milk-app

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Update for El Capitan

We have just submitted an update to fix the bugs related to the new OS X El Capitan. Milk 2.3.3 should be available on the App Store within the next few days.

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Milk 2.3.2 has been submitted to the App Store. New old icon, new old price.

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Milk 2.3 has been submitted to the App Store and should be ready for download within a few days. This update is intended to run only on machines running Yosemite. If you haven’t updated to OS X 10.10 yet, you definitely should. Enjoy!

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Milk 2.2 is now available for download on the App Store. Don’t forget to check out what’s new in the (reinstated) Preferences menu (⌘,).

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Milk 2.2

Milk 2.2 is finished and has been submitted for review. The update should be available on the App Store early next week. Until then, here’s what to expect from this update.

Toolbar

The Like, Reblog and Notes buttons have been moved from the main toolbar to the header of the post detail view. For posts created by the user, the Edit, Post, Enqueue and Delete buttons have also been moved into this new toolbar, making them more easily accessible.

Post Preview

The post previews have been redesigned to make better use of space. Each preview cell is now taller, the text is bigger and runs to the end of the cell including a more complete preview description, the date takes up less room, the avatars are larger and easier to identify, and the post type icons are gone, along with the grey sidebar. Videos hosted on YouTube and Vimeo now include a photo preview.

Post Detail

Along with the new toolbar mentioned above, the colors and font sizes for the post detail window for the default theme have been adjusted for better readability.

Preferences

The Preferences Panel (⌘+,) has made its way back into the app! The following options are included.

Display Date: You can choose to show or hide the timestamp in the post preview cells.

Full-size Images: You can choose not to display full size images in the post detail window. Instead, ideal size images—less than full size but large enough to appreciate—are shown. This is especially useful over slow internet connections.

Round Avatars: You can now choose between square and round avatars, everywhere avatars are shown.

Markdown: You can set markdown as the default editing mode so that you don’t need to toggle the html/markdown option for every new post.

Links: You can choose to open tumblr links—links of the form “blog_name_here.tumblr.com/…”—directly in Milk or in your browser. Selecting this option will display blog_name_here’s blog in Milk when you follow a link pointing to a page found on their blog.

Bug Fixes

It wouldn’t be a new minor update without bug fixes. The bug fixes for version 2.2 include the following.

Reblog a post to any blog under any account you’ve signed on to without having to switch to the account hosting that blog. This has always worked for new posts but a 401 error was occurring in the case of reblogs.

Save media posts to your desktop without having to include any media. You must, of course, add a photo, audio, or video (or reference to such) before posting to your blog, but you can now leave that part for later without the document crashing on save.

There was previously an issue with a whitespace gap appearing in the list of post previews when more posts were fetched and added to the list. This rendering issue is now fixed and there are no more unsightly gaps.

App Icon

The border radius was fine tuned to achieve a perfect squircle.

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We chose the name ‘Milk’ for our app because we wanted to appropriate a simple, common English word. A lot of our previous apps suffered from the fashionable naming conventions of their time, like ‘i’ and ‘tap’ prefixes, missing vowels, etc.

We wanted a name that you could associate with the word Tumblr, which could be either a medieval juggler or a cup. The obvious choice was Jugglr, and indeed our first Tumblr API key is registered under that name, but it fell into the fancy naming fad that we were looking to avoid.

With the second interpretation in mind, we thought to name the app ‘Whisky.’ It seemed like a perfect match, having the same number of letters as ‘Tumblr’ along with the missing vowel, which has a very specific meaning (only whiskey produced in Scotland, i.e. scotch, is spelled ‘whisky’ without the ‘e’). But we were worried about having an age limit imposed on the App Store because of the name, so the next best thing that occurred to us was milk. Simple, fresh, easy to come up with an icon (which we’ve changed to a simple iOS 7 style icon) and it’s something you can put in a tumbler. Done.

We were very happy with the name, until we started getting a lot of blank stares from people when we told them about our app and that it was called Milk. This was especially true at this year’s MacWorld. We were getting the impression that our app name was flawed for exactly the reasons we thought it was great. Maybe Jugglr would have been better.

A few months later we’re sharing the name with Samsung’s new streaming music app, and we couldn’t be happier because it means the name probably wasn’t a terrible choice. And because maybe Google will throw some more traffic our way now that people will be searching for apps named ‘milk.’

