Author: Craig Hockenberry

Un-fucking-believable

An anonymous individual is spreading accusations that I’m a patent troll. Hard to believe, huh?

It makes me furious that I have to respond to these claims without knowing my accuser, but here goes:

Yes, we have a patent. Yes, we got a license fee for it. No, it wasn’t unreasonable.

We originally got the patent as protection against a large company, like Adobe, using our innovation. Patents are like trademarks, you have to protect them after you get them (by collecting licensing fees, even if it’s a small one.) The arrangement with Ricci Adams was amicable from the first email to the last.

From a monetary point-of-view, all I’m going to tell you is that the fee we collected from Ricci Adams was less than the amount of time and money spent getting the legal documents in place. We didn’t profit from it, nor did it “stifle competition.” (Pixel Winch is a great product, you should check out the beta. And no, I’m not making any money by saying that.)

We also acquired this patent before our encounter with Lodsys. Our view of patents has obviously changed since then. I can’t go into any specific details there, thanks to the lawyers.

And you want to know the real kicker? After talking about this stuff with my friend Marco Arment, we’re no longer sure that software patents have the same “use it or lose it” conditions as with a trademark. Of course, for a lawyer who’s collecting fees, mentioning this is not in their best interest.

Any further comment on this situation will have to wait until the coward who’s making these claims comes forward.

P.S. Marco, I could use that beer now.

Written on June 5th, 2014 for Business, Miscellaneous

Confidence

We witnessed something amazing yesterday: a WWDC keynote that will be remembered for a long time. And not for the reason you might expect.

As developers, it’s easy to focus on the fantastic software that was announced: a UI refresh that’s getting a thumbs up from designers and developers alike, great new user-facing features in iOS and OS X, and literally thousands of new APIs that let developers do new and amazing things with their apps. We even got a new programming language!

**BLINK**

But that all pales in comparison to the undercurrent for all these changes: Apple has a newfound confidence in itself. It’s at the top of its game, and it knows it.

This is personified by the man who ran the show: Craig Federighi. It was only four years ago that we first saw him on stage at an Apple event. His shaking hand is still painful to watch, especially if you’ve felt that same fear while giving a presentation on stage. Yesterday, we saw a different man, one that owned the stage and the products being presented.

With this confidence, we’re starting to see some important cultural change in the company.

  • Legal agreements that lets developers talk about technologies without breaking confidentiality.
  • Opening up proprietary technologies like iCloud: providing more transparent access, without hiding things through opaque APIs.
  • Improvements to the App Store that give developers better ways to manage and sell their products.

This confidence manifests itself in many ways. When was the last time you heard an Apple executive tout the best product line he’s seen in 25 years?

In short, with confidence comes a new kind of openness. As developers, we’ve always struggled with a company that doesn’t want to give anything away. Yesterday, that started to change.

Written on June 3rd, 2014 for Business, Development, Observation, Opinion

Upheaval

In just under 12 days, Apple is going to introduce a new look and feel for Mac OS X. This is going to be much more disruptive than it was for iOS 7.

On iOS, an app takes up the entire screen and becomes an extension of the device. It’s also something you’re “in and out” of on a regular basis. It’s not the end of the world if one or more of your apps still looks like iOS 6 because it’s not competing with anything else and the pain is short-lived. Bank of America’s app is still on iOS 6, but I use it infrequently and usually just to deposit checks.

But on the Mac, an app usually shares the display with other apps. And they’re something that you use continuously. If a customer’s Email, Web, Calendar, Contacts and other built-in apps are using a fresh, new look, they’re going to feel put out when they switch to your app and get a legacy appearance.

You will stick out like a sore thumb.

We’ve already started the process on our own apps and are gearing up to help our clients adapt. If you haven’t carved out a large chunk of time this summer to do the same for your own app, do it now.

Written on May 21st, 2014 for Advice, Business, Development

Get Ready for June 2nd

There’s no doubt in my mind that Apple is going to overhaul the look of Mac OS X in the next version. As more and more apps bridge the gap between the desktop and mobile, the lack of consistent branding and design across platforms is becoming a problem.

I fully expect to see flatter user interfaces, squircle icons, a new Dock, and Helvetica Neue as the system font. We’ve already explored a flattened UI and new icons in xScope, but I was still left wondering what the app would look like with Helvetica Neue as the system font. There’s a lot of custom drawing in xScope and I was pretty sure there would be some areas where sizing and placement would be wrong because the metrics for Lucida Grande were assumed.

So I wrote this.

This category swizzles the NSFont class methods to return a different system font. The instance method to initialize a font from an archive (like a XIB) is also swizzled and the font is replaced if it’s Lucida Grande. The MAC_OS_X_VERSION_NT definition is both an inside joke and a way to make sure your code can adapt to any font.

Here’s what one of the new tools in xScope 4 looked like before using the category:

Before

And here it is with Helvetica Neue as the new system font:

After

As you can see, there are lots of small misalignments, both in my custom controls and the ones provided by Apple.

Changing the system font will be a bit like the transition to the Retina Display: lots of small tweaks to keep our apps looking perfect. Now would be a good time to start looking for areas where your app is going to need work.

Written on April 18th, 2014 for Advice, Development

At

I recently appeared with John Gruber on The Talk Show. During the episode, the following exchange took place:

When it comes to naming characters, the Unicode standard is the bible. And code point U+0040 is named as “COMMERCIAL AT”.

So yeah, we’re “right.”

But then Twitter got ahold of this exchange and I quickly realized something important: we don’t all speak English:

It turns out “arroba” has a very interesting history that originated in Spanish commerce:

“Whatever the origin of the @ symbol, the history of its usage is more well-known: it has long been used in Spanish and Portuguese as an abbreviation of arroba, a unit of weight equivalent to 25 pounds, and derived from the Arabic expression of “a quarter” (الربع pronounced ar-rubʿ)”

As someone who loves iconography, it’s pretty amazing to see @ as a handwritten symbol in 1148:

I also realized that I knew the Italian word for the @ symbol: “chiocciola”. It’s one of the names for a snail (the other being “lumaca” which is commonly used when ordering them in a restaurant.)

And why is this name used?

(It’s fun to say, too. Something like “key-o-cho-la” but with more exotic hand gestures.)

This tweet led to many responses that show how varied the pronunciations are in different languages.

  • Dutch: “apenstaartje” = “monkey tail”
  • Hebrew: “strudel” = shape of the cake
  • Danish/Swedish: “snabel-a” = “with an (elephant) trunk”
  • German: “Klammeraffe” = “spider monkey”
  • Poland: “małpa” = “monkey”
  • Korean: “골뱅이” (gol-baeng-ee) = “a type of sea snail”

Wikipedia has a full list of how @ is used in other languages.

But do you notice the pattern with these pronunciations?

They’re being used as pictograms:

“A pictogram…, is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to a considerable extent pictorial in appearance.”

While pictograms are fairly common in Asian languages, it’s rare to see this kind of usage in the West. Written Kanji characters, such as 木 for “tree”, have been in use since the first century AD. Indeed, these kinds pictures were man’s first form of expression and communication.

But in these writing systems, someone saw a thing with a trunk and leaves growing from the ground and put it on a piece of paper as an 木 symbol. What we’ve seen happen with the @ symbol is the opposite. Many different cultures have seen our “COMMERCIAL AT” symbol and given it a name based on its appearance.

So even though John and I are right about the pronunciation, this is certainly a case where English pales when compared with other languages. I envy my colleagues that get to play with snails and monkeys while coding in Objective-C!

Written on March 25th, 2014 for Miscellaneous, Observation
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