If you have a Mac at home (like I do, it runs and is connected to my TV), you can Kodi also leverage it to control or query your home in different ways. Being an user, I thought it would be neat to be able to send and receive commands to my house using iMessages, whether I’m at home or somewhere else. iPhone Asking my Mac for a joke, it responds So to limit the scope of this article, I’m just going to implement a very simple joke bot. First of all, let’s write a shell script powered by that allows us to send messages. We need to do this, as Apple does not provide an open API. AppleScript Let’s create an actual AppleScript handler for Messages.app: This script needs to be placed in your folder. ~/Library/Application Scripts/com.apple.iChat To install the handler, open Messages.app, go to and choose the file. Preferences>General MessageReceive.script Now — upon receiving a message, Messages.app will send the message to the AppleScript receive handler. Lastly, as simply calls the shell script , we’ll have to create it as well: MessageReceive.script ~/bin/MessageReceive.sh #!/bin/bash # Set shell optionsshopt -s nocasematch sender=`echo ${1} | cut -d ':' -f 2`read line sendChuckNorrisJoke() {message=$(curl -s " " | python -mjson.tool | grep '\"joke\"' \| cut -d : -f 2 | sed 's/"/\"/g')${HOME}/bin/SendMessage.sh "${sender}" "${message}"} http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random if [[ $line =~ "joke" ]]; thensendChuckNorrisJokeexit 0fi message="I do not understand what you mean."${HOME}/bin/SendMessage.sh "${sender}" "${message}" The above script is simply a hack that only works with a Chuck Norris joke database. The concept should be clear though, i.e. you can replace this with any type of script such as your very own personal AI bot, or switching lights on/off.

