Linked List: November 18, 2017

Saturday, 18 November 2017

The Talk Show: ‘Christmas Mitzvah’ ★

Merlin Mann returns to the show for a Thanksgiving-week holiday spectacular. Topics include the history of Markdown, nerding out with Keyboard Maestro, kids today and the computers they want to use, caring about idiomatic native UI design, a look back at last year’s election, and more.

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Microsoft App Center ★

My thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote App Center, their recently-launched service for Apple developers that connects to your GitHub repo to automatically build, test, distribute, and monitor iOS and Mac apps. App Center is the next generation of HockeyApp, which was acquired by Microsoft a few years ago.

The basic HockeyApp features like beta distribution and crash reporting got a revamped user interface, and Microsoft added new features for building, testing, analytics, and push notifications. Simply connect your repo, build the app on App Center’s Mac cloud, and run automated UI tests on thousands of real iOS devices in their hosted device lab. You can not only distribute your builds to testers, but also deploy directly to the App Store.

You can use all of these features together, or just the pieces that complement your current workflow. Spend less time on drudgery, and more time on your app. Sign up now.