Chris Hannah

I was totally not ready for today. It was an early 6:30 start, followed by an absolutely sweltering office. Hopefully the air conditioning is a bit more effective tomorrow.

While on my lunch break, I finished off writing my review of Castro, and published it to the blog today.

I also did some reading. I used my commute to force myself to start reading Essentialism. Tomorrow will be exactly the same.

Tonight, me and my girlfriend have been visiting her parents house for dinner. And now it’s time to go to bed and start it all over again tomorrow.

For quite a few years now, I’ve been using Overcast as my podcast app of choice. It’s a great app, and it’s praised by basically anyone that uses it. However, I had never really used an alternative. So I wasn’t sure if I really was using the best app that was on offer.

After doing a bit of research, and hearing about it in the past, I decided on Castro. It’s the app that I’ve seen the most talked about online, second to only Overcast.

As I mentioned on my journal entries on April 8th and 9th, one of the best features of Castro, in my opinion, is the focus that’s put into queuing episodes. And in particular, the idea of triaging new episodes, so that you can have a more refined queue. This helped me a lot, as I was getting to a place where I had so many episodes build up in my list, that I didn’t know what to listen to next. And in some cases, there were episodes that I knew that I would never get around to listen to, but I just didn’t want to remove them.

Starting with an import of my subscription from Overcast via the export/import OPML files in both apps, the Inbox in Castro was filled up with the most recent episodes of all my subscriptions. From there I started assigning each episode to either the top/bottom of the queue, or removing it from the list. This resulted in a pretty small queue, I think it was around 6 episodes, and my list would usually be around 20 in Overcast.

As new episodes continually appeared in the Inbox, I found it rather easy to sort through them, and pick out the episodes I wanted to listen to. It seems strange, but this feature alone made me listen to many more podcasts. It removed some of the unnecessary choice, so I could always find something I wanted to listen to. Because of the queuing, and the fact that you prioritise episodes in the queue when triaging the Inbox, it’s always ready whenever you just want to jump in a quickly listen to something. Or maybe in the morning, when you haven’t quite woken up yet, but you still want something for the commute.

I did think I would miss the two great enhancements that Overcast offers, Voice Boost and Smart Speed. However, Castro have their own versions, Enhance Voices and Trim Silence. I didn’t notice any difference in this regard. So either, they both work with a similar level of quality, or I just don’t notice the feature on either apps. Either way, it’s not an issue for me.

One thing I did notice about playback though, was when resuming an episode, I really missed Overcast’s “Smart Resume”. It’s really handy when you pause in the middle of a word, because Overcast will rewind slightly to the gap before the word. It sounds like a minuscule feature, but you soon get used to it.

Something else that caused me a bit of friction when I first started using Castro, was the way you found the show notes of an episode. In Castro, you swipe left → right and “activate” the Info button, which launches the show notes above the current context. However, I was really used to the interface in Overcast, where you swiped right → left to view the show notes, and then once more to view the chapters (if the episode had them). These are nothing major, and are mostly caused by muscle memory.

After using Castro as my podcast app for a while, I was in a situation where I wanted to listen to a podcast on my iPad. And that is when I discovered the lack of Castro! So after all the benefits I found with the queuing feature, the nice refreshing interface, and also a few pain-points, I literally couldn’t use the app anymore. I kept using the Castro app on my phone for a few days, but I had to stop, because managing two podcast apps would be crazy.

In conclusion, I would like to state that I really like Castro. And while there are a few things that I was used to in Overcast, that caused friction when using Castro, the overall experience was great. I just can’t use an app on iOS that isn’t universal anymore. I’ve gone back to Overcast for now, and I’m going to try and take small things I’ve learned from triaging episodes in