CocoaHeads Boston will meet this coming Thursday. Fabián Cañas will present Unexpected Behavior with Nullability and Objective-C / Swift Interoperability. It should be a good meeting. New participants of all experience levels are always welcome.

Donald Trump Is a Clear and Present Danger to the 2020 Election

– by Anne Milgram, former Attorney General of New Jersey

Save Democracy. Unfriend Facebook —Renée Graham, Boston Globe

New apps often become available in the App Store a few minutes or hours before their in-app purchases. Early downloaders have no indication that the inability to make a purchase is the result of a temporary App Store propagation issue. This is my plan to handle that:

• Add a server API endpoint that returns false to indicate that in-app purchases are not yet available, true to indicate that in-app purchases are available.
• The app will check that endpoint before looking for products. When that API endpoint returns false, it will display a message stating that the purchases should become available soon.
• I need a way to determine whether the purchases are available to me in the live app while the API endpoint is returning false. The app will check whether the device has another app that can open a URL with a specific scheme. If it does then the app will try to load purchases regardless of the server setting. An internal app on my device will be able to open URLs with that scheme.

I will also hold off announcing the app until the in-app purchases are available to me, I am confident enough time has passed for those purchases to become available to everyone else, and I have made the server API endpoint return true.

Congratulations to @danielpunkass on the release of Blank Ink 2, a great Mac crossword puzzle app.

Ryan Christoffel at MacStories:

One particularly interesting detail about Express Mode is that it enables a special Power Reserve state for your iPhone or Apple Watch. When your device is set up for Express Mode, and its battery is close to depletion, iOS and watchOS will automatically save a certain amount of power so you can still use your device for transit access for another five hours after Power Reserve kicks in.

Even if my phone is almost fully charged, I get anxious about its battery when relying on it to get back home, to my car, or to a hotel. I like the idea of a power reserve for showing transit system tickets.

The first snowstorm of the season is here.

I strayed from the prompt words, but I wrote at least one micropost each day in November. I hope to continue the habit of posting something every day.

The most recent episode of Upgrade has a good conversation about Trump’s press event at the Mac Pro factory.

At the Garden for the Bruins game.

Happy Thanksgiving. 🦃

I walk five miles almost every day. I have a 59-day streak going. My phone was apparently in a weird state this morning and did not log the first three miles of today’s walk. I am considering walking three more miles to fix this.

I just finished an Unread feature that took about a month of development work.

My 16-inch MacBook Pro has otherwise been fantastic, but it crashed three times when I was not using it. I am trying to confirm or disprove my hypothesis that this only happens when connected to my external displays.

With my new 16-inch MacBook Pro it takes 90 seconds to build and archive Unread. With my 2012 it takes 169 seconds. A 1.9x performance improvement.

I received my 16-inch MacBook Pro today. It is a very nice and fast machine. I will post a build time comparison tomorrow.

Sorry to see the Independence podcast come to an end. Thanks for the great show.

If I was running for President, my campaign promise would be the return of slow news days.

I am looking for a podcast feed with recordings of the public impeachment hearings.

TIL: While he was President, Gerald Ford personally testified before Congress to defend his pardon of Richard Nixon.

My dream Apple product is an “iMac without the computer” for docking a MacBook Pro. You would connect a MacBook Pro to this product with one cable. This would give the MacBook Pro power, a 27-inch display, and all the ports of an iMac Pro.

No spoilers here, but this week’s The Morning Show ended in a way that left me more surprised and disturbed than I could anticipate.

Impeachment Hearing Audio Files

This might interest you if you are looking for an easy way to listen to the public impeachment hearings – perhaps by sideloading them into a podcast player.

I am temporarily driving a car with CarPlay. Having Apple Maps on the in-dash display is very nice.

UIViewPreviewProvider is a helper class for displaying UIViews inside the Xcode preview canvas meant to display SwiftUI.

Via Zev Eisenberg at last evening’s CocoaHeads Boston meeting.