Tag Archives: times

AppleScripting Dates > Elapsed Time Calculator

ImageSince Valentine's Day is this week, I thought I would take this opportunity to share an AppleScript I wrote to calculate how long my wife and I have been married. With this baby, I'll never be accused of forgetting how long it's been when our anniversary rolls around. The script determines the elapsed time between now (the current date and time), and a prior date and time (such as our anniversary). It then displays the result in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years.

Note: If you're into the whole "traditional anniversary gift" thing (I'm not), you can find a list of gift categories on Wikipedia.

Creating the Script

Note: If you have any trouble following along, you can download the complete script here.

1. Launch AppleScript Editor in /Applications/Utilities and create a new script document.

2. Insert the following code:

Some notes about this script...

* I used some of the number calculation handlers in the Essential Subroutines section of macosxautomation.com, although, I made some slight modifications to them for the script. If you're interested in learning more about AppleScript, there are some other useful handlers there, as well, and I encourage you to check them out.

* The final display dialog sets as its icon the FavoriteItemsIcon icon file, which is embedded in the CoreTypes bundle in /System/Library/CoreServices. It is, coincidentally enough, a heart.

Using the Script

To use, just run the script within AppleScript Editor, or save it as an application to be launched and run whenever you wish. First, the script asks you to enter a date and, optionally, a time.

Image

Next, the script does its calculations and displays the result. Just take a screenshot of the dialog and send it along to your significant other.

Image

Until next time, Happy Scripting and Happy Valentine's Day Week!

AppleScripting Dates > Elapsed Time Calculator originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 11 Feb 2013 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink

Wait times for App Store approvals reportedly rising

A developer training firm named Shiny Development has been tracking waiting times for the App Store review process as closely as it can, and it has bad news for would-be app developers: The waiting times for the Mac App Store are growing longer. In the last six months or so, the waiting time for getting a Mac App published has gone from under seven days to almost as high as a month, according to Shiny's data. Apple's process is largely closed off -- there is a little bit of information for developers on the main dev website, but otherwise Shiny has mostly gathered this information from the various developers it tracks and corresponds with online. If indeed the times for the Mac App Store have gotten this bad, it could mean that big apps are getting delayed longer and longer, and that could be trouble for the platform in general.

The good news is that the iOS App Stores' waiting times appear to be going down over nearly the same time period, from 10 days a few months ago, down to right around a week now. Apple has hired lots of app reviewers in the past year or so, and that's likely the reason for dropping times: As it has more people to check incoming apps, it can get approvals through the system quicker. Hopefully there's a bigger horde of Mac App reviewers on the way, so these apps can get out to the public in a relatively timely fashion.

[via MacRumors]

Wait times for App Store approvals reportedly rising originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Source

Steve Jobs subject of new children’s book

The Loop spotted a new book over at Amazon called "Who Was Steve Jobs?" that appears to be a children's book, of all things. It's part of a series of books designed to tell kids about famous historical figures and why they're so admired or well-known.

Looking inside the book shows that it talks about Steve's life and times, all the way from the garage in California, up through the NeXT days, and to "Think Different" and "Insanely Great." There's also a detailed timeline included, and even a bibliography of sources. This might be just the thing for any little ones who could use a primer on Jobs and his life.

Steve Jobs subject of new children's book originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 16 May 2012 16:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Source

Mobile apps leaving the web behind in usage

Mobile ad company Flurry has released a new analysis on its official blog stating that customers are making the transition lately from using the mobile web to spending more of their daily time in mobile apps. In the early days of smartphone prominence (and by "early days," we mean about three years ago), the main feature on mobile phones was the web. You could check email, look up web pages, or browse the web on your smartphone, and that's how most people used them.

Since the rise of iOS, however, mobile apps are picking up that time spent. And as you can see from the chart above, customers are now putting more time into mobile apps (about 9 percent more, it turns out) than browsing the mobile web. It should be noted that both stats are still growing -- customers are spending more time on mobile phones than ever. But mobile app usage is growing even faster.

It's not hard to see why this is, either. Mobile apps are maturing quickly, and it's easier to get information from many of them now than it was just browsing around the web. Mobile apps also offer features like offline access and other things that the web doesn't, so this shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone.

Mobile apps leaving the web behind in usage originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 04:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Source

How the iPad and iPhone shift reading habits

Read It Later is an Instapaper-style platform for saving and tracking various things to read online, and they recently released some interesting information about iPad and iPhone reading over on their blog. The line for when people save articles is pretty constant no matter what hour of the day you're talking about -- we're pretty often browsing for and discovering new things to read all of the time. But when you look at the graphs about when people retrieve those articles on their mobile devices, you see some interesting trends.

The iPhone graph, seen above, has lots of little peaks in it, but those peaks come at "in-between" times -- when we're eating some breakfast, traveling via commute or about to go to bed. That's fascinating -- according to this data, the iPhone is really a whitespace device, providing productivity when we don't have access to anything else. And the iPad graph is interesting as well -- as you can see on RiL's page, it sees most of its activity later in the evening, when we're on the couch just relaxing.

And there's one more little bit of interesting data -- users who own an iPad are apparently doing less reading on their computers during the day. In other words, they're saving articles specifically for iPad time, because apparently they prefer to do more reading on the iPad itself. Remember, these are brand new categories of devices, and it's really crazy to see how they're changing our habits so quickly.

[via TechCrunch]

How the iPad and iPhone shift reading habits originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments