Who would of expected this?

The Model S P100D with Ludicrous mode is the third fastest accelerating production car ever produced, with a 0-60 mph time of 2.5* seconds. However, both the LaFerrari and the Porsche 918 Spyder were limited run, million dollar vehicles and cannot be bought new. While those cars are small two seaters with very little luggage space, the pure electric, all-wheel drive Model S P100D has four doors, seats up to 5 adults plus 2 children and has exceptional cargo capacity.

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A lot of people write long year in review blog posts, so I also decided to do one as well. But it was also beneficial for myself, as it seems I did a lot more this year than I thought I did!

Projects

Qwiki

Qwiki is an app for macOS, that let’s you search directly and view Wikipedia articles, directly in your menu bar. It also has sharing and export options, but that’s basically what it is.

Now in version 1.3, the app has come a long way. And it is my first proper app, meaning I spent longer in development, I had a beta testing stage, and then I actually marketed the app. I learned a lot from this project, and it’s my best app to date.

Website
App Store

ChrisHannah.me

I think I may of owned this domain before 2016, but this was the year it finally got sorted out.

This website serves as my “About Me” page on the internet, a place where you can find general information, my past work, and also how to contact me.

I initially wrote about it in September, but it has been radically changed since then.

Website

Pixels Sticker Pack

When iOS 10 (X) came out, I knew I had to create an iMessage Sticker Pack myself. So I put my pixel art skills to the test, and created Pixels Sticker Pack!

Blog Post
App Store

CH Uploads

Another small project came later in the year, and it was the result of being bored in my university classes. This time it was a basic image/video upload manager, that was built with PHP and MySQL.

Blog Post
GitHub

Tap Gap

Again, I got bored at university. But this time I made a little game! More specifically an iPhone game, where you need to tap the screen when the line is inside the gap.

Blog Post
App Store

Devices

Two of my main devices received a pretty big update this year:

• iPhone 7 Plus
• MacBook Pro (Touch Bar!) – Initial Blog Post / My Review

Writing

I write a lot on my blog, but this year I got a few opportunities (Although very similar 😉) to write on other peoples blogs:

• MacSparky – HOME SCREENS – CHRISTOPHER HANNAH
• MacStories Weekly – My Home Screen

I also started a weekly newsletter, which was fun when it started. But after a few weeks, I couldn’t think of anything interesting to write. So this was unfortunately stopped. Here is the first issue that went out, which I’m still pretty pleased with.

I also wrote about Apple’s “Hello Again” event, where they announced the pretty nifty MacBook Pro that I’m currently writing this post on. It was a while since I did a post like this, since covering loads of Apple events when I wrote AppRecap.

Travelling

Although I started the year just coming back from Italy, I didn’t actually do much travelling in 2016.

However in the summer I did take a two-week trip to Crete!

YouTube

I’ve had a YouTube Channel for a long time, but this year I eventually started watching loads more videos. And this got me even to create a few myself:

• Typing Noises – MacBook Pro 2011 vs Wireless Keyboard vs MacBook Pro 2016
• A Few Seconds With Touch Bar Piano
• Touch Bar Apps

So I made another video!

It shows a few of the many Touch Bar apps that have been released, but these ones are clearly the best 😉.

Thanks to Jeremy Burge of Emojipedia (The Emoji Guru), here is a video of all the new emoji in the latest iOS 10.2 update:

Showing every new emoji that came out for iPhone on December 12, 2016. New in this update is face palm, shrug, tuxedo man, selfie, butterfly, black heart and ROFL, and more.

To read more about these new emojis, check out the post on Emojipedia.

I’ve got a lot of books, and the majority of them I never read. There’s old iOS development books, biographies, Minecraft guides (not even because I needed them), you get the picture. They of course don’t include the enormous collection on iBooks, but I tend to actually read them.

Well I’ve just went through the collection, and picked out 8 that I plan on reading next. I must admit it’s a strange bunch, but there’s a lot of variation, and maybe it will keep me interested.

So here’s a list of them all, including links where you can get them yourself!

