Introducing Billie, the smart invoice assistant on macOS

I’m very excited to introduce Billie, the smart invoice assistant on macOS.

Meet Billie, the smart invoice assistant for macOS!
After more than a decade of building iOS applications, it was time to get my feet wet and build something for macOS.
The past 3 months I’ve been working hard to release my first macOS application to make renaming & archiving invoices easy and quick, of course with a touch of machine learning (as you do nowadays).

Last week I’ve launched Billie on ProductHunt and at the end of the day, Billie ended as the #9 project of the day!

Create a bootable USB drive for OSX El Capitan

Everytime when Apple releases new software, I can’t help it to format my computer. I just don’t seem to trust an update of a operating system. I like to create a bootable USB drive because it’s blazing fast to install the OS. For El Capitan, it took me +- 15 minutes with a USB3 stick.

Luckily it is fairly easy to create a bootable USB drive for OSX El Capitan!

Create a bootable USB drive

Have a USB stick ready (USB3 is really fast! :-))
Format it with the Disk Utility tool (Mac OSX extended format, give the drive the name Untitled)
Download OSX El Capitan from the Mac App Store, but quit the update application when it is downloaded.
Open Terminal
Use the following command

sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/ --nointeraction

Type in your password when asked
Wait a little while the files are being copied to your USB stick
TAKE A FULL BACKUP OF YOUR IMPORTANT FILES
Reboot your computer and hold the alt key
You’ll see a menu where you can choose to run the installer from the USB drive

Done 🙂

Run Mapbox Tilemill on OSX Yosemite 10.10

The problem

For a few projects I have to use Mapbox’s Tilemill so I can generate mbtile files. I just booted my Tilemill application for the first time on Yosemite, but it gets stuck and I get a never-ending preloader thingie. It seems that the app broke with the update to OSX Yosemite 10.10.

Luckily the solution ain’t that hard. Just build it yourself!

Continue reading Run Mapbox Tilemill on OSX Yosemite 10.10

Create a bootable USB drive for OSX 10.10 Yosemite

Everytime when Apple releases new software, I can’t help it to format my computer. I just don’t seem to trust an update of a operating system. I like to create a bootable USB drive because it’s blazing fast to install an OS. For Yosemite, it took me +- 15 minutes with a USB3 stick.

Luckily it is fairly easy to create a bootable USB drive for OSX 10.10 Yosemite!

Continue reading Create a bootable USB drive for OSX 10.10 Yosemite

Sandbox Unity app in an existing iOS app

I HAVE CREATED A NEW WAY TO INTEGRATE UNITY WITHIN AN EXISTING IOS APP. YOU CAN FIND THE POST HERE.

The problem

After my previous blog post on how to sandbox an iOS app inside of a Unity project, I got some questions on how to do the same but put Unity inside of an existing iOS app.

After playing around with it, I found a solution which works well for me to add Unity app in an existing iOS app.

Continue reading Sandbox Unity app in an existing iOS app

Add Unity3D in a native iOS application

I HAVE CREATED A NEW WAY TO INTEGRATE UNITY WITHIN AN EXISTING IOS APP. YOU CAN FIND THE POST HERE.

The problem

For a project I need to implement an augmented reality feature inside a native iOS application. We chose to go with Unity3D and Vuforia to do the augmented reality bit, as it’s free and lots of people are saying it’s the best solution. The only problem when working with Unity3D is that the exported iOS project is not easy to implement in an existing project as we only need Unity3D for 2 views inside a project with some dozen other native UIViews. Continue reading Add Unity3D in a native iOS application

Grading in the future?

As partial exams just passed at my work (devine.be), the job of carefully entering grades takes a lot of time. A common workflow is

Correct grades on paper
Input grades in a spreadsheet with partial grades
Double-check grades on paper with grades in spreadsheet
Merge partial grades in a new spreadsheet with global grades
Input grades in school system

As I was working I was thinking about how nice it would be if I could just speak to my computer and the grades would be filled in automatically.

Continue reading Grading in the future?

Unhide the Library folder on (Mountain) Lion

Problem

Since OSX 10.7 Apple has decided to hide the ~/Library folder from your users directory. When you are using the iPhone Simulator or other development applications, you spend a fair amount navigating around in the Library. So if you are tired of using command+shift+G all the time, you can easily unhide the Library folder forever and ever, without showing all the hidden files on your system!

Continue reading Unhide the Library folder on (Mountain) Lion

Installing unsigned apps on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion

Problem

If you have installed Apple’s new operating system (Mountain Lion), you will notice that you won’t be able to install software which hasn’t been signed by an identified developer or downloaded via the Mac App Store (this is also known as Gatekeeper). They do this to counter the growing amount of malware that is bugging OSX the last couple of months. As the option is turned on by default, you have to find where to shut it off to download unsigned content (especially older apps).

Solution

Go to System Preferences < Security & Privacy < Tab ‘General’
You will see ‘Allow applications downloaded from’ greyed out, so first authenticate by clicking on the little padlock at the bottom left of the window.
Select ‘Anywhere’ instead of ‘Mac App Store and identified developers’

You’re done 🙂

iCapital v1.5 released

This week a new version of iCapital got released in the App Store. It was my guinea pig app to learn myself Objective-C this summer when I broke my foot. It was an excellent learning app, because it covered a lot of new concepts which I had to tackle:

Core Data
Migrating data on updates
Memory management
Retina support
Game Center
…

Now, 8 months later, I took a look at how I left my code behind in my repository and I thought it was a good thing to rewrite the whole app as I now have a much better understanding of the language. Since then I created a new game Boring Meeting OXO, an iPad app (in a private store, but you can take a look how it works here, this was still in a development phase), and a few personal apps. As I feel myself comfortable with the language now, I hope I can release many new apps soon (one is coming pretty soon :-)!

As with every update, I give away some promo codes you can redeem via the App Store. So for the quick readers, here are 10 promo codes:

AW66MN7A6H3E
EPYRKHW6N6NF
E4MEXAMHTFKM
MYR4JFYPWY6L
FHLN4TJA97EP
MEH34K39HR4K
7KN6MMYAAPW7
NF6KMNNYH399
HTFKEX49JEP4
L3T9FWLPYXLX

I hope you have fun with it!