Linked List: December 8, 2014

Monday, 8 December 2014

Daring Fireball T-Shirts 

Almost sort of kind of just in time for the holidays: a new printing run of DF t-shirts. We’ll take orders through the end of this week, print them early next week, and start shipping them around December 19. U.S. domestic orders should arrive before Christmas; international orders, alas, won’t.

J.J. Abrams on the Magic of Mystery 

2009 essay for Wired magazine by J.J. Abrams:

Spoilers give fans the answers they want, the resolution they crave. As an avid fan of movies and TV myself, I completely understand the desire to find out behind-the-scenes details in a nanosecond. Which, given technology, is often how long it takes — to the frustration of the storytellers. Efforts to gather this intel and the attempts to plug leaks create an ongoing battle between filmmakers and the very fans they are dying to entertain and impress. But the real damage isn’t so much that the secret gets out. It’s that the experience is destroyed. The illusion is diminished. Which may not matter to some. But then what’s the point of actually seeing that movie or episode? How does knowing the twist before you walk into the theater — or what that island is really about before you watch the finale — make for a richer viewing experience? It’s telling that the very term itself — spoiler — has become synonymous with “cool info you can get before the other guy.” What no one remembers is that it literally means “to damage irreparably; to ruin.” Spoilers make no bones about destroying the intended experience — and somehow that has become, for many, the preferred choice.

Space Age 

Speaking of Panic employees and cool new apps, I’ve been digging this whimsical exploration game from Big Bucket (Matt Comi and Neven Mrgan) — with an entire soundtrack by Cabel Sasser. Pure fun.

Transmit iOS and iCloud Drive 

Panic got a baffling App Store decree from Apple:

Also, at Apple’s request, we had to remove the ability to “Send” files to other services, including iCloud Drive.

In short, we’re told that while Transmit iOS can download content from iCloud Drive, we cannot upload content to iCloud Drive unless the content was created in the app itself. Apple says this use would violate 2.23 — “Apps must follow the iOS Data Storage Guidelines or they will be rejected” — but oddly that page says nothing about iCloud Drive or appropriate uses for iCloud Drive.

I thought the whole point of iCloud Drive, and iOS 8’s new sharing sheet for storage services like Box and Dropbox, was to allow users to do exactly what Transmit enabled. To say that those “iOS Data Storage Guidelines” do not explain this limitation is an understatement — they have nothing to do with iCloud Drive.

If iCloud Drive were an iOS-only technology, this might make some sort of sense. But given that iCloud Drive on OS X allows you unfettered freedom to put whatever file you want wherever you want it, this doesn’t make any sense at all.

(Even without this feature, Transmit for iOS is a fantastic app. The whole crew at Panic is on an amazing roll recently, including a major re-write of their iOS SSH client Prompt and a huge free update to Coda.)