Title	Author	Status
Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade	Guy Browning	Not Read
Beyond Good and Evil	Friedrich Nietzsche	Peeked Inside
The Martian	Andy Weir	Half Read
Ready Player One	Ernest Clyne	Not Read
Neutrino	Frank Close	Peeked Inside
Decoding Reality	Vlatko Vedral	Not Read
Fantastic Beasts (The Original Screenplay)	J.K. Rowling	Not Read
Elon Musk	Ashlee Vance	Half Read

That may give you an insight into what I’m interested in, but I can assure you, I’ve read even much weirder.

First up, I think I’m going to finish The Martian^[1].

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1. Oh shit, it’s 1am. Maybe no reading tonight. ↩︎

STAR LORD IS BACK!

There’s a bit of talk over the new MacBook Pro’s keyboard, and the noise it makes. So I decided to make this little video, to show the noise of the new keyboard, against my old MacBook Pro, and also an Apple Wireless Keyboard.

P.S. I love the new keyboard noise.

Devices:

• MacBook Pro – Late 2011
• Wireless Keyboard – 2007
• MacBook Pro – Late 2016

I just set up a nice little automation on my Mac that I just had to share with everyone, it’s quite small, but it’s a big help to me when writing my project report for university.

I’m writing it in iA Writer at the minute, and I’m certainly making full use of the content blocks for things like images, and referencing separate bits of text. But I wanted a way to take a screenshot, and then have it available to me to embed into the document. It meant I had to google a few things about AppleScript, but that seemed pretty simple.

To keep my project folder nice and tidy, I created a new folder inside it called “Resources”. At the minute it’s just for images, but who knows!

Then I created a new rule in Hazel, to detect any file in my Inbox folder^[1] that has the tag “KeepTrack”^[2], which then moves it into the appropriate Resources folder that I just created. It then runs a small bit of AppleScript to copy the correct text to my clipboard, that I can then paste into iA Writer.

set the clipboard to "/Resources/" & item 1 of inputAttributes

The inputAttributes is the variable Hazel provides, and I have only set one item to pass through, the full name of the file that was matched, so “Image.png” could be one.

Then I’ll get something like /Resources/Image.png in my clipboard, that iA Writer will accept as a content block and show the image!

Hazel Rule

So it’s not a grand automation workflow, but it’s something that I worked out due to the fantastic capabilities of Hazel!

I’m starting to really love the app, and it’s allowing me to automate my work on my Mac even more.

If you want to get Hazel yourself, you can find it on the Noodlesoft Store.

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1. This is a folder on my desktop, that I use to quickly throw files into. I pretty much have all of my rules in this folder. ↩︎
2. The name of my project. ↩︎

Who would of thought it, Stephen Hackett writing a book about old Macs.

The Bondi iMac — and the family of colorful computers that came after it — brought some much-needed clarity and excitement to the Mac line.

More importantly, it bought Apple time to integrate NeXT’s technology and build Mac OS X from the ashes of the aging Mac OS.

This book looks at these parallel projects with a consideration of Apple’s best product: the company itself. – Aqua and Bondi

I’ve just purchased the book myself, and I’m looking forward to reading about the early stage of Apple, that really changed the company.

You can buy Aqua and Bondi on the iBooks Store, or alternatively as a PDF from the website.

I’ve been using my new MacBook Pro for a while now, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on it! I probably haven’t written about everything that’s new, but I’ve split everything up in to the main categories that I think everyone will care about.

Design

The physical design has changed a bit since the previous MacBook Pro, with it’s much smaller profile, and smaller bezel around the screen. And of course because it’s so light, it’s much more portable. Sure my old MacBook Pro wasn’t that heavy, and I could still carry it everywhere. But this is so much better at it. It’s so easy to just whip it out of my bag when I’m on the train into university.

I’m a fan of dark colours, so I definitely had to get the Space Grey version. It’s so much better than the boring silver.

Display

The display on this MacBook is absolutely unbelievable, and I’m still finding it hard to fathom the fact it is this good. Maybe it’s because it’s my first Retina Mac, but then there’s also the Wide Colour support. I’ve had a look at some different images on this new Mac and my old one, and the colours are just so vibrant.

