Panic makes great apps (I use a few of them). I hate that this happened to them, but you have to admire their transparency and openness about this situation.

The Case of the Stolen Source Code

I recently bought OmniFocus for my iPad after finding other task management apps insufficient. The one real weakness I found in OmniFocus was the inability to link to tasks in other projects to indicate a cross-project dependency. (From my research online, I gather that most OmniFocus users think this is counter to accepted usage patterns and thus not a good idea. Nonetheless, it’s something I need to do.)

While doing research to figure out if this was possible, I found a discussion forum where an OmniFocus user mentioned that in the Mac version of OmniFocus (which I didn’t buy), it’s possible to copy the link to a task. I wondered if this was also possible in the iOS version.

I started by opening the task, clicking the “share” button and selecting “copy,” which yielded this:

omnifocus:///task/cIx7zMCx7iz?name=Test%20task&note=This%20is%20a%20test.&parallel=true
omnifocus:///task/cIx7zMCx7iz
- Test task @parallel(true) @autodone(false)
	This is a test.

The task’s URL is there: omnifocus:///task/cIx7zMCx7iz.

Next step: Can I use Workflow to parse just the task URL and copy it to the clipboard?

I have an action extension workflow with one step — View Content Graph. Running this workflow on the OmniFocus task, I could see that OmniFocus was passing the task URL to Workflow.

 

Using another action extension workflow that gets the URLs from the input and displays them using the Quick Look action, I determined — through a bit of trial and error by running it on various tasks — that the task URL is always the last URL that OmniFocus passes to Workflow.

 

The task URL can be easily retrieved using the Get Item From List action, so the workflow is just three steps:

 

The workflow is available here.

I recorded this video in May of 2015 during takeoff from Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur (NCE) on a flight bound for Heathrow Airport (LHR). The airport is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea on three sides, and during takeoff we flew over the sea before turning back inland. After the plane levels over the sea, you can see part of the airport in the right side of the frame.

Video recorded during takeoff from LaGuardia Airport (LGA) on April 10, 2016. We flew over the northern end of Manhattan, which provided a good view of the skyline.

Vík to Jökulsárlón

The day after we arrived in Vík, we drove 193 km (120 miles) from Vík to Jökulsárlón, a glacial lagoon in Austurland, the Eastern Region of Iceland.

The trip was entirely on the Ring Road, and it took us through the most varied and stunning scenery we saw in Iceland.

Cliffs that seem to have sprouted abruptly from flat grassy plains:

Snow:

Lava fields:

Glaciers:

Barren flatlands:

And the remains of a bridge destroyed during a glacial flood:

The occasional farming community and gas station – which, if you’re lucky, might also house a convenience store or a café – are the only signs of civilization in this part of the country.

Single-lane bridges are common on this stretch of the Ring Road.

Most of them are short enough that you can make sure the bridge is clear before proceeding. The longer ones, like the one seen in the video below, have small places to pull over in case you meet another car head-on (which did happen to us once, on a different bridge). To give you an idea of exactly now narrow this bridge was, we were driving a Toyota Yaris, and it felt like a tight squeeze crossing the bridge.

This house was a popular spot for people to stop and take photographs (click the image to see it full-size), which is probably why the sign was at the entrance to the driveway.

We saw a few people walking around the gate (the driveway was gated, but there was no fence) to get a closer look. We just stayed next to the road and took some pictures of the land and the surrounding cliffs.

Jökulsárlón and the Atlantic Ocean

Jökulsárlón is a glacial lagoon and the deepest lake in Iceland. It’s full of icebergs that break off from Breiðamerkurjökull, one of the glacial tongues of Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in Iceland. (The lake can be seen in the beginning of A View to a Kill, where it stood in for Siberia.)

There’s a channel from the lake to the Atlantic Ocean (I think it was created by the glacier’s retreat), and the icebergs eventually end up on the nearby beach or floating in the ocean.

The beach is black volcanic sand, which provides a striking contrast to the white and blue-green icebergs.