Brandsonic Apps blog

I recently found out that my long time web host, Webs (AKA Freewebs) will be shutting down on March 31st of this year. This will leave me without a website. I outgrew Webs a long time ago and I've been wanting to move to something different, but I haven't found anything else I really like. I am setting up a site on Google Sites that I intend to be temporary. With this site, I don't have the same page limits as I did on Webs. So I plan to have more apps on it than just Brandsonic Web. When the new site is ready I will announce it here and on Twitter. This blog will remain, it is not being affected by the Webs shutdown.  Google Sites doesn't resolve the issue of where to host the Brandsonic Web portal. Not sure what I am going to do about that. The portal is hardcoded as the default home page in all versions of Brandsonic Web except for the latest version of Brandsonic Web for Mac. This means that once Webs is shutdown, the portal will no longer be the home page. I don...

After working on it for over a year, the Swift rewrite of Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS is nearly ready for release. There are many reasons why I decided to do this rewrite. The original codebase of Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS is over 10 years old. It dated back to the iOS 4 and Xcode 3 days. It was becoming harder and harder to maintain. This was part of the reason for the infrequent updates. When I started Brandsonic Web, I wasn't as skilled with coding as I am now. While I am no expert now, I know a lot more than I did when I started Brandsonic Web 10 years ago. My lack of skill lead to a lot of poor programming practices with also made the codebase harder to maintain. The old version of Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS is based on the old UIWebView API, which was deprecated by Apple a number of years ago. It was replaced by a new API, WKWebView. This was the biggest reason for the rewrite. I attempted to transition the current version of Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS to WKWebVie...

You may have seen that I recently tweeted the Big Sur icon for Brandsonic Web for Mac. As I mentioned in the tweet, it was created by /u/1Gigabite on Reddit. I'd like to thank them for taking the time to make this icon for me. It's far better than anything I could do myself. This is the official Big Sur icon. This icon will only be used as the Big Sur icon for Brandsonic Web for Mac. It will not be replacing the current Brandsonic Web logo. I plan to release a version with the new icon included. However, for now, I have released a download of the ICNS file so that you can change the icon if you are on Big Sur. You can get it below.  I don't know if the current release of Brandsonic Web for Mac works on Big Sur, and I don't currently have a way to test it myself. I don't have a Mac capable of running Big Sur, officially or unofficially. I also have no way of testing it on the new Apple Silicon Macs. I plan to release a Universal binary version of Brandsonic Web for M...

Brandsonic Web for Mac 0.10 is the biggest release of Brandsonic Web for Mac yet. It's so big that I felt that it was time to bump the version number to 0.10. This is the first Brandsonic Web for Mac release in over 3 years. It includes major new features like the the ability to change the home page and search provider in the new preferences window. You can now choose Bing or DuckDuckGo as your search provider instead of Google. The default is still Google. I plan to add more search providers in the future.  This is also one of the most tested versions of Brandsonic Web for Mac. I tested it on 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.13 and 10.14. There is an issue on older macOS versions. You won't be able to visit some sites because of SSL issues. Unfortunately, there isn't much I can do about this.  I removed Google+ from Quick Sites because it was shut down last year. I added DuckDuckGo to Quick Sites in the search engine section. This is the first change to Quick Sites since its introduct...

It has been over 2 years since that last release of Brandsonic Web for iOS. My life has been pretty crazy the last two years. School keeps me very busy and I simply haven't had the time to devote to Brandsonic Web. As you may have seen on Twitter, I took and completed the 100 Days of Swift challenge last month. My ultimate goal was to a rewrite Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS in Swift. I have started work on this and it's coming along rather nicely. However it's not ready for release and I don't know when it will be. I plan to release a new version of Brandsonic Web for iOS with a fix for the "The operation couldn’t be completed" bug and official iOS 12 support. I will be testing this release over the next few days to make sure I was fixed the problem. If all goes well I hope to release this update soon. I am still using Xcode 10.1 on High Sierra as I don't have a Mac capable of running Mojave or Catalina officially. This is why I can't add official ...

Unfortunately, my development machine, a MacBook (Late 2009) cannot run macOS Mojave. I have no way of testing Brandsonic Web for Mac on macOS Mojave. I will be able to update Brandsonic Web for Mac for macOS Mojave, as the latest Xcode should run on macOS High Sierra, which my machine can run. However, once the latest Xcode no longer runs on High Sierra, I won't be able update Brandsonic Web for Mac for newer macOS versions. This also goes for Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS, but since it only runs on jailbroken devices, I'm not as concerned about it right now. I will try to keep Brandsonic Web for Mac working on the latest macOS for as long as I can. If someone could test the current version of Brandsonic Web for Mac on macOS Mojave, and tell me the result here or on Twitter, I'd greatly appreciate it.

I found out today that the Cydia repo, ModMy, that I've hosted Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS on for seven years, is gone. This is an unexpected blow, but Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS WILL continue. Right now, you can still download the latest version of Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS (0.9.9) from the ModMy repo, as all the content on the repo has been archived. However, future updates to Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS will no longer be available from ModMy. I plan to host Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS myself on my own repo. There will be more about this in the coming weeks. For now, if you need to download Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS, download it as you normally would. I would like to thank ModMyi/ModMy for hosting Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS for seven years. It received over 50,000 downloads over the seven years it was hosted on ModMyi/ModMy. Without ModMyi/ModMy, Brandsonic Web mobile for iOS would have never been downloaded so many times and for that, I'm thankful. ...