Gordon Kelly, writing for Forbes:

The consistently reliable site reports further iPhone 8 problems exist with the integration of Touch ID into the display, the supply of OLED for the display itself and operation of the new front facing “3D sensor” camera – which will bring unlocking via facial recognition.

In fact these problems are reported to be so severe that several of the functions will not be available when the phone launches, forcing Apple to enable them later via a software update…

…

“By all accounts, it’s late in the game for Apple to be wrestling with problems as big as those described above,” concludes Fast Company and that’s certainly true. With mass manufacturing usually starting three months prior to release (and a September unveiling locked in stone) solutions are needed, and quickly.

I’m not sure if they just needed to get an article out about the future iPhone 8, but in my opinion it’s a load of rubbish.

Sure, Gruber also said that the charging feature may be sold separately, or just released with a later version of iOS. But it’s not a real problem, that warrants writing about a “serious problem”. The device isn’t even announced yet, let along being released.

I’m really not a fan of rumour posts, and normally I’d just ignore it, but this if Forbes! I would of thought they’d had better things to write about.

Michael Rockwell, over at Initial Charge write a piece about a really interesting way to give web apps a more native feel on iOS.

Firstly, he mentions Fluid, which is an application for macOS which lets you “convert” web apps into containers that run as normal apps:

On macOS, there’s an application available called Fluid, which lets you create site-specific web browsers. Many of us use web apps everyday and Fluid allows you to run them side-by-side with your native applications without being sequestered inside of a web browser. Fluid is a handy little tool that every Mac user should have in their arsenal.

I hadn’t heard of Fluid before, so I’m going to try this myself, but it’s not as good as his next suggestion for iOS:

To build these site-specific browsers, it just takes two simple actions — a URL action with the web app’s address and the Show Web Page action. When run, Workflow will open up the URL in a Safari View Controller, which gives you access to your action extensions alongside forward, back, and refresh buttons. From there you can give the workflow a name, set an icon color, and a glyph to fit the website or web application’s functionality.

So, he uses Workflow! It’s something I haven’t thought at all about before, but it makes sense. You can use the standard Safari View Controller inside Workflow, or you make partner it with apps like Sidefari, or maybe even add another layer to it with Opener.

I’ve actually just set one up myself to handle my the interface for this blog, which runs on Ghost.

Whether you use macOS or iOS, there’s a solution for you in this post!

I’ve done some minor researching into this idea of mine, that really became a thing when I started making my blog super lightweight. And I really want to carry that over into whatever this project becomes.

Whatever I do, will of course be personally oriented, and it will be packed full of decisions that wouldn’t work best for most people. But it’s a personal project first, and if it becomes more flexible and open in the future, that’s just a bonus.

What To Track

With Google Analytics, you get a whole bunch of stats. This can be really handy for someone trying to deeply understand interactions with a website, but it’s a bit over the top for the menial use I want out of it. There’s also the added fact that you’re tracking your users — it’s not a big deal, but I’d rather not invade people’s privacy.

There are very minimal metrics that I want to capture, and that is page views, referrer websites, and possibly number of sessions – although I don’t care about this too much. But regarding the first two, this can be completed by simply telling something the page that’s been loaded, and what referred it. Luckily for me, it’s all in the HTML DOM and I think I’ll be able to do this super minimally.

The way’s this basic data could be used is also rather interesting to me, as when the message is received (by a server, or whatever), a date can be applied. Which means the data can be sorted by the date, collated into individual pages, and some pretty cool graphs could be made from it.

How to do it

For the sake of the front-end implementation, I plan this to be a simple PUT request, which will send the (as mentioned above) data to whatever server that is in control of the analytics. From there, it will require no more work from the client.

For the back-end, the speed, and “heaviness” of the implementation isn’t super important for me at the beginning stage. Because initially it will only serve myself, so it’s not a big load that will be put on it. But my first idea is to use a cloud server on Digital Ocean, to host a Swift server app! Built using Perfect, because I had a great experience with it when I experimented with a text formatting API. There’s also the fact that I am mainly a Swift developer, and is more likely to get finished if I make use of that.

Progress

As with all my other projects, I’ll be pretty vocal with the progress, and try to share as much as possible. This will be done mainly on Twitter, where you can follow me at @chrishannah, and if you want to know something I haven’t shared yet, just ask!

I’ve been getting more obsessed with these two things recently, and you may have already noticed it with the recent “redesign”, if you can call it that. Basically, the design has been simplified even more, and a higher focus (like everyone always says) has been put on the content.

I’ve had this mindset towards website sizes, and how fast they should load for quite a while. But it’s only the past week or so that I’ve put effort into sorting out my website.

