Absolutely great post. I couldn't pick out just the one paragraph to quote, so I'll just encourage you to check it out.

I wrote about wanting an offline capable Visual Studio Code app for iPad yesterday, and while I haven’t found an app that I feel to be equal, Textastic does seem to be the best code editor app I’ve found for iPad.

Thord D. Hedengren, shared a great tip on his Switch to iPad blog on using VS Code on an iPad:

One of the most popular code editors for web developers today, is Visual Studio Code, or VS Code for short. It’s made by Microsoft and is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Unfortunately, there isn’t an official iPad app just yet, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use VS Code on your iPad. At least not if you use GitHub to manage your codebase.

How you access it is pretty inventive:

Now, assuming you’ve got a GitHub account, and a repository, you’ll also need a keyboard. Any bluetooth keyboard will do, just as the Magic Keyboard if you’re on an iPad Pro.Navigate to your repository in your web browser (you might want to use Safari to be safe), then press the period (.) key. Yep, that’s it, now VS Code will load up your repository, in your web browser window, just like that.

VS Code is an app I use a lot at my day job, for all use cases where I’m not using Xcode to write Swift, or IntelliJ to write Java. I also use it when modifying my blog theme, and playing around with random text files.

I’d love it if the app could come to the iPad as an app. It’s built on web technologies so it wouldn’t be fully native, but as much as I’d love to use the web version of VS Code, I don’t want to be reliant on an internet connection to edit a local file.

I mentioned recently that I decided to purchase a PC, but I didn’t go into much detail. But now I’ve had it for over two weeks, I thought I’d share my reasons for purchasing one, what components I went for, and also my experiences with it.

Why Get a PC?

Okay, so as for why I decided to own a PC, after years of only owning Macs. That can be put down a few reasons, each with different levels of importance.

• Gain access to a wider market of games.
• Being able to play games, such as World of Warcraft, at their maximum graphics capabilities.
• Not being tied to Apple’s choices (not that they’re objectively bad) over hardware.
• To own a computer that I could maintain and upgrade for a long period of time.
• Because I’m interested in technology, and don’t want to be stuck to a single manufacturer.
• I’ve always wanted to build my own PC.

So, six reasons. Although I’m sure that they really fall into three main ideas: to play games, to have flexibility and control over my computer, and to fuel my interest in technology.

These ideas have been building up in my head for quite some time now.

And after watching endless amounts of videos reviewing various PC components, seeing how certain builds could be created with different budgets, and exploring the PC ecosystem again, I decided that I was going to build my own computer.

What Type of PC Did I Build?

Just before I share the exact specifications of my new computer, I’ll explain my (self-made) constraints, and also my minimum expectations.

The minimum I was going to accept in a new PC, was that I needed to be able to play World of Warcraft at maximum graphics and at ease, ability to expand memory and storage capacity in the future, and to also have the option to upgrade other components such as the graphics card. I also ideally wanted a USB-C port, since a lot of my devices now use that connector.

I set myself a budget of roughly £1000, since that was my, expectation after researching builds that matched my expectations, and I got searching!

The PC

Here’s exactly what I ended up going with for my PC:

• Case: NZXT H510 Black/Red Mid Tower (Has USB-C port)
• Motherboard: MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
• Memory: 2 x 8GB Corsair DDR4 Vengeance (3200)
• Storage: 1TB Crucial P5 M.2
• Graphics: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2060 6GB GDDR6
• Network Card: TP-LINK Archer T4E AC1200
• Power Supply: Corsair RM650x Full Modular

In the end, I stretched to about £1100, but I still think it’s a pretty reasonable price for the components.

