Author Archives: Ben Collier

Fleeing the Nest  →

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Shige Honjo, a veteran executive at Nest, and Scott Mullins, a senior engineering manager, are leaving the company, according to multiple sources.

Their exit comes amid a steady stream of departures from the connected-device unit under Google parent Alphabet, as pressure mounts on Nest to improve its sales targets and right its increasingly rancorous culture.

All these reports of trouble at Nest led me to worry of the future of the company. Recently I was thinking of purchasing additional Nest Protect smoke alarms – but these reports have put me off. Whatever the internal troubles are; the PR impact is damaging enough.

The concern: what if the company folds and my heating stops to work.

How Apple fixed the iOS 9 broken Universal Links

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iOS 9.3 had a big problem with processing universal inks which caused any links in apps to break. If you’re hit with the problem do a software update now.

Now iOS 9.3.1 is out it gives the shared web credentials daemon (swcd) enough memory to process large association files, and recover from previously large files that had previously pushed swcd over the limit.

Expect to see a future update to iOS limit the maximum size of an apple-app-site-association file to be something more sensible than unlimited, like 128 Kb.

Bots please: Slack needs a news feed

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Slack News Feed Mockup

Slack, everybody’s favourite chat client, is a great way for communicating within a team and avoiding emails. At Ocasta we don’t just use it to discuss projects or what’s for lunch but to get timely updates on our server deploys, when apps have been built by Jenkins and when pull requests are created or merged. These useful automated messages are triggered by bots but treated as full slack citizens; triggering notifications and happily interrupting any ongoing discussions.

As a workaround we pop news related messages into muted channels or team based channels (such as Android pull requests going to the #android-dev channel), so you just dip in when you need them – but that removes them from the context of the conversation.

If Slack had a News Feed per channel it could let these timely updates feed into a central place without interrupting the discussion or requiring you to proactively peep. In the mockup above I’ve repurposed Slack’s What’s New section to show a feed similar to our bot generated content, whilst still letting those that love notifications (why?!) get alerted when news feeds into Slack. Keeping the main chat free of noisy bots but keeping the team up to date without filling up their inbox.

Integrations were key to Slack’s crazy growth, a News Feed could stop them from being what ruins it.

If you’re not using Slack, here’s an affiliate link that scores us both $100.

Using iOS 9’s Universal Links

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If you don’t know, Universal Links allow a website and iOS app to be linked together so following a link opens up the app (with the right content) instead of the website. For example, following a link to a Vine video can open up straight in the Vine app; where the video looping experience is much better than the website.

Once they’re working again the iOS 9 universal links are quite useful, but can be quite jarring depending on the app. Matt Sephton from Apple reached out to me to share some tips to make them work better for you.

When you following a universal link to an app, you’ll notice the iOS status bar offers a link to open it in Safari:

iOS 9 Universal Link

Once tapped, any links will no longer jump straight to the app but load in the browser – effectively turning off Universal Links for that site.

If you later want to reactivate Universal Links for that site, you can long press a lintk and chose Open in [App Name]. It’ll then remember your preference.

iOS 9 Universal Link - open in app

Personally I think links to video sites like YouTube or Vine work best as Universal Links, whereas the overhead of loading a whole app (especially if it’s not already open in the device’s memory) seems a little heavy for news based apps.