Announcing Triode 2 – a huge update to our popular Internet radio app.
We’ve packed the new version with improvements, including new support for Shortcuts and Widgets, improved Siri and CarPlay support, and a ton of tweaks and refinements across iOS, macOS, tvOS, and CarPlay.
Interactive Widgets
Triode now sports two different types of iOS 17’s new interactive widgets:
A controller widget lets you play and pause stations, view artwork, and see track info. It’s a quick way to answer “what’s that song?” from your Home Screen.
The stations widget shows your favorite stations or recently played items. Start listening to a new station or easily switch between them without ever leaving the Home Screen.
Triode’s new Interactive Widgets let you choose your favorite stations and control playback without ever having to leave the Home Screen.
These new widgets also work great with the new StandBy mode. And combined with Triode’s new Sleep Timer, your iPhone is about to become the best clock radio ever made.
Triode helps make your iPhone a great companion at your bedside or while you work.
The new interactive widgets will also be available on macOS Sonoma when it ships.
Shortcuts
We’re also bringing full support for Shortcuts actions to Triode:
Quickly find and play stations
Start, stop, or mute playback
Get information about what’s now playing
Start an automatic sleep timer
Use these shortcuts as automations to easily integrate Triode with your life. Turn on the lights and start some music on the stereo when you arrive home. Play your favorite station when the Driving focus mode begins. The uses are limited only by your imagination!
CarPlay
Speaking of your car, gear up for some great new additions to CarPlay:
Quickly start a station using the new Recent Stations list
Now Playing screen shows the station name (WQIF) in the Up Next position
Choose another favorite station by tapping Up Next button
A new mute button is included below the playback controls
Visual improvements to Triode when CarPlay is in light mode
Pick a station image and keep your eyes on the road, while the player shows that station at a glance.
If you love CarPlay like we do, your drive just got a whole lot better!
Apple Music
We’ve also integrated Apple Music more deeply into the app. Viewing an entry in Triode’s track history now offers options to open the show or play the track in the Music app. You can also replay the track without leaving Triode: perfect for those cases where you want to hear a great song again!
The sharing options when viewing track details also lets you add the song to a “listen later” app like MusicBox.
Interface Refinements
The cherry on top is the improvement to Triode’s visual appearance. Default station artwork and track info are more vibrant, and new choices for category icons are now available.
We also made improvements to the Dock icon on macOS – enable it by right-clicking on the icon, and Triode’s presentation will match the new visual default first introduced in Big Sur.
For a full list of what’s new, check the Triode version history.
Download Today
Triode is FREE to download and play. In-app purchases enable benefits like favorites and high-quality artwork. To learn more about the app, check out the product website.
You can download the update today for iOS, macOS, or tvOS (search for Triode in the App Store).
We hope you enjoy this new version as much as we do. Rock on!
Just a quick post to let you know about updates for our FREE Clicker and Now Playing Plus apps for both iOS 17 and watchOS 10.
Clicker, our little counter with a thousands uses, gets two new features on iOS. The first is an interactive widget that lets you see and increment your count on the Home Screen. The other is support for Shortcuts: which means you can now automate your counting, including running a shortcut using the Action Button on your Apple Watch Ultra.
We’ve also adopted the new look on watchOS 10, so the app looks completely at home on the new OS.
Now Playing Plus, which provides a watch face complication for Now Playing, gets a similar visual treatment and fixes a bug that could prevent the now playing view from appearing correctly.
Get your updates today and you’ll be ready for the new OS versions on Monday. And if you enjoy these little apps, make sure to check out our big ones! 😀
In 1998, the Iconfactory was still a toddler. Our first website launched just two years prior, but by the time the iMac appeared, we were on our third iteration.
And that was enough time to figure out that folks loved customizing their computers. Especially the hard drive icons – over the years we’ve made hundreds of them.
Back in the late 90’s the networks we now take for granted didn’t exist. You may have had a few Macs connected together, but it was often quicker to copy a bunch of media to an external drive and walk it over to whoever needed the files (we called it sneaker net!). And forget about cloud storage – we were using 56 Kbps modems!