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A crude iMessage API

I presented at On 20.9 Reversim Summit (one of the biggest conference for developers in Israel) about building Android apps. This was my first time talking in a conference at this scale. It wasn’t easy but I survived and I’m here to talk about my journey. One day, something like 3 months ago, I stumble upon a post in one of my Facebook groups about a conference for developers going to take place in September: Hi all, The Reversim Summit is probably one of the best (if not the best) independent software engineering (at large) conference in Israel, and it will be held this year at Sep. 19–20 at the Weizmann institute. As an event 100% based on community generated content, the conference is as good as the quality of the submissions. The call for papers is *now* open... This was the first time I heard about the Reversim Summit. I was familiar with the and knew it was good, so I knew the conference should worth something. So I decided to give it a try. podcast Picking the right content Ok, so I decided that I want to talk in the conference, but about what? One of the great tips that I’ve got (from the great about ) is to take one of your blog posts and create a talk. That’s, I thought, is a great way to give the reviewers a more compelling way instead of just 1–2 paragraphs when trying to describe what I’m going to talk about. Chiu-Ki Chan how to be an Android expert Luckily I wrote couple of technical posts, but most of them were some kind of tutorials on how to do all kind of things in Android. Also- most of them not gained too much tractions, what made me think that people won’t be too interested. Moreover, knowing that this conference going to get lots of submissions, I knew that my talk should be different. Given that I don’t have enough reputation, and because people are interested more on technical problems in larger scale than mobile- If I will go head to head with other technical talks I’ll loose. So, I decided to choose my series blog posts about How to build a bad app ( , , ). This is great because: part 1 part 2 part 3 This will cover also other aspects of mobile developing, like design and product. The talk will be about my experience and things that I’ve done. I think those are the best talks. I don’t like talks which are too technical- I don’t believe that we can read too much code from slides or understand deep technical concept without actually playing with it. So this will be great for high level review with lots of small things that everyone can get. It’s light, it’s funny, it’s a lecture that is fun to deliver. Call for Papers This is always a tricky part (although there’s couple of good resources about how to that can help). write a good abstract for CFP How do I make my abstract highlight my talk and make it unique? How do I describe what I’m talking about (how to build a bad app) without confusing the audience? How to say that it’s a bit technical but not too much? How to let others know that it’s for developers, designers and products managers just in a single paragraph? Tried my best and got this: Building a decent app is easy this days, there are plenty of tutorials, videos and blog post about it. In this session I’ll try to go over some of the top mistakes that everyone of us is doing while building his app. This will cover all the aspects of building bad app- technical, UI & UX, and product. So each one of you will be able to adapt his own favorite bad pattern and ruin his app. I think it’s great because it’s clear, but still leave the reader curious. People might afraid that it’s not technical enough but they know they can get out with action items from the talk. The review started a week after, it was combined from crowd voting and team of moderators that process all requests and choose the best ones. There were around 300 propose sessions and only 30 will be approved, I was in the mobile track, were there 30 submissions and only 3 will be chosen. 10% chance, not so high as you can understand. After couple of mails and phone calls with my moderator (thanks !), I got this email: Adir Amsalem Shit just got real. Warming up Now it’s time to do the actual work. I immediately schedule a talk in my work place as part of our bi-weekly company talking program. I decided to chose 5 rules for each list: technical, UI/UX and product. I wanted find for most of the 15 rules an example from a real world app, aiming for big apps that everyone knows. Building a minimal slides, with the rules and a picture or two for visualisation (screenshots when possible, gifs for others) and couple of more slides for intro and background. It was great for first run, but there were some problems: It was too long, it took me around 50 minutes and I only have 35 (plus 5 minutes for questions). Solution- cut the rules list to 11. The audience was able to see the rule in the slide’s title when I moved to the slide and before I started to talk about. That killed the surprise affect. Solution- Change the order of the fade in animation, so the text will shown in the end. Gifs were keep playing and steel the audience (and my) attention. Solution- put a static image of the gif on top of the gif to “stop” the gif, and show in on click (great tip that I’m going to apply on all my presentation from now on). After some tweaks, one of the mentors from the summit schedules another dry run on offices. Kind of an intimate rehearsal (presenting it to him and another college) to gather final feedbacks. Wix Again, we found things that can be improved: The intro is too long and not very clear. Solution- instead of talking about why I’m giving this lecture on 4 different slides, I’m going to tell my story on the first slide, tell about motivation on another slide, and remove the other 2. Videos on Google slides not working without internet connection. Solution- keeping a local copy of the video, and use it. The talk is finished kind of out of nowhere. Solution- add a summary slide with the list of all rules that we talked about. I also changed the theme to more cleaner one and came out with this final slides: Show time September 19- the first day of the summit, register and gathering into the keynote (by the amazing ), entering a huge auditorium with around 500 people. Luckily (and actually with some disappointment) my session was scheduled to a much smaller room, so I didn’t need to freak out from having to talk in front of so many people. Iris Shoor During the summit I got into some great talks (by , , , and ) and a amazing lighting talks (especially the ones by and ) and even a song! (by ). This is another nice benefit when you talk in a conference- you get a free ticket =) Eyal Yavor Lior Bar-On Yuval Samet Boaz Gaon Oren Ellenbogen Hagai Levin Michal Tirosh Yoni Tsafir My talk was on the morning of the second day, I was a bit nervous but not too much. The Reversim team was great and everything was taken care for me. I just needed to memorize the order of the rules (because as you remember, I changed it and I don’t have the text in slide when I start talking about it) but beside of this I felt really confident. Everything went very well, the hall wasn’t big so I didn’t need a microphone, what made it more natural. I also got some friends in the audience, what made me less stressed. I even nailed some jokes that I thought about right before I started. It’s all finished very quickly. It’s funny how you prepare yourself for very long time just to build a 40 minute talk. On the stage it even feel shorter. I got very good feedbacks, they said that the talk was very good and they learn one thing or two about mistakes that they didn’t thought about before. What’s next Since then I gave the talk on another conference- and I plan to do it one or maybe two more times. Droidcon Tel-Aviv I feel very comfortable talking in Hebrew, even in front of a big audience. My next milestone is to bring this kind confident to when I’m talking in English, and to give a talk in a conference abroad. I might need to prepare more than what I’m used to, but I think that I will able to do it very soon. Conclusions Pick your talk wisely. Think what is your relative advantage and how your talk can stand out from all the others. Don’t be shy. Don’t think that you’re not interesting enough and you have nothing that others can learn from. With any rehearsal you will get you more feedback, doing it more- the better your talk and slides will be. BUT: Don’t overthink it. You’ll never get perfect. Learn where it’s good enough and stop you feel confident with what you got. Photos by: Reversim Summit 2016 photo album If you enjoyed this post, please hit the “recommend” button below and share this story. I also love reading all comments. Thanks! Originally published at shem8.github.io on October 3, 2016.