And while I won’t get into every reason why I went with each component over another. Especially when I’m fully aware that none of my component choices are the best I could have got, or in some cases the most trendy. But I’ll share a few reasons behind my choices:

• I went with AMD because I’ve heard better reviews about them, Intel seem to be very slow, and also that’s what I gathered the most information on. (Since most people seem to be switching to AMD)
• The memory was a tough one, I instinctively wanted 32 GB, but no one was recommending that it was necessary for gaming. So I went with 2 8GB sticks, as my motherboard has 4 slots so I can upgrade if needed in the future.
• Separate network card because that was cheaper than getting the upgraded motherboard with built-in WiFi.
• 1TB M.2 drive simply because of the price, £68.99.
• No RGB lights (except from the one in the motherboard) because it’s not important for a budgeted build.

How It’s Been

In short, the PC is great. It’s met every expectation of mine and more.

While I haven’t had any experience where I’ve wanted to switch my computing away from a Mac or PC for anything except gaming, I definitely believe it was a good choice.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (at maximum graphics) a lot recently, and I’ve never seen the CPU or GPU struggle at all (They usually sit between 20 and 25% when playing a game). I also tried out Final Fantasy XIV, Minecraft, and a few other games, and they were all brilliant.

Maybe this is expected behaviour for other PC owners, but for the years I’ve owned a Mac, I’ve never experience great game performance. Sure, I’ve been able to play World of Warcraft, but only ever at 50% graphics capability, with the fans going crazy, and not exactly the best fps.

Another odd (again, probably only to me) experience I had is the time it took to install Windows 10. Before putting everything together, I had put a copy of the Windows 10 installation media onto a USB stick. My expectations were that it would be a slow process, probably taking around an hour, especially as I was using an old USB stick, connected to a port on the case instead of directly on the motherboard. It honestly installed in under two minutes. I had no idea that this process had become so fast. Maybe some of this work was actually happening while I was configuring the installation, but it still felt so quick.

Overall, this has been a surprisingly great experience. I still don’t think Windows 10 is the best OS ever, maybe Windows 11 will fix that, but I’m never really in the OS for this to cause me any issues.

I will no doubt upgrade various components down the line, seeing that was one of my ideals for this computer, but I imagine the next upgrades I make will probably be to my peripherals. The mouse I use for my Macs and iPad is an MX Master, and I’ve currently got all three Bluetooth devices used up, so at the moment I’m using an old wired mouse with the PC. And for the keyboard it’s pretty similar, I have a Keychron K2 keyboard which I use with my Mac and iPad, so I had to purchase a relatively cheap keyboard for the PC. I imagine that these, along with possible speaker upgrades will be where I look to upgrade next.

One more thing that I assume will cause some thinking over the next few months is how I balance the use of my various computers. I have a Mac, PC, and iPad, and I use them all. But it will be interesting to see if anything changes.

TeestFlight is finally available for macOS, albeit a beta, so I've opened up the Text Case macOS beta. Feel free to join and test out the various Shortcut actions.

Earlier this year I decided that I would try writing a monthly newsletter. The idea was that it would be a way for me to write one long-form piece of writing a month. (Delivered on the 13th, because I thought it was funny). Last month marked the 6-month mark, which means that this project has lead me to create six pieces of writing, that I’m pretty happy with.

However, I’ve decided that I will put the newsletter on hold while I work out a better strategy for writing and sharing my longer pieces of writing. At the start, I was bought into the idea of having a more dedicated newsletter audience, but over time I realised that by keeping this writing behind a (free) subscription, it drastically reduces the chance of people reading my work.

I recently opened up the issues on my blog, which essentially made them special blog posts that were additionally sent out via email. That made it feel a bit weird, how there wasn’t much of a distinction between a newsletter issue and a normal blog post. But I was still referring top it as a “newsletter”.

It might be that email is just an optional method of delivery that I will offer for all of my writing (probably not linked posts though), and that it forms part of the overall blog. Where my writing is hosted on the blog, but also has the option of an RSS feed or email option. We’ll have to see.

But for now, the newsletter is paused, and all of my writing will be delivered straight to the blog, for everyone to read.

Felipe Nunes is a professional skateboarder, and a great one at that. But he has a disability that you'd expect to severely hamper his ability to ride a skateboard, let alone be right up there with the best in the sport. At the age of six, Felipe had an accident that caused him to lose the lower half of both his legs. But that absolutely didn't stop him.