The only thing we regret about the name is the domain milk-app.com. That dash in the domain is an eyesore. Every other possible top level domain for ‘milkapp’ was free except the dot com, and the people who owned the domain were squatters who wanted way too much money. So we had to choose between a dot net, the next best top level domain choice, or dot com with a dash in it. We probably should have gone with dot net. Oh well!

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⌘+R & ⌘+L

Don’t forget that you can reblog and like posts using your keyboard with the shortcuts above. You can also create a new post using shortcuts ⌘+1 to ⌘+7 and search tags using ⌘+T.

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Meet the New Milk

While Milk 2.1 works its way through the App Store’s review pipeline we’d like to show you what’s new.

UI Overhaul

All four panels of the main window—toolbar, outline, post list, and post display—have been redesigned in Milk 2.1. We stripped away the chrome to let the content show through and to make the app faster and easier to use.

Usability

The biggest change in this update is the stock OS X toolbar has been replaced with a slim toolbar. You can now create any kind of post with a single click, and the reblog button in the toolbar requires only one click (right click on any post in the post list to reblog as a link, text or quote). And since ‘like’ and ‘reblog’ are the two most used actions on Tumblr, they are now available through the shortcuts ⌘L and ⌘R, respectively.

Scrolling

Choppy scrolling has been an issue in Milk and on OS X in general since the introduction of Mavericks. This is ironic because ‘smooth scrolling’ is a Mavericks feature. We’ve had a bug filed for this since the beta for 10.9, but Apple has has their own peculiar way of dealing with these things.

Through some fortuitous, unrelated changes to the codebase, we’ve fixed what Mavericks broke. Scrolling is now buttery smooth in the post display window. Hurrah!

Extras

A swipe-to-next/previous action has been added to the post display window, a la Chrome. There’s no longer a need to move the cursor all the way back to the post list or to keep an extra hand on the keyboard to navigate your dashboard.

Finally, the main menu has been reorganized. There’s now a ‘Hide Outline’ item under the Window menu (⌘H) to show/hide the outline and the app remembers whether you want the outline to show when it restarts.

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⌘R => ⌘U

A quick warning ahead of the Milk 2.1 release. The shortcut for updating your dashboard, previously ⌘R, is now the shortcut for reblogging the current post (in its natural form). The new shortcut for updating the dashboard is ⌘U.

If you keep getting a new document window every time you press ⌘R, just remember it’s now ‘R for reblog’ and ‘U for update.’

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Milk 2.1 has been submitted to the App Store and will be available just as soon as it’s reviewed. This is how it will look on your dock and in your launchpad.

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We’ve recently been asked how to edit tags for reblog posts in Milk. We wrote a short post on this previously but didn’t include any screenshots to illustrate.

Briefly, Tumblr’s system has a set way to handle reblog-style posts: the post is replicated but with your comments added. If you want to edit the tags, provide a custom url or clear out the block quote that Tumblr adds automatically, you need to first submit the reblog post—which you can do as a draft to avoid publishing it in this default form—and then edit that post. It’ll still be registered as a reblog of the original post but you now have control over every aspect.

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A big thanks to our friends at FAQ-MAC for this incredible video review of our app. You can find the full article here.

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My book of cartoons ‘You’re All Just Jealous of my Jetpack’ is available now: US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1770461043 UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1770461043 Other stockists and info at www.tomgauld.com

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We are pleased to announce that we are sponsoring Matt Gemmell’s blog for this week.

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Instead of an exhaustive list of features, we thought it would be better to go over the two driving factors behind Milk 2.

When we originally released Milk last year, we had built the app that we wanted. This is really the only thing we could do considering we didn’t have any information to go on except what we thought we wanted from a Tumblr client. Milk 2 is the app that all of you out there wanted. After a year of going through feedback, we realized what you all wanted was something a bit more conventional, more utilitarian, like Mail.

That brings us to our second point. Whereas our initial release was focused around a series of questions of the form wouldn’t it be neat if so and so worked in such a way that …, the question that was on our minds this time around was simply, how would you expect this to work? It’s no longer a collection of ideas and features, but a cohesive app whose purpose is to help you spend more time with what you like from your Tumblr without having to spend so much energy scrolling through the rest.

We’re proud to present Milk 2. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

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Milk 1 Has Been Retired From the AppStore...

To make way for Milk 2, which will be available starting on 4/24. More to come over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.