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How I survived my first big conference talk

SashiDo - The Real Parse Alternative I remember as it was yesterday: January 2016 when Parse announced their shutdown. I saw the confusion that mobile developers felt, they had to deal with servers, infrastructures, databases, backups, app scaling etc, all necessary things that they need, but take a lot of time, effort and knowledge to implement. I was thinking … these guys create amazing apps with inspiring UX design, why bother them with troubleshooting production systems? Set their minds free, give them time, stable platform and tools to unleash their powers. My first company CloudStrap is a Cloud hosting platform and me and my team have years of experience with Cloud services and infrastructures, we burn for what we do, so we decided: we have to build incredible product for them! It was months of hard planning, development, debugging, hundreds of sleepless nights and countless cups of coffee. It was difficult, but we wanted to provide the best option for the customers to receive again the real Parse experience. It’s been 3 months since we launched, is ready for production and we work with more and more enthusiasm to make into SashiDo SashiDo THE REAL PARSE ALTERNATIVE. Now, if you are still wondering where to migrate before Parse shuts down or if you are looking for a real Parse feeling: join for a free trial! SashiDo We’re the only service providing . We also have so nothing will get lost from your app. If you already have moved your application from Parse hosted service: don’t worry, SashiDo engineers would love to help you migrate from any Parse Server provider, we already gathered a lot of experience :) a fully automated migration from Parse: it takes few clicks Parse Files Migration tool SashiDo’s Dashboard gives you’ll find in our the following features: SashiDo 14 days free trial to test the real Parse experience: improved shiny fast Parse Dashboard , integrated with GitHub. We give you a private GitHub repository with each app: you can add collaborators, branches, versioning, deploy your code with just a You can read more on our “ ” tutorial. Advanced Cloud Code git push. How to set up Cloud Code on SashiDo you can choose a mobile platform, audiences, preview the push before sending. Reach your users fast and easy! Push Notification: give you the option to write long running tasks, include them in your Cloud Code and set up how often you want to run them. You can read more on our “ ” tutorial. Background Jobs: Getting started with Background Jobs on SashiDo maintain e-mail, social verifications and logins without any integrations, the same way as on Parse. Email integration & Social login: You want to code on a language other than JavaScript and integrate frameworks and technologies not supported by the Cloud Code? It’s now possible with WebHooks :) You can read more on our “ ” tutorial. WebHooks: How to set up WebHooks on SashiDo want you app to go real-time? We included them in the Dashboard so it’s easier than ever! You can read more on our “ ” tutorial. LiveQueries: SashiDo goes Realtime with Parse Server Live Queries we provide Static Website and Dynamic ExpressJS hosting. You don’t need anymore to host your app on one provider and the site on another: everything is on place! Web Hosting: provides secure and automated scaling of your apps. Will always handle an unexpected traffic during your marketing campaigns or media coverage. SashiDo Multi-regions are also covered: choose which one is convenient for you. uses stack which means no vendor lock-in, because we want to keep you as a happy customer, not as a hostage :). When a new version of the is released: we test it for bugs then fix them if we find any, and when everything is running smoothly we update your app so you don’t have to deal with this :) SashiDo Parse Open Source Parse Server We believe that you don’t have to give up the convenience of using all the features you’re used to. That’s why we constantly provide our customers with more and more tools so they can have the freedom to create amazing apps with fun … without effort! Focus on your app, we’d love to do the rest for you, because it’s our passion! Try and share the experience! SashiDo Marian Ignev ( @mignev )CEO of SashiDo