This environment made customization popular. The first reason was practical: you knew that the Klingon ship on your desktop was an external drive and so did the person who was offloading the files. But more importantly, that icon allowed you to express a little bit of your personality – that drive icon said “I’m a Star Trek fan”. Maybe you even talked about the latest episode of Deep Space Nine as the files copied over (networks weren’t the only thing slower than what we use today).
Then along came the iMac. A computer that looked like nothing else, and we all loved it. The originality of the design inspired a lot of things, including icons. A machine that looked that cool needed a desktop to match!
And as we celebrate the iMac’s anniversary, it has inspired us yet again with a fresh take on hard drive and folder icons:
These icons got their start back in July when Talos Tsui bought some plastic plates in translucent colors. While the Bondi Blue colorway was all sold out, the fond memories were still available. After redrawing the original macOS hard drive icon, which wasn’t high enough resolution for today’s needs, Talos wrapped it in the colors of the original iMacs. And when going over-the-top isn’t enough, he decided to make icons that are an exact match of the current macOS folders!
Sadly, these icons also remind us how much more difficult it is to customize today’s computers. System integrity is a good thing, but it also takes the fun out of expressing ourselves with a desktop that looks exactly like we want. We’re doing our best to keep it alive, but there’s only so much we can do.
Thankfully, Mac users have it much better than folks on Windows. While we can still Copy & Paste in the Finder, on Microsoft’s platform it’s a long and arduous process with RegEdit. That also explains why we’re not including .ICO files in the downloads above. If you’re smart enough to dig around in the registry, you’re also smart enough to figure out how to use the included PNG files.
But when it comes to customizing our devices, there is hope! It’s all happening in our pockets and purses.
Apple sells a lot of cases and saw the popularity of this kind of personalization. Software to customize your phone arrived in iOS 14 with Home Screen widgets. Apps that gave your device a unique look were wildly popular.
This move toward customization continued with Lock Screens in iOS 16. We were thrilled with this new feature and quickly developed Wallaroo to fill this niche with a constant stream of great looking wallpaper.
And now with iOS 17, Apple is bringing us Contact Posters and NameDrop – features that let you share your personality with others. “More personal and intuitive” indeed.
But our favorite thing in iOS 17 is Interactive Widgets. We can’t wait to show you how Wallaroo, Triode, and even Clicker have gotten more personal!
So while we’ve lost some customization options, we’ve also gained some new and important ones. And it all began when the iMac broke from the bondage of beige. Happy anniversary!
Relive fond memories of your favorite classic arcade or electronic handheld games with Ollie’s Arcade – a fun collection of retro-styled mini games that are challenging and simple to play.
All of us here at the Iconfactory love the classic video games we played in our youth. Many hours were spent in front of titles like Asteroids, Moon Patrol, and Battlezone, as well as cherished handheld electronic games like Mattel Football, Simon, and Merlin. Ollie’s Arcade recaptures a little bit of this magic and gives players a chance to turn their iPhone or iPad into a retro gaming experience.
Two of the games in Ollie’s Arcade – Ollie Soars and Tranquility Touchdown – were inspired by simple Easter eggs in Twitterrific, our beloved Twitter app. We polished Tranquility Touchdown, completely revamped Ollie Soars, and added an all-new third game – our own take on the classic Snake. All of Ollie’s mini-games are easy to learn and designed to be accessible for everyone. You can even play with your favorite game controller or via wireless keyboard.
The Games
Here are the three retro mini games:
Ollie Soars – The sky’s the limit as you fly around the world with Ollie. Find all the gems you can while soaring past obstacles. Take time to enjoy the scenery but watch where you’re going!
Snake – A hungry snake is its own worst enemy. Gobble up as many apples as possible while you avoid running into your snake’s own twists and turns. Watch out for apple cores!
Tranquility Touchdown – Head for the stars in a game of exploration and skill as you pilot your lander to the surface of six different planets. Keep an eye on your fuel – what goes up, must come down!
Do I need quarters?
No, you won’t need a pocketful of coins to play! And better yet, there are no annoyances while playing: all the mini games are ad-free with no subscriptions.
Ollie’s Arcade is a free download that includes Ollie Soars. The other two mini-games, Snake and Tranquillity Touchdown, are unlocked via a one-time purchase of just $1.99 USD each.
We have lots of ideas for future additions, and your purchase will help us bring them to life. So grab Ollie’s Arcade on the App Store today, press PLAY and have some fun!