It started with optimising the images on the website, which consisted of resizing every image so that the width didn’t exceed 1400px and height didn’t exceed 1200px. They’re not exactly small sizes, but we live in a Retina world, and I have to put up with that. On top of that, all PNGs were put through the highest compression in Squash 2, and any image that was currently on the front page (I really couldn’t be bothered to do this for every post), was converted to JPG.

It was a decent start, and it certainly made a noticeable change in the size, with it taking my home page from 6MB to 1.2MB. It’s a relatively big difference, but I still felt that it wasn’t near enough what I was aiming for.

My desire is to have my website show off the content really nicely, be measured in mere kilobytes, and load so fast it’s not even recognisable.

Fast forward to today, where both the size and load speed metrics have improved a lot. I’ve been playing around with a few static site generators, and thinking about doing a more custom approach to the website, but I realised that Ghost (what this site runs on) can be manipulated itself. So for now, nothing major has changed with the underlying blog engine.

I have done a few things though:

• Removed Prism – this was the already small library that I used to style any embedded code, but it’s not really relevant.
• Cleaned up and minified my CSS file (yes, I write basic css).
• Removed all javascript, including Google Analytics!

Google Analytics was the hardest to remove, but I got down to a point a page showing a single text-only post, would be roughly 50KB. 29KB of that was Google Analytics. This was didn’t seem like nice ratio to me, so for now it is gone. Hopefully in the future, I can write something minimal myself to track basic page views, but I’m not worried about that just yet.

Here are a few examples of the website size and load speeds:

• “5K Versions of Every Default macOS Wallpaper →” (<30 words, 0 images) – 7.36KB (70-130ms)
• “Emergency SOS on Apple Watch” (<250 words, 0 images) – 8.39KB (85-105ms)
• “Snapchat Can Now Share Your Location” (<500 words, 3 images) – 427KB (200-300ms)

I’m really happy with the low page sizes, and it appears the only thing truly adding to the size now is the images, which I can deal with. I’ll just start to use them where the need to be used, and nowhere else. The load speeds varied across multiple attempts, so that’s why a range was given (caches were disabled).

My next step will be to try and further optimised the actual Ghost engine itself, to see if any speed improvements can be made there. And I guess maybe an improved cloud server would help also? Then there is the dream goal of custom web analytics.

So rest assured, for now, nothing is being tracked on this website.

I’d be very interested in hearing everyone else opinions on website sizes, and all the rubbish I’ve wrote here in this post. Because while I really want my blog to be under 10Kb in most scenarios, it probably doesn’t make a huge difference to the reader.

Stephen Hackett (with help from the Relay FM designer – @forgottentowel), has created a page containing every default macOS wallpaper in 5K!

I’ve downloaded a few myself of course.

The AnyWatt comes in three versions: one for square-headed chargers, like those found on Lenovo laptops; one for more traditional barrel plugs; and perhaps most surprising, one for Apple’s MagSafe 2 adapter.

I really don’t see the amazement at this product, it’s just an adapter. Sure, the automatic voltage adjustment is nice. But if you have a Mac, are you really going to ask a Lenovo user for their charger?

Just bring your own.

I had my third experience triggering Emergency SOS on my Apple Watch this morning, but this one was the most annoying.

If you haven’t heard of it, then iMore has a good guide on what it is and how to set it up. But basically, it’s something that when triggered, will start beeping loudly while it counts down from 10, and when finished it will call your local emergency services, and share your location with a rather urgent message to your emergency contacts.

To be honest, it sounds really useful. Not something that would get used 99.9% of the time, but it’s nice to know it’s there if you need it. However the action to trigger it, is by holding down the buttons on your watch. Which I believe, is a terrible idea.

As I mentioned before, I’ve accidentally triggered this a few times. I was pretty sure that I saw somewhere that the latest betas had an issue with cancelling it, I’m not sure if this is still true, but nothing I did stopped everything from happening. So my watch beeped loudly on the train for 10 seconds, the (not so equal to 911) emergency services were dialled, and my location was shared with a few people. All because I was leaning on my wrist in a weird way when trying to get off the train.

It’s a nice feature, and is vital to someone in an emergency. But it should be harder to trigger.

I made my first API today, and I used Swift to do it!

Basically, I got bored this afternoon and decided to have a little research into server-side Swift programming. I’ve heard about this before, but I’ve not gone too deep into it myself.

The problem with me tying things like this, is that I ever really have a good idea, or scenario which I could use to learn the new thing. Well as you may already know, I’m slowly working on a title casing application for iOS and macOS, and therefore I’ve already created a few functions to format text.