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I started playing with Elm around January 1, 2016. This was largely brought about by by at 2015’s ElixirConf. It took me a few more months to actually dig in, finally being reminded of my resolution when I saw some video by (I think?) and decided to take the plunge. this keynote Jessica Kerr Richard Feldman When I build apps in Elm the resulting architecture is extremely clean with minimal effort. Just a day later it was clear to me that this language was going to change my life. (and still ). There is a great new debugger coming in the next release (which showed off in ). Elm apps are also . The Hindley-Milner (Haskell-style) type system clarifies your ability to think about your application — and its hard to express how important this is if you haven’t worked with this type system before. In addition, runtime errors are extremely unlikely; in Elm, In the last 9 months I’ve been using Elm daily, and I’ve run into only 2 of these runtime errors. I had the same feeling I had when I wrote my first Rails app or played with Erlang , and later Elixir , for the first time. The compiler error messages are already amazing and extremely helpful getting better! Evan his ElmConf talk When I build apps in Elm the resulting architecture is extremely clean with minimal effort. unbelievably fast by default runtime errors are considered bugs in the compiler! How Elm Has Changed My Life This year, I’ve been dedicating basically every spare moment to playing with Elm. I went so far as to start . a business that revolves around me trying to make it easy for people to learn Elm and other important languages, in perpetuity Remote Meetups In March, I . The goal of this is to make it easier for people who don’t have access to a strong local programming community to increase their involvement in languages like Elm. These are If you’re interested in this sort of thing, The past ones have all been great, and here are videos from each of them: started coordinating Remote Meetups for Elm free meetups with world-class content. the 5th Elm Remote Meetup is happening on October 24th at 6PM on the West Coast. Elm Remote Meetup #1 Elm Remote Meetup #2 Elm Remote Meetup #3 — Note: this meetup just happened this week, so we are still working on making the video nice like the others Elm Remote Meetup #4 Free meetups with world-class content. Pairing with Amazing People My engagement with the Elm community has also given me the opportunity to pair program with some amazing people. We recorded 2 of those sessions so far: to refactor a project for my ElixirConf 2016 talk, which allowed real-time collaboration in a music tracker editor. I paired with Luke Westby to create nice server-side validations to go along with client side validations via elm-mdl. Luke and I paired again Also, and I are going to pair on something fun on Tuesday, September 27th at 7:30PM CDT Corey Haines (Should we should livestream it? Let me know in the comments!) More People Are Taking Notice Elm was making my life better, so I was thrilled when my buddy pointed me to this tweet: Phil Yay! I was very excited to see that other people that I know were starting to pay attention to Elm. That means more friends to play with! made me unbelievably happy because it signaled that Gile’s post other people are joining the fun and bringing more amazing people into the Elm community! Finally, I ran an impromptu Elm workshop at ElixirConf 2016. There was no formal announcement, and I was expecting maybe 15 people to attend. We had to scramble to prepare for that crowd and get an A/V setup in place. People are definitely paying attention to Elm :) When I walked in, there were ~100 people in the room. Come live in the future with me Elm has a lot of great lessons to teach us as a programming community. From its type system, to its great compile time messaging there is a lot of technical learning to grok. Perhaps most important is its amazing and helpful community. s the most interesting chat that I’m a member of, and I’m constantly impressed by how willing its members are to help others in their journey. The Elm slack i TL;DR : Elm is the future, and I want more people to live in it. Come join us in the future! Want to chat? Just leave a comment below! Also, there are more interesting links below…I just can’t stop. About me I’m Josh Adams, a co-founder of , which provides , including , , and . By subscribing for a personal or a team plan, you can help us devote the time it takes to produce all the nice Remote Meetups and free tutorials and pairing sessions that I love making so much. I’d love it if you’d help me dedicate my time to this by signing up! DailyDrip daily continuous learning content in a variety of technical topics Elm Elixir Ember My focus is to help developers build software better. My focus is to help developers build software better. Additional Links From Me People seemed to like my Introduction to using Material Design in Elm. I used Material Design Lite in Elm to create a multi-room chat system with a Phoenix Channels backend. I built a and spoke on it at ElixirConf 2016. collaborative music tool using Elm and Phoenix Channels ElmConf 2016 Videos We also were very proud to be the video sponsors for the first ever ElmConf. Here are those videos: “Code is the Easy Part” by Evan Czaplicki “Beyond Hello World and Todo Lists” by Ossi Hanhinen “Compilers as Therapists, or Why Elm is Good for ADHD” by Luke Westby “Rich Animation” by Matthew Griffith “Functional Data Structures” by Tessa Kelly “0–60 in 15 Minutes: Building a Realtime App With Elm and Horizon” by Abadi Kurniawaan “Rolling Random Romans” by Joël Quenneville “Building an Interactive Storytelling Framework in Elm” by Jeff Schomay “The Clockwork Gardener: Growing an Elm App With Templates” by Jessica Kerr “Nightingale.space — Elm and Crowd-Sourced Music Making” by Murphy Randle “Making Impossible States Impossible” by Richard Feldman Q&A Panel If you liked this post, please click that heart button to help more people live in the future! :)

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive September 23rd, 2016

A crude iMessage API

@tk512
Torbjørn Kristoffersen

How I survived my first big conference talk

@shemag8
Shem Magnezi

Becoming the Real Parse Alternative

@sashidoio
SashiDo.io

Why Elm is Going to Change the World

@dailydrip
DailyDrip

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive September 23rd, 2016

A crude iMessage API

@tk512Torbjørn Kristoffersen

How I survived my first big conference talk

@shemag8Shem Magnezi

Becoming the Real Parse Alternative

@sashidoioSashiDo.io

Why Elm is Going to Change the World

@dailydripDailyDrip

@tk512
Torbjørn Kristoffersen

@shemag8
Shem Magnezi

@sashidoio
SashiDo.io

@dailydrip
DailyDrip