Chris Hannah
Joe Cieplinski on his ideal version of Do Not Disturb:
“Do you want to tell this person to shut the hell up?”
If at least two people tap “Yes” the other person’s phone hangs up automatically and refuses to take any new calls.
I’d have to agree.
In a recent announcement by PayPal:
You can now use PayPal to pay on App Store, Apple Music, iTunes, iBooks and iCloud. It’s a fast and easy way to pay for the entertainment you love.
If you read the last issue of my Weekly Links newsletter, you may of seen my comment about my desire to expand the content. With this weeks issue, I’m going to take a step in that direction.
The past issues have simple been a list of links from all over the internet that I find interesting, it’s pretty simple and very minimal. I’m not saying I want to rich newsletter full of embeds, and images, but I’m going to be separating content into sections, which will lead me into including more content in general. For the beginning at least, it will still be a basic email containing hardly any formatting, but loads of links.
The sections that will be included from this week forward are:
They’re pretty explanatory, but the basic idea behind the transition is that the simple list of links is a bit unorganised. And some weeks, it’s simply not very long. But I’ve got content that I post on the blog, there’s tons of great videos that I watch, and I’m always working on something random. So why not share it here?
In the future, I want to add a podcast section, because I sure do listen to a lot of those. But adding a list of everything I’ve listened to isn’t good for me or anyone reading it. So maybe this will be my favourite/recommended episodes, and probably will end up being a less regular section. I was thinking every month, but this is a weekly newsletter, so every 4 weeks is a good alternative.
Anyway, you can sign up for the newsletter right now, which means you’ll have access to the past (boring) issues, and one new one which goes out tonight. All issues are usually send out on the Friday evening, but occasionally I’m busy and it gets pushed to Saturday morning.
Also, for the sake of my sanity. I’ll be starting the new issues at #1.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.