Linked List: June 21, 2020

Sunday, 21 June 2020

My thanks to Danilo Campos for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball to promote Tallymander, his nifty new iOS app. Tallymander is a tool for gathering and analyzing numerical data. Says Campos, “Spreadsheets never quite hit the spot for me in a mobile context, so this is an attempt to reimagine them for your pocket.”

That’s a perfect elevator pitch, but Tallymander is not a pocket-size spreadsheet. The concept is more big picture than that, more imaginative. It’s more like thinking about the sort of things you create spreadsheets for, traditionally, and then imagining what a good UI for that sort of thing would be in a mobile context. It’s deceptively simple but really quite ambitious when you play with it. Instead of mainly dealing with numbers in a grid Tallymander is about exposing touch-based controls for incrementing and decrementing counts. You can even set a field to use shaking the device to adjust the count. Free to download — just check it out, trust me.

In addition to launching Tallymander, Campos is available on a freelance basis for product planning, interaction design, and iOS/Mac software development. He built Tallymander with SwiftUI, and knows his way around Objective-C, Swift, AppKit, and UIKit. I’d hire him.

John Dickerson Interviews Tim Cook on CBS Sunday Morning ★

I usually come away disappointed by mainstream TV news interviews with Tim Cook. Not so with this one. Dickerson gets it — he truly sees the biggest issues facing Apple right now and asks Cook the right questions. Really interesting comments by Cook on the nature of uncertainty at the end, too.