Andréas Saudemont

Dactylo, now at version 1.1

Version 1.1 of Dactylo has just been approved and is available on the App Store. Here’s what you’ll get with version 1.1:

Support for TextExpander touch snippet expansion.
Last modification dates in note list.
Subtle improvements to the user interface in numerous places.
Fixed bugs and annoyances.

If you’re into that kind of things, read on for a detailed list of changes; otherwise you can now go on with your life.

Added support for TextExpander touch snippet expansion.
Added a preference to disable TextExpander snippet expansion.
Added last modification date in note list.
Added the About screen in the Preferences.
Added a “Loading…” message to the splash screen.
Shortened the duration of the splash screen fadeout.
Removed the disclosure indicator (the right-pointing arrow) from the note list cells.
Reduced padding in note list cells.
Top-aligned excerpts in note list cells.
Changed the algorithm that computes note excerpts in order to preserve line separators.
Added a white shadow to the labels of the color picker.
Replaced “Apple App Store” with “App Store” in user interface messages.
Fixed a bug that dismissed the search UI when a new note containing the searched text was created.
Fixed a bug that arbitrarily showed the search bar when switching orientation with an empty note list.

I love how Byline gets a couple of visible lines of text back when showing a news in landscape by moving some of its toolbar buttons to the right side of its navigation bar.

Portrait mode with a standard toolbar layout.

Landscape mode with the most useful toolbar buttons within the navigation bar.

“If it were my time and money on the line, I’d certainly not want to be in the business of making an iPad photo manager, mapping app, ebook reader (narrowly missed that axe), slide-presentation builder, word processor, or spreadsheet. And that list will keep growing as Apple expands their software lineup to encompass nearly anything that’s mass-market enough to be worth their attention.”

— Marco Arment on duplicating existing functionality on the iPad

Why is it that Bing annoyingly and invariably selects its “Show all” radio button by default, requiring me to click “Your settings” and running the search again so that my lovingly cooked up settings are effectively put to use?

“A good user experience is one in which the user is pleased with their interaction, but this says nothing about the user’s ability to achieve their goals. While these two things are usually well aligned this is not always the case, and sometimes the most successful interfaces are those that can make difficult systems so enjoyable that even failing to achieve ones goals is still fun.”

— RJ Owen on the differences between usability and user experience

“Yes, this is the bright secret of life in the United States: Americans are not just friendly and polite — they are also charming. And the most charming thing of all is that it rarely looks like charm.”

— Geoff Dyer

→ What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google (Predictably Irrational)

Via Trivium.

“The bus factor is the total number of key developers who would need to be incapacitated, as by getting hit by a bus, to send the project into such disarray that it would not be able to proceed.”

— Bus Factor (Wikipedia)

Instapaper Text Transformations

There’s nearly not a day when I don’t launch Instapaper on my iPod touch. Last time I was using it to read an article saved from Le Monde (in French, translation here), which explains that, since 2005, someone’s family name in France can be composed of the names of his two parents, with the strange constraint that the parent family names be separated with double dashes, like this: “‒‒”.

So if you were born in France after January 1st, 2005 from Juliette Dubois and Martin Deschamps, your family name might have been “Dubois‒‒Deschamps” or “Deschamps‒‒Dubois” — or simply “Dubois” or “Deschamps”: there’s no obligation to give both parent names, and you can get either your mother’s or father’s family name.

(Actually, and this is the subject of the article, the double dashes are not required anymore. Thanks to a judge who ruled that double dashes are unknown in the French language and thus unwelcome in official French documents, you might now be called “Dubois Deschamps” or “Deschamps Dubois”, without any spurious dash.)

Thanks for the lecture, but how is that related to Instapaper?

Glad you asked.

While reading the article, I noticed that Instapaper’s text engine runs a SmartyPants-like transformation of ASCII punctuation characters into proper typographical entities. So, for instance, Instapaper will print “it’s” when the source text contains “it's”, “a “curly” quote” instead of “a "curly" quote”, and “hello—what?” instead of “hello‒‒what?”.

Applied to the article in question it also happened to alter the text in an undesirable manner. Take a look at the screenshot below, taken from the original article web page, where I’ve tastefully highlighted some places where the Instapaper text engine will transform punctuation characters:

Now consider the other screenshot below showing the same excerpt displayed by Instapaper, where I’ve harmoniously highlighted correct and unwanted text transformations:

Whereas the straight quote in “qu'ils” is correctly smartified into a curly quote, giving “qu’ils”, Instapaper also goes one step too far and replaces the double dashes in “Deschamps‒‒Dubois” and “Dubois‒‒Deschamps” with em dashes, thus displaying “Deschamps—Dubois” and “Dubois—Deschamps”.

OK, I get it. But why all these pompous, whining words about such a minor issue?

Good question.

Remarks on the User Interface of Dactylo

The user interface of Dactylo is rather conventional for an iPhone notes application. It presents a simple hierarchy with the note list at the root and the notes themselves as direct leaves:

The note viewer also serves as the note editor when the users taps anywhere within the note, with support for both portrait and landscape orientations:

Font and Colors Preferences

Unlike some other notes app, Dactylo allows you to customize the font and colors used to read and edit notes. And unlike some of the other notes app that do allow such customization by presenting dull lists of available font names, font sizes, and colors, with Dactylo you jointly select the font name and size, you jointly select the foreground and background colors, plus you see a preview of your choices as soon as you make them.

This is achieved by first tapping the cog button at the top left of the note list, which opens the preferences screen; from there you can change the font family and size by tapping the Font cell, and the foreground and background colors by tapping the Colors cell. In each case you are presented with a screen where you select the desired font or colors by spinning the appropriate wheels. Your current choice is displayed live in a preview text box filled with lorem ipsum text:

In App Purchase

Dactylo is free as long as you store no more than five notes. When you try to create a sixth note, an alert view appears that suggests buying the Unlimited edition so that you’ll be able to store as many notes as you want. If you tap the Buy button of this alert view (or the Buy Unlimited Edition button of the Edition preferences screen), you are then asked to wait a bit while the application retrieves all the required information about the Unlimited edition, including its localized price, from the App Store:

Once the product information has been received, you are then asked to confirm your purchase with a new alert view that clearly displays the price you will pay. Assuming you tap the Buy button of this alert view, you are then asked, again, to wait a bit while the App Store processes the payment. If needed, you’ll be asked, through another alert view, to enter your App Store id and password. When the application is notified that the transaction was completed successfully, yet another alert view appears that thanks you for being such a nice person:

That’s a lot of alert views, but hopefully you shouldn’t see them more than once.

Bienvenue! I’m Andréas Saudemont and this is my blog. I create software for a living and can be blamed for Dactylo and Revue, among other things. I’m also a casual photographer, flaunting myself on Flickr. My ramblings are listed in the archive. Comments are not available but you can email me.