We’re proud to announce that version 1.0.4 of Notchmeister is now available to download. And with it comes a revolutionary new feature called Fusion Dice.
They spin.
You can click on them, too.
Fusion Dice are the perfect accompaniment to a never-ending video conference—you’re looking right into the camera while clicking the time away! And even if you’re lucky enough to not be in one of those meetings, they’re still a great fidget toy.
This all began with a toot from BasicAppleGuy. As soon as I saw this image, I knew it had to happen:
There was a snag: the window where the dice were being displayed blocked interactions. A large area surrounding your menu bar that prevents mouse clicks has just a few usability issues, so I asked people who are smarter than me for help. Luckily Guy English, Steve Troughton-Smith, and Justin Miller came up with some pointers that led me to a solution. It may not look like it, but there are five windows on screen, working in concert, just so you can fiddle around with your notch. As it should be.
Meanwhile, Louie Mantia was off making a font for die-hard fans of typography and Star Wars. And creating the assets needed to play Corellian Spike.
All good collaborations come to an end, even if one of the team members comes up with an idea that makes you think it will never be done.
(Unfortunately, this work has also inspired another request, but please don’t ask us for Truck Nutz. The first problem would be the unpleasant experience of finding a 3D model; the final problem would be App Review.)
This effort has been a labor of love, but if you’d like to show your appreciation, we have plenty of other apps you can buy. You can also be like BasicAppleGuy and become a Patreon supporter. We treat our patrons right, but not always this extensively 😉
The bottom line is that the more you support us, the more we can do the things that bring a little weird joy to your life. Once you’ve done your part, hold down the Option key while clicking on the Help icon, then live long and prosper.
WorldWideWeb, our simple web server for iOS and macOS, has been a hit with developers. It’s another case of us scratching our own itch and finding out there are lots of folks who need to do the same thing!
Of course, people who rely on an app also start asking for features. One feature that has gotten a lot of attention is auto refresh. It’s a huge time saver to edit your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in your favorite editor, then see all the changes in your browser as soon as you save with ⌘S. It also makes testing in multiple browsers a snap because all of them update simultaneously.
The auto refresh we included in version 1.0 was very basic. We spent quite a bit of time with improvements and making the feature as bullet-proof as possible. The whole user experience is better.
And now our simple little product is a little less simple and needs more customer support. To deal with these new costs, we’re going to be charging for the features that only web professionals will need. The basic features will remain free and the PRO upgrade is a one-time purchase of $10 per-platform. You can also try out PRO with a free trial.
This new revenue source will also help keep the app FREE for the folks who need it the most. It makes us incredibly happy when people use the app to learn how the web works without first jumping over the hurdle of setting up a server with the command line.
We’ve also launched a new website that includes a quick demo of the new features. If you work on the web, you owe it to yourself to check out the new WorldWideWeb!
Our fast-paced puzzler, Frenzic: Overtime, is back with a brand new chapter to test your reaction and flex your gray matter. Enjoy new challenges as you battle your way through 30 exciting levels, complete new mini-goals, and solve unique puzzles that earn Game Center achievements.
Join in the fun to defeat the menacing Overbot once and for all in Frenzic: Overtime‘s third chapter: Unplugged!
Head on over to Apple Arcade to get the latest levels and start playing Frenzic: Overtime today.
We took some time to chat with the nice folks over at HostingAdvice about all things Iconfactory: from our history, to our current projects, to what the future might hold. HostingAdvice serves up a daily helping of technology news, product reviews, and profiles the movers & shakers of our industry.
Many of our long-time fans and customers know the Iconfactory from our top-tier apps, but it doesn’t hurt to toot our own horn about other projects every once in a while! The interview focuses on our design services, which include app icons, user interface design, promotional materials, Emoji design, illustration, and so much more.
If your project needs assistance, check out our design and development services at design.iconfactory.com. We can help you launch, improve, or grow a digital product, just like we do with our own. Get in contact with us today!
We’ve teamed up once again with our friends over at Cotton Bureau to bring you some cool new merchandise. In addition to our Iconfactory logo t-shirts and limited edition enamel pins, you can now be the proud owner of a snazzy Iconfactory baseball cap. These low-profile, dad style caps are 100% cotton and embroidered on-demand.
