine – but likely borderline – approach.

This lateral success finally unlocked a couple of small updates to my other Mac apps that I had put together during my August holiday and that have been successfully approved by Apple today:

• ClipBar 1.6 allows Users to manually reset the menu bar’s pasteboard preview (the utility’s purpose is to display what you last copied in the upper right corner of your screen, with some additional bells and whistles) by right-clicking on the app in the menu bar and selecting Clear ClipBar; this does not erase the content of your Mac’s pasteboard but removes the preview from the menu bar, which in some cases can be useful for privacy reasons. Special thanks to connectionfailure’s App Store review for suggesting the feature!

• TameTime 1.5 also includes two new features, both recommended by Kenneth, whom I thank for helping me improve my utility to fight RSI and remember to move around: it’s now possible to manually reset the timer by clicking on TameTime in the menu bar and selecting Reset timer; most importantly, Users can now set custom and independent flash-screen messages for the Minor and Major alerts, or omit them completely and only have the 3-seconds dark screen as visual clue to take a break.

It’s a secret I cannot mention in their release notes, but both these apps also work great on Sonoma.
Sadly, though, there’s also a catch to the updates above (and most likely it will be an annoying reality that will also apply to GlanceCam 4.1): due to the fact that I needed to replace the Launch at login mechanism, Users who previously set those apps to open automatically when their Mac started will need to manually re-enable that behavior. I don’t love this, and I mention it in their release notes in the hope of causing limited disruption, but at least I was able to move past that super-worrying submission block and now these apps are “in the right section” of macOS Settings, which is more professional and therefore a welcome bonus at the end of this ordeal.

Finally, there should be another project on this list: early this summer I started working on Quee, an app that has been on my mind for years and a possible playground for improving my SwiftUI experience and especially testing out SwiftData; the idea behind Quee remains interesting to me, especially with the upcoming Journaling APIs, but I must admit development quickly stalled (the fact that SwiftData surprisingly doesn’t support inheritance didn’t help) and I have so much going on already that’s impossible to also devote time to a new project in the immediate future. Maybe if it had not been so hot…

Ventura updates for GlanceCam, Link HUB, ClipBar and TameTime, plus an iOS 16 update for PhotosUpload

October 23, 2022

I’m happy to announce that all my Mac apps have just been updated for macOS 13 Ventura, which launches tomorrow:

• GlanceCam 3.6 works great on macOS 13 Ventura and is amazing in combination with Stage Manager, behaving exactly as you’d expect: with Always on Top enabled, your cameras remain visible in all Stages, just like they did (and do) with Spaces; if you don’t use Always on Top in combination with Stage Manager, GlanceCam behaves like all other apps, moving to the side when you switch applications… but your camera preview remains live on the left sidebar even when it’s not on the main stage!
  This version also introduces an optional Zoom feature that’s been requested by some Users a while back (thank you both for the suggestion and patience, Gretar and Olof!); you can find out more about how Zoom mode works in GlanceCam in the release notes.

• Link HUB 2.2.1 has been tweaked to be the best links manager and launcher on the latest version of macOS.

• ClipBar 1.4.2 is a minor update – just to smooth things out for Ventura – to my utility for viewing the content of your Pasteboard from the status bar.

• TameTime 1.4.2 perfects macOS 13 compatibility of my status bar utility built for reminding you of taking regular breaks, so you don’t spend too much time sitting at your computer and risk compromising your health.

And since pushing 2 GlanceCam versions in one week, plus Ventura updates for all three other Mac apps currently in my portfolio wasn’t enough, PhotosUpload 1.4.1, my FTP uploader for iPhone and iPad, has been updated for iOS and iPadOS 16 too!

iOS 14 updates for Walk More and PhotosUpload

September 23, 2020

I’m a few days late with this post, as both updates are already available in the App Store:

• Walk More 1.5 asks the User’s authorization before accessing the IDFA identifier of the device to show targeted ads in the free version; I think Apple did great introducing this, and I wanted my app to support this privacy-focused feature on day one, and indeed this update shipped the same day as iOS 14.