Even if you're not that interested in skateboarding, I'd still urge you to watch his latest video, and if you want to learn more about him, then his interview with Thrasher Magazine is a good place to start.

If you haven’t heard, there’s a new photo-sharing app called Glass. It’s an iPhone-only (unfortunately) app, designed for photographers to share photography, get feedback, and of course, to enjoy others photos too. They specifically say that it is not designed to replace Instagram, which I definitely find comforting.

Instead, Glass is a paid subscription-based app^[1] for photographers. While I’m sure most people would enjoy the minimalistic interface, and how the focus is really placed on the photos, there’s a ton of things that are obviously geared more towards photographers showing off their work and receiving feedback from the community, rather than the average person sharing selfies^[2].

There’s support for P3 colour gamut, EXIF information for each photo, and a lack of “likes”. The only interaction that you can have on a photo is a comment. And the only interaction you can have with a fellow photographer, is to follow them.

This leads me to my favourite aspect of the app, the simplistic nature of how the app works fundamentally. There are four “tabs”^[3] at the bottom of the app, each of them showing a different screen. There’s the purest form of a reverse chronological timeline that can exist, which just shows a stream of photos from the photographers that you follow. Then there’s the discover/search/community tab, which is essentially how you discover or search for photographers. And the last two are your profile, which shows your own photos in a list, and also your notifications, which can only consist of two things: follows, and comments.

Obviously, the app won’t appeal to all people, given that it requires a subscription fee, but I think that will be beneficial for the community.

At the same time, since there is a regular fee being paid, users (including myself) will be expecting a certain level of updates and a few extra niceties that you won’t get with something like Instagram. The next things I personally would like to see in Glass would be an iPad app, a way to view your profile/photos on the web, and also a way to categorise your photos/account to help improve discoverability.

You can find me and my photos on Glass at @christopher.

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1. $4.99 per month, $49.99 per year ($29.99 per year at launch). ↩︎

2. Not that selfies are bad, just a different market. ↩︎

3. Well, not quite tabs, but essentially that's what they can be treated as. ↩︎

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed something change within myself, regarding my opinions on technology, and my preferences on what I’m willing to put up with.

For quite some time now, I’ve been a die-hard Apple user. I use a Mac, iPad, and iPhone at home, and also a Mac at work. My life is pretty much in Apple’s ecosystem. There’s a lot of pros and cons to that, some of which I wrote about in my piece: How Do I Know if the Grass Is Greener?, and also touched on when I was thinking about consuming media in Thinking Out Loud: What Is It To Be in Control of the Media That You Consume.

Most of those thought processes stem from the fact that before I used an Apple device, I was really into PCs, whether it was building them, seeing the latest technology, or just tinkering with them. But after I switched to a Mac, it felt like it wasn’t a device for tinkering, rather it was an off-the-shelf product that you used to get things done.

I don’t mean this to be an attack on Apple products, or just to be purely negative about them, because I think they’re some of the best technology products that exist today. But just like every other product, they come with their own pros and cons.

For example, I think that macOS is a better operating system than Windows in a usability sense, design, and overall cohesion with the Apple ecosystem. And the same also applies to iOS and iPadOS. However, there are times when I’ve felt like I’ve been wrapped in cotton wool, instead of having real control of my devices. That’s led to my recent thinking on Android phones, and imagining if I could ever make the switch.

These thoughts have been going around my head for a while, and one phrase came to mind yesterday that seems to sum up my overall opinion on technology: “I don’t want nice, I want control”. And whether or not this is the reality, I’ve always felt like the Apple world offers more niceties and a cohesive experience throughout all of their products, and not exactly one that offers an abundance of control to its users.

All of this has led me to very recently (a few days ago), purchasing a PC. I’ll write about that on my blog in more detail soon, but it’s a Windows PC, relatively cheap, which I built myself, and I’m now having some fun playing World of Warcraft at the max settings with a seemingly lack of struggle.