So far the base TextCase functions are:

• Uppercase
• Lowercase
• Title Case
• URL Encoding
• Mocking SpongeBob (yes, like the meme)

From these formats, the only ones I could see being useful are Title casing, and the fun SpongeBob format.

From making use of various APIs myself, I knew that all I needed was a super simple HTTP server, which had support for a few GET requests.

Perfect was the tool I used to write the server side code, and I found a quick tutorial which explained the basic HTTP server that I needed. I must say it was really easy for me to create this, as I’m already familiar with Swift, so the only thing to learn was the “Perfect” way of doing things.

Because it was in Swift, I could also reuse my main TextCase class which handles the formatting. There was a slight exception, where the arc4random_uniform function isn’t available on Linux, but I found a Linux suitable replacement for this.

There are also a few more reasons why I wanted to try this out, but they’re rather meta. For example, I’m a big fan of Swift, and it feels good working with “low-level” Swift if you can really call it that, and also because I just love the look of Swift in the default Xcode theme, with the SF Mono font 😍 (weird, I know, but it’s the truth).

The final code (as in what I’ve done so far), is three endpoints, which are actually just two. /title/{input text} is to return the given text in title casing, /spongebob/{input text} is for the SpongeBob case. The third one is just /{input text}, and it returns the text in every format available, which is just the two I mentioned so far. The results are in plain JSON, and also include the plain value that was sent in the request.

For example, here is an example response to the / endpoint:

{
    "plain" : "what the hell is this",
    "title" : "What the Hell Is This",
    "spongebob" : "wHAT ThE Hell iS thiS"
}

Anyway, you can view the project over at GitHub, and if you want to suggest any new formats (or even write some yourself), just let me know on Twitter at @chrishannah

Snapchat has just released a new feature, and it’s one that can be taken in a few different ways. It’s Snap Map, and basically it’s a way to share and view peoples locations.

To activate Snap Map, just pinch to zoom out, and you can view any of your friends that are currently sharing their location with you.

In their short video showing the new feature (Now unavailable), it seems as it’s being advertised as a way to see where your friends are, so you can go hang out with them.

But at the same time, it’s very easy to accidentally share your location with more people than you want. This becomes a much bigger problem with a service such as Snapchat, as the majority of users are very young.

Fortunately, there is a setting in Snapchat where you can limit who can view your location. I would suggest turning this feature off completely, but it’s not a problem if it’s managed properly.

So here is how to fine-tune your privacy preferences in Snapchat:

1st Method – From Settings

1. When viewing your profile in Snapchat, press the settings icon in the top-right hand corner.
2. Scroll down to the section labelled “WHO CAN…”.
3. Tap on “See My Location”.
4. You can then choose any location sharing options from here.

2nd Method – From Snap Map

1. When viewing the map using Snap Map, press the settings icon in the top-right hand corner.
2. You get moved straight to the location settings, where you can choose any sharing options.

Location Sharing Options

When sharing your location in Snapchat, there are three different options to choose from (of course there’s also the option to not share it at all, by never enabling the feature).

• Ghost Mode (Location is hidden)
• My Friends
• Select Friends…

So you can either hide it completely, share your location with all of your friends, or just to a selected group. In some cases, “My Friends” is a completely fine option, but that only makes sense if you only add close friends. But if you like to add other people you don’t know very well, or you just want to completely sure who you’re sharing your location with, the latter “Select Friends” option is much better suited.

Extra Tips

• When using “My Friends”, any friends added will automatically be allowed to view your profile.
• When using “Select Friends…”, people you allow to see your location won’t be notified, they will simply be able to see you on their map.
• Your location is only received while you are using the Snapchat app, and apparently not in the background.
• Any location data is deleted after a few hours.
• To clear your last locations, toggle Ghost Mode on and off. This will clear your past data, but keep your sharing settings the same.
• The last tip – Just be careful who you’re giving your location to.

My friend Cesare Forelli has just released his fourth app, and it’s a pedometer to help keep track of how far you’ve walked.

It’s a simple application, in that it’s primarily a way to view your walking data, but that’s not all it does.

It tracks your steps, the distance you actually walked, and if you’re on an iPhone 6 or newer it also shows you how many stairs have climbed.

This data is combined with a set goal, which is an amount of steps you want to hit every day. This is all presented in main ring, but if you swipe to the left you will also get to see the Stats view. Here you can find your past steps and distance walked, but also other data points such as the most steps walked, longest distance, and most floors in a single day.

There’s also a today widget, that let’s you keep on top of your walking at a glance.

I’m a big fan of the interface, and how it shows everything I need to see, and in a beautiful way.

Walk More is free to download on the App Store, but there’s also a few tip options in the settings, just in case you want to help keep the app going!