We’re also offering our Superhero Patreon supporters a special $4 discount when they order through Cotton Bureau. We’re always looking for new ways to show our gratitude to our Patreon supporters so if you’re subscribed be sure to head on over and grab your promo code prior to ordering.
If you are looking to level up your headwear game and add some flair to your dome, then don’t wait – head (see what we did there?) over to Cotton Bureau and order yours today!
Another day, another set of revelations. We’ve almost reached our destination, so let’s get going!
Tooling Problems
SwiftUI and the cross-platform frameworks you will be using are either:
A new thing with bugs and rough edges — and quickly evolving.
An old thing with decades of legacy — and unlikely to change.
You will have to deal with both.
Previews, Oh Dear!
You won’t realize how much you depend on SwiftUI previews until you start working on macOS.
Sometimes they kinda work, but more often than not you’ll get an endless spinner. When they do work, they’re not interactive (you have to use the selectable mode with the arrow icon). There’s also a weird app that you can open outside of Xcode to preview, but it’s unreliable and weird.
And when you do finally coax the previewer to work in Xcode, it never shows the button with a tint. That’s because whatever is showing that preview isn’t the key window, and windows that aren’t key don’t get tinted.
As a result, you’re going to run the app to see layout changes. Then you go back to Xcode to check the iOS layout and restart the previewer. Then after a few seconds you realize that’s not going to work because the target is still on the Mac. So you switch the target to iOS and check things out after restarting the previewer (again). Then the Mac code gets edited and you run to check the changes: and quickly realize that the iOS Simulator is kicking off because the target is set wrong. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
I’m not exaggerating, when I say THIS HAPPENS HUNDREDS OF TIMES EVERY DAY.
To adding insult to injury: if you’re using .navigationBarTitleDisplayMode() in your PreviewProvider, you’ll have to add #if os(iOS) because that API doesn’t exist on the Mac.
And you can bet your ass I’ve filed feedback about all of this. You will, too. (FB12071275)
Feeling Entitled?
Pay attention here: I’m about to save you a bunch of time. Many apps use entitlements for App Groups and Push Notifications and have key/value pairs in the project’s .entitlements file.
The keys for these things are different on macOS.
When you created the Push Notification capability for your iOS app, you added an “aps-environment” key with a “production” value. When you added the Mac as a Destination for your SwiftUI target, your entitlements were not modified.
You will first wonder why the UNUserNotificationCenterDelegate methods are either generating an error or not being called at all. Then you will search for documentation and find that “com.apple.developer.aps-environment” is needed. You check the entitlements and see “aps-environment”. Looks good!
The similarity of the key names makes this a hard lesson to learn. I looked at “aps-environment” and “com.apple.developer.aps-environment” for hours before I realized they were different. After you add the one for macOS manually, everything is golden.
After that trauma, you’ll see that group containers aren’t working quite right. You’re now a seasoned veteran and quickly determine that’s because iOS and macOS have different configuration requirements (macOS needs a TeamIdentifierPrefix, other platforms do not).
That’s a trickier one to fix manually: a target can only have one app group in its entitlements. You have to split the target and do a bunch of configuration changes in Xcode. Never fun.
Since we primarily used the group container to transfer information from a NotificationServiceExtension and its containing app, we were able to get by without this capability on the Mac. It was easiest to add an #if os() check at the points where the group was being used. For example, using UserDefaults.standard instead of UserDefaults(suiteName:) in our Preferences class.
And More…
In the grand scheme of things, these are minor irritations. Worth mentioning, but not worth worrying about:
We weren’t able to get FileRepresentation working in a Transferable. Other applications can’t access a temporary file that’s created for the export. This feels like a sandbox problem that we couldn’t work around. I use a great app called Shareful that makes the share menu a lot more useful, but it needs access to the exported files.
Pushing a view onto a NavigationStack feels like it should be animated, but it’s not. You can get very close with either NavigationStack(path: $path.animation()) or withAnimation { path.append(item) }, but there’s no way to animate the back button in the toolbar. Feedback submitted (FB12071343).
You can’t put an EnvironmentObject on a Window. Our Scene body uses WindowGroup (iOS) and Window (macOS) and it feels like that would be a better place to put shared StateObjects instead of the views embedded in each window.