I don’t know if this makes me part of the “PC Master Race” or if I’m actually going to be doing more things in Windows than playing games. But one thing I’m going to be doing from now on is to keep an open mind about technology. Somehow I went from being interesting in technology and computing as a whole to then thinking Apple products are the only ones worth thinking about. Whereas I’m now starting to realise that products are contextual. And that the quality of a product is contextual, to the use case, users familiarity, price, what downsides a user is willing to put up with, etc.

Maybe this just means that I’m now an Apple user with a gaming PC, or maybe it’s the start of a wider appreciation for technology. I guess I’ll just have to find out.

When one of these services or your subscription ends, your access to your media ends instantly.

After reading a recent article on The Atlantic, “What Will Happen to My Music Library When Spotify Dies?”, by Joe Pinsker (via Pixel Envy), I started to think about what is it to own your music.

I’ve been subscribed to various streaming services in the past such as Apple Music, Spotify, and Rdio. And with some basic maths, I can work out that if I’ve been streaming music for around 10 years (at least), and you put a rough average of £8 as a monthly fee (counting in some small discounts along the way), then that would mean a total of £960 spent on temporary access to music.

I don’t mean to create any hysteria by that figure, as it’s been over a ten year period, and I’ve no doubt enjoyed listening to the music. But I wonder how much it would have cost if I had to purchase every song that I listened to in that period. I currently have around 3,000 songs added to my Apple Music library, and I’ve surely listened to countless other songs as well. So it sounds like I’ve got my money's worth. But I’m still suddenly left with nothing if this service goes away.

It’s certainly an interesting thing to ponder. Because on one hand, music streaming platforms give you access to their vast collections of songs and you can listen to them on practically every computer possible. But on the other, at no point do you own this media, you are merely paying for the privilege to have temporary access to someone else’s music.

When I think about ownership of media, I start to think about the music I’ve streamed, but also the books, audiobooks, tv shows, and movies that I’ve purchased digitally over the years.

And while I theoretically can access this media forever, these purchases exist solely in Apple’s ecosystem. There’s still something that I need to maintain to access my purchases. For without myself owning and using a device that can access the movies I’ve purchased from iTunes, these purchases are worthless. This means that they do not result in ownership, like purchasing a CD, instead what you own is access to this content on platforms that the distributor deems suitable.

One example is buying a movie. If you purchase a physical copy of a movie on DVD, then you are free to watch that DVD on any DVD player, or you can even transfer the movie to your computer into a digital file and have even more freedom. But if for example, you purchase a movie in the iTunes Store, then you have no control over the copy that you purchased. Sure, you can watch it on platforms that have access to your iTunes purchases. But what if for some reason, you lose access to your iTunes account? You can’t export the movie files, you can’t burn them to a disc, and there would be no way for you to access your purchases on any new device either.

Then again, is any of this actually a problem? The reason I purchase movies is to watch them multiple times. I really don’t care about the ownership aspect, I just want the privilege of on-demand access to the content that I like.

It also applies to music. It doesn’t matter whether or not I have control of the raw files, what I care about is being able to listen to my favourite songs whenever I want.

So maybe I don’t need to rush off and start my own personal media collection, as the balance of access to vast collections of content compared to the relative costs are currently working in my favour.

In the end, it comes down to personal preference. As always.

However, after this little thought experiment, instead of realising that streaming services are bad and that I need to “own” everything I consume — which is what I thought would happen — it’s led me to believe that the bigger problem lies right in the middle of streaming content and owning content. In the places where you are required to pay the premium of long-term ownership, but do not have total control over your personal copies.

Because yes, while using streaming services, you do only have temporary access to content. But at least that is reflected in the price that you pay. Just as you would pay more for a physical copy of a movie or album because you are paying for the control and ownership.

Therefore, while I’m not planning on quitting streamin services, I may stop purchasing media from stores such as iTunes, and instead, opt for a physical copy (usually that the same or lower price) which I then control and can store digitally if I so wish.