• PhotosUpload 1.3 is a maintenance update for iOS 14 that also fixes some visual glitches on iOS 13.

Soon I’ll also have a major announcement regarding my newest app, Link HUB… stay tuned!

PhotosUpload 1.2

October 19, 2019

PhotosUpload version 1.2 is now available and introduces an op­tio­nal High Con­tra­st the­me for the user in­ter­fa­ce.

This the­me can replace the clas­sic oran­ge with dark grey for most in­ter­fa­ce ele­men­ts and is more rea­da­ble in dif­fi­cult si­tua­tions like when using the app in full sun­light; High Con­tra­st can be toggled in Pre­fe­ren­ces.

The up­da­te also in­clu­des mi­nor bug fi­xes.

PhotosUpload 1.2 is a free update available right now on the iOS App Store.

PhotosUpload 1.1

July 12, 2019

A few days ago I had to take a few photos at work, and my extended usage of PhotosUpload “in the field” brought up a few tweaks I felt were could improve the app.

Enter PhotosUpload 1.1. This new version includes:

• A new upload progression view (basically, a HUD with a progress indicator and a 7/20 upload counter);
• A recap, at the bottom of the list, of the total number of photos and the number of images already uploaded;
• Minor bug fixes (the main one being a jumpy scrolling of the tableview while uploading many photos that is now gone).

I also edited the metadata in the App Store from a plain app name to “PhotosUpload - FTP uploader”, hopefully helping discoverability, and added the system-default “ask for review” prompt after a successful upload operation. Marketing!

After launching the app, I got feedback requesting SFTP support; I’m pretty busy right now (mainly my jobby job and, when I can, working on GlanceCam 3.0), but I can see that coming sometimes in the future. Stay tuned!

Obviously PhotosUpload 1.1 is a free update available right now on the iOS App Store.

Introducing PhotosUpload. Finally.

June 20, 2019

Over a year ago, at my day job I had to look for an iOS app for taking photos and uploading them to the company FTP server; bonus points were awarded if an app was easy and quick to operate because it would be sometimes used by “non-technical” people. Surprisingly, very few apps could provide that functionality, and even less were kept up to date and polished.

So, on May 17, 2018, I pushed the first commits of a new app, but any real work on its’ core features (take photos > add tags > upload image files via FTP) started 5 months later; by mid November - ~ 300 commits and many early mornings later - the app was 95% ready to be published, when I decided that I liked the idea to have it supported by subscriptions, given the very niche market it was addressing. A slow and painful phase followed, with edge cases to consider and everchanging requirements for the subscription copy, until I almost lost passion for the project: subscriptions code is soporific code and, meanwhile, GlanceCam was gaining a little bit of traction.

About a week ago, while thinking about my summer plans after WWDC, I realized that I’ve been sitting on a finished, useful app, and that I only needed to switch business model (to a very reasonable, IMHO, buy-once-use-forever $ 4.99 price) and be ready to share a little, but professional, piece of software we use and appreciate at work every day with the rest of the world (or, at least, the subset of the world that still uses FTP).

Enter PhotosUpload, available right now on the iOS App Store and compatible with iPhone and iPads, offering tags, multitasking support, a solid Core Data backend, an introductory tutorial to help users get started and a reliable uploading system that worked with every FTP server I tried it with.

You can find more details on its product page, but in summary, if your job includes taking photos and uploading them to a FTP server in an organized way, PhotosUpload is the professional app you were looking for:

1. Shoot photos or select images from your Photo Library;
2. Add tags! They are optional, but very useful to group related photos together (they are included in file names, after the date and time);
3. When you are ready, upload your photos to a FTP server you configured. There’s no step 4!

I’m happy to be back in the game of iOS development after a nice period working on Mac apps, and I hope PhotosUpload will prove useful to many users: FTP is not the most modern technology, but if you still need it, I think it’s nice to have a polished and modern app in your pocket. Please, check it out!