When your SwiftUI macOS app goes into the background, Instruments will show a mysterious spike in CPU usage with NSPersistentUIFileManager(Snapshot)writeWindowSnapshot. This snapshot is used when macOS reboots and shows the window contents while re-establishing the desktop state.
TestFlight
Beggars can’t be choosers. I’m old enough to remember a time when there was no TestFlight on the Mac: all the way back in 2021.
Testing an app that exists on both iOS and macOS can, and will, confuse your testers. It will also confuse you because it behaves differently than what you’re used to on iOS.
The first thing you want to do is turn off the ability to run your iOS app on Apple Silicon. As you can see above, it won’t matter for the App Store, but it will cause installation problems for your testers. That’s a good thing because it gives you a chance to remind folks that they need to install the macOS app.
More TestFlight fun that awaits:
Beta reviews take much longer than they do on iOS (days versus hours). TestFlight on macOS also gets confused if you replace a build with a newer one (because it’s taking so long and you have new things you want people to test). Be patient. If you’re not, you’ll see a “This beta isn’t accepting any new testers right now” and will have to submit a new build to set things right.
TestFlight users can only be added after macOS build is approved. You can do it before that and you’ll end up with a bunch of folks who will try to install the iOS version on Apple Silicon even though it’s not available. Confusing, both for the tester and you.
TestFlight users will see both macOS and iOS versions even if they can’t install the iOS version. And the only way to pick the right one is with a low-contrast segmented control at the top of the window. The default setting is also iOS. Dumb.
TestFlight beta review for incremental builds on iOS is instantaneous these days. You can expect something slower on macOS: it’s not only the initial review that’s slow.
Still, this is better than testing with manual provisioning or Developer ID and Sparkle. Baby steps!
The good news is that after you’ve run the TestFlight gauntlet, there’s only one thing left to do: press that “Submit for Review” button. Congratulations! 🎉
Documentation
As I look back on the challenges during this project, the biggest source of friction was Apple’s SwiftUI documentation. While they have done a fantastic job at getting folks started, things start to fall apart when you’re in the thick of things.
To give you an idea of what I mean, we didn’t learn about fileExporter until late in the project. Part of the problem is the naming: I’m thinking “save a file with dialog/panel” and “save”, “dialog”, “panel” are not mentioned at all on the page. Technically, this is correct:
Presents a system interface for allowing the user to export an in-memory document to a file on disk.
But it’s far too abstract for someone who’s just trying to solve a problem. I can understand this approach with the wording: it needs to work in a variety of platform-specific scenarios. But it’s impossible to target with a query.
So a developer heads to their favorite search engine and enters “save dialog swiftui”. You get back a bunch of hits and they all talk about NSSavePanel.
The current Developer Documentation is teaching folks that it’s only useful when you need specific information about an API. And even then, when you search for “frame(” you get ten identical results all telling you that the API is deprecated. I’m pretty sure it’s not.
Clearly the current search approach isn’t working. So what does work?
(* If you’ve blogged about Swift or SwiftUI in the past you have my sincere thanks. The sites mentioned here just happened to show up first in my Safari history.)
SwiftUI has freed us from having to know implementation details: when I first used fileExporter, I note that it picked up my accent color automatically on both platforms. That’s great, and I don’t need to know any details.
But I do need to know that I need a sandbox entitlement on macOS. I want to know the configuration options available (only a default file name, bummer). How do I create the a FileDocument for the API? And for an iOS developer who’s never seen a FileWrapper, what the heck is that?
It seems that in a world of SwiftUI, Developer Documentation would work better if it focused on the recipes rather than how the ingredients are made. Feedback submitted (FB12071380).
Conclusion
There has been a lot to take in over the past three days. It’s taken me a week to produce and will take you longer to consume.
Getting your app from iOS to macOS is a task with many steps. Start the journey with the hard stuff that’s going to turn out to be easy, and then chip away at the easy stuff that’s harder than you expected. Come back to this guide as you work through it all.
You’ll get into the swing of things and before you know it, you’ll have a great app with surprisingly little effort. It’s easy to forget how much time you saved with all those hard things that just worked. Hopefully we helped you get through the easy things. 😀