Speakers

Not a feature I thought I would be writing about, but these speakers are a true improvement to the previous laptops. They’re so loud that I probably couldn’t ever have them at full volume when at my Mac, but maybe when you have a few friends round, this could be the sound system. It’s that good.

They’re also surprisingly clear, and the sound quality is a lot better. The fact that the speakers have moved to either side of the keyboard is a big bonus as well, because everything just sounds more real. I can’t really describe this, but it’s just so much better.

Keyboard

I honestly don’t see what all the fuss is all about, I really like this keyboard. It feels a lot more stable than the older design, and if I think about it, I can tell that the keys don’t travel as far. But they have some travel in them, and they make a pretty good clacking sound as I’m typing. I didn’t have a transition period to get used to it, I was able to type straight away.

Ports

This is one of the things that gained a lot of attention, and I completely see why. My MacBook has 5 ports, 4 Thunderbolt 3/USB C, and a headphone port. I understand dongles aren’t brilliant, and they cost even more money. But I believe USB C is the future of wired connectivity, and therefore devices will slowly move over to this standard.

My issue is with the fact that it doesn’t connect to my iPhone 7. Okay, the iPhone came out before the Mac, and not all iPhone users have a new Mac they can plug their iPhone into. But I would argue that hardly anyone even plugs their phone into their laptop anymore, so including a USB C -> Lightning cable in the box would of been so much better.

Then there is the headphone port, if Lightning is the future of audio, then why isn’t it on here? And more importantly, why can’t I use my EarPods with my laptop? Usually I would only ever use one pair of earphones (my current iPhones EarPods), on all of my devices. But now if I want to take my Mac somewhere and listen to music, I’ll have to either take two pairs of EarPods (3.5mm Jack and Lightning), or just use the old ones and carry a Lightning -> 3.5mm Jack adapter. Neither solution is any good.

However, while I say all of this stuff, the only thing I’ve plugged into my Mac has been my external display. And because my HDMI cable is always plugged into my screen, attaching an adapter to it is completely fine.

Gaming

I have the 13″ version of the MacBook Pro, and with just the integrated Intel Iris 550 graphics, it’s not a computer that’s hugely designed for gaming. But I’ve found that it was perfect for my needs.

I am a gamer, but not one that plays all the newest games, or even many games. The few I play are World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and a few smaller ones (the recent one being TouchGrind).

For World of Warcraft, I had to play it on the absolute lowest graphics on my previous Mac. It was find for me, because I still loved playing the game, but it wasn’t the best experience I could have. On this Mac however, I put this straight up to the mid level settings to test it out, and it worked! I was getting about 60 fps in very populated areas of the game. It’s a lot better than I expected it to be, and with the new display, the environments are really beautiful.

Then there is Minecraft, it’s not a hugely demanding game, but it’s not the small pixel game that everyone may think it is. I have it with every video setting turned up to the max (Except view distance, because that can get stupid), and it’s completely fine! It’s the perfect Minecraft experience, and while that isn’t much, it’s great to know my laptop can support it. And also whilst doing a lot of other things at the same time.

Touch Bar

I do like the Touch Bar, however I wouldn’t say it’s groundbreaking new technology. But maybe it doesn’t have to be. It’s made a few things for me much faster, especially the Emoji picker!

The design of the Touch Bar is better than I imagined, as it blends into the physical keys on the keyboard really well. I’ve had it in a wide range of lighting conditions, and it’s always just felt natural.

It’s certainly not just bringing iOS to the Mac in regards to adding a touch screen, I think it’s a true extension to the keyboard.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, I love this new MacBook Pro. It’s the perfect laptop for me, and probably even more.

The design is a great improvement, and the only flaws I see at the minute is the lack of ports, but this will improve over time as more of my devices become USB C.

I’ve had three MacBooks before this one, and my previous one lasted me 5 years. So I expect this one to last me probably the same amount of time.

It is a bit expensive, and more so for myself because of the Brexit price increase, but I think it’s totally worth it.