iOS – Chronicles by Varun Pramanik

Producing A Video On iPad

Among several projects I’m kicking around is a YouTube channel sharing apps I like and other things relevant to computing platforms. Today, I published my first video on the channel.

It was very spur-of-the-moment. I was checking out watchOS 3—which I wasn't able to try as a public beta unlike iOS 10—and began composing a tweet about the app launch speed improvements in the update. I thought about attaching a video to the tweet, so I pulled up the camera on my iPad Pro that was propped up in front of me.

I took a few takes of me jumping around apps on my Apple Watch until I was satisfied with the composition. When I played back the video, I didn't like the background noise that had been picked up. So, I popped into iMovie and silenced the video. Flicking through the audio options, I picked a pleasant background score and edited it to fade out toward the end of the video.

As I exported the video to my camera roll, I thought I might as well upload it to the aforementioned channel. The result is here to watch.

The entire process took less than 30 minutes from start to finish. This speed and simplicity is one of the things I love about working on iOS.

Website Updates on iOS

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed a little tweetstorm I had earlier tonight as I made some updates to my website.

While the homepage at varunpramanik.com is a pretty basic and lightweight page, I have a tendency to go a little nuts over the details on it (have a look at the source and stylesheet). I’m therefore happy that I was able to complete every task for the edits to my satisfaction on my iPad.

To start, I saved the logos for each company/service to Photos and then pulled them up in Pixelmator to get the hex codes for their dominant colors using the color picker for the brush tool. I used these hex codes to give the links a sense of character and relevance to their destinations.

I used Drafts as a Slide Over app to drop notes, like the aforementioned hex codes.

I grabbed copies of my website assets from my cloud storage using Documents, sending them to Transmit for management and Coda editor access.

I did the bulk of my code editing in Coda (I made some minor tweaks in Transmit’s built-in barebones text editor). Coda has some great syntax highlighting and preview features, though it has frustrating backspace and cursor movement behaviors.

Finally, I uploaded my assets via FTP to my host using Transmit, whose drag-and-drop uploads and permissions management I absolutely love.

Check out the end result.

Markdown Tables in Ulysses on iOS

After hearing much about Ulysses from people whose opinions I trust, namely Federico Viticci, I decided to give it a try for a writing project. This post is a slight distraction aside in the midst of that project.

As I was writing, I figured it would be best to lay out some data in a table. Unfortunately, the Markdown variants supported by Ulysses don’t support a MultiMarkdown-like syntax for tables.

That’s where iOS comes in. More specifically, that’s where Workflow shines. I figured I could meet my needs using a combination of a Workflow action extension and Ulysses’ Markdown XL raw source syntax (~…~). The Workflow I created takes Markdown-formatted text, converts it to HTML and places it on my clipboard. While I aim to use it to create HTML tables, you could technically use this workflow in any instance where you need to convert Markdown to HTML via an action extension.

Here’s how it looks:

I create a MultiMarkdown-formatted table.

I select the block of text and hit the share button.

I run the workflow.

I paste and replace the text with the HTML code on my clipboard.

I wrap the HTML code with Ulysses’ raw source syntax (~…~)

Voilà.

Transferring files to and from Pythonista

Pythonista is a fantastic iOS app—one that really pushes the boundaries of what iPhones and iPads are capable of doing. However, due to Apple’s restrictions, developer Ole Zorn can’t include any kind of file syncing for scripts within the app nor can he add Pythonista to the system share sheet as a destination for files.

There is a work around, though: copy and paste this script by Ole into Pythonista, then run it. The script creates an FTP server that is accessible over your local network. You can then use Panic’s excellent Transmit to transfer files to and from Pythonista on the same iOS device.