nick peelman

Damnit

On one hand, I no longer have the annoyance of not being able to click the “update all” button.

On the other, McTube has disappeared from the US AppStore (at least, probably the entire AppStore).

Damnit.

This post brought to you by the assholes at YouTube

The most recent update to McTube removes the ability to cache videos.

Apple & YouTube executives/lawyers seem to forget that the blanket of wireless internet that covers Silicon Valley and mountain view doesn’t extend over the entire globe, and 4G data plans are capped and expensive.

iOS App: DayOne

This particular app isn’t limited to just iPhones; I use DayOne on my Macs, iPad, and iPhone, all tied together via iCloud.

When I made my attempt at Grad School a few years back, one of the professors I was assisting introduced me to his system of keeping tabs on his work. He used a Day Planner, but instead of planning his days, he logged them. One thing I have always had a problem with is the lack of ability to truly plan my day. I never understood people who can make a rigid schedule and keep it throughout a day, let alone a week.

So during my tenure at Purdue as a SysAdmin, followed a similar system. Using an At-A-Glance Planner, I made an effort before leaving my office each day to jot down some notes of what I did that day; details were sparse, but it was enough for me to write up end-of-week notes for my boss, and to kickstart my memory when I was trying to remember when I did something.

Following the release of Halo: Reach, I became romanticized by Dr. Halsey’s Journal, a fantastic, fictional, and physical relic of the Halo universe. I eschewed the At-A-Glance planners for a traditional leather-bound journal, and took to writing longer-form entries at the end of each day. This also coincided with my job and role changing from Purdue SysAdmin to Stoneware Java Developer. The developer role was requiring me to write more thorough notes in order to keep my scatter-brained tendencies manageable.

Eventually I fell out of romance with it, and my gig at Stoneware came to a close, so I all but quit logging my days.

Enter DayOne.

This is almost like the best of both worlds. I get a daily-entry, quick-notes system, I can do multiple entries per day, and if need-be, I can do a long form entry to more thoroughly document something. I can attach pictures of whiteboards from meetings, and I have also found I use it to document personal events as well, particularly travel. And the best of all: I can type it; I hate writing by hand, and the journal exacerbated that because the of the book-form/spine problem. The At-A-Glance at least could be laid flat for writing on the left-hand pages.

And given the ubiquity of the app, it doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing, when I have a few free minutes, I make an entry. Or I can just snap pictures and make the entry later, attaching the pictures from my photo roll; DayOne will prompt to automatically update the date/time stamp of the entry to match the date/time stamp of the picture. That’s one of about a dozen details that make me love the app.

iOS App: McTube

So after iOS 6 came out, and a proper YouTube app went away for iPads, I briefly suffered with the horrible mobile web experience, before discovering McTube.

I spend quite a bit of time on YouTube; I’m subscribed to a lot of channels (91 at present count) and almost daily I have an hour or two of content to watch. I used to think I was avoiding the brain rot of most TV programming. Now I’ve decided I’m just submitting to a different form of brain rot, but a more educational version.

But my YouTube habits aside, McTube is a great enabler of them. It supports offline caching of videos, it has a great user interface and is definitely a superior experience to the old Apple YouTube app. It also provides great support for AirPlay targets. The most recent update brought a big redesign for both the iPhone and iPad interfaces, streamlined the subscriptions experience, and even came with a pretty new icon.

So yeah, if you’re looking for a good YouTube experience on iOS, you should check it out.

iOS App: Posted

I subscribe to Amazon Prime for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is the free¹ two-day shipping. Most things we routinely need and I can by from Amazon, I do. A consequence of this the UPS guy is dropping stuff at our door 2-3 days a week (on average).

A while back I had ordered a big batch of stuff for the home office, and a around the same time we were making orders for some stuff at work, and at one time I had 7 or 8 tracking numbers I was keeping tabs on.

Enter Posted.app. You feed it tracking numbers and descriptions, it presents a concise display of their status. You even get push notifications for status changes.

The app syncs across devices, and is universal, and a web interface is coming, or so I have been told.

Give it a shot if you regularly find yourself trying to keep tabs on multiple packages at once.

¹: With the exception of the yearly fee, which I more than get my money’s worth from.