Linked List: March 11, 2022

Friday, 11 March 2022

Logger for Shortcuts 

Alex Hay, developer of the excellent Toolbox Pro for Shortcuts, has a new tool for Shortcuts developers:

Logger is a new app that makes developing complex shortcuts a breeze. Log text or images to the console and see them appear in realtime, as your shortcut runs. [...]

JSON is formatted for easy reading and the console can be exported to plain text or Markdown. All your messages are synced securely between your devices using iCloud.

There’s an old joke that the best way to debug a program or script is by using a bunch of print() statements that log what’s going on. I’ve personally found it very frustrating while trying to create even relatively simple workflows in Shortcuts that there’s no equivalent — and that frustration has largely kept me from even trying to create more complex workflows. Logger seems like it’s exactly what the doctor ordered.

$10 unlocks the app for iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS.

Percent of Time in New iPhone Presentations That Apple Spent Talking About the Camera 

Josh Lee on Twitter:

don’t think i ever shared this

over the years, % of time in a new iphone presentation apple spent talking about the camera

I knew it was true that the camera has steadily become more of an area of focus for Apple. You can see this just by looking at how big the camera modules have gotten over the years. The first two iPhone models didn’t even shoot video. Today, the “Shot on iPhone” ad campaign might now be the longest-running ad campaign Apple has ever run. Apple spends a lot of engineering and design effort on the iPhone cameras (and Camera app), and they spend a lot of marketing effort telling people about it.

And I knew it was true that Apple didn’t talk much about the camera in the early years. But seeing these numbers is rather striking. Lee posted a follow-up tweet showing the entire presentation time for the iPhone 3G camera in 2008: three seconds!