Indie Frame #1 — Matthew Flint and Nearly Departed
This is the first in a series of posts focusing on indie app developers who use Shareshot.
We’re kicking it off with Matthew Flint who came to our attention saying nice things about Shareshot on Mastodon during the Beta period.
We thought we’d ask him about his brilliantly named app Nearly Departed and how he is using Shareshot to frame his screenshots and get work done.
So Matthew, please tell us a bit about yourself!
I’m a software engineer from Nottingham, England, and have been making iOS apps full-time for the past ten years. In addition to my day-job at a financial company, I spend a lot of time working on my app “Nearly Departed” which tracks UK train journeys.
This is my way of experimenting with code and trying new Apple frameworks, before I propose using them in the day-job. I’m happiest when I’m solving coding problems!
What have you been using Shareshot for?
I submitted a talk proposal for the iOSDevUK conference, which was accepted, and needed something to make my app screenshots look amazing. My artistic skills are terrible, so I’m grateful that someone else is able to do the heavy lifting for me.
Framing screenshots is a chore that was begging to be automated, and I’m really pleased with how Shareshot effortlessly gives great results. It finds screenshots in the photo album, detects the correct frame size, and has some really nice ways to customise the output.
I attended iOSDev UK few years back and had a great time. What is your talk about this year?
It is a great conference! This will be my sixth visit to Aberystwyth, and the second time I’ve spoken. I did a five-minute lightning talk in 2023 on “The Mikado Method for refactoring code”, which was prepared the night before and delivered after no sleep. I had missed the acceptance email from the organisers, and learned that I’d been selected at 11pm while in the pub.
This year, I’ve had six months to prepare a talk about Live Activities, which arrived with iOS 16.1. Live Activities are a great tool for tracking a task on iPhone and (since watchOS 11) Apple Watch. I’ve added Live Activities to my Nearly Departed app, and I plan to share some things that I’ve learned along the way: from making the UI, to updating the presented data using push notifications. I hope I can inspire people to add Live Activities to their apps.
Can you tell us a bit about your screenshot workflow and how you used Shareshot?
I have a branch of my application code which contains some hard-coded data, rather than using live train information. To get the all-important “09:41” status bar, I attach the test device to my Mac and start a movie recording with the QuickTime app - this sets the perfect status bar, and even overrides the time shown on the lock-screen too. I relied on Photos iCloud-sync to make the screenshot available on another phone where Shareshot was installed, and finally transferred the framed images to my Mac with AirDrop.
If I needed to frame a large number of screenshots, then I might have investigated the App Intent automations built into Shareshot - but the app is so easy to use, I never felt the need to automate the process.
(Editor’s note: we wish we could have told Matthew at the time: if you are doing something like this, using Continuity Clipboard to copy and paste the images between devices is much faster, and works between iOS and macOS.)
That QuickTime trick to get the 9:41 time is genius! Some kind of 9:41 mode is something we have in our frankly huge backlog of features. Is there anything else that you’d like to see us add to Shareshot?
Top of my list would be a Mac app. If it could read from the macOS photo album and write to the Mac filesystem, that would make the process much faster.
I’d also like to be able to zoom the screenshot preview on iOS, because some of the effects are difficult to see on my small iPhone. It’s only now, while we’re chatting, that I realise I should have been running Shareshot on my iPad. That would have been a smart thing to do.
Thanks to Matthew for sharing, and we wish him well with his talk! You can find Nearly Departed in the App Store or at nearlydeparted.app.
The iOSDev UK conference really is great and takes place in Wales. There are still some last minute tickets available for the conference which starts on 2nd September 2024, and the price including accommodation is very affordable.
If you are an indie who enjoys using Shareshot and fancy being featured in a future instalment of “Indie Frame”, please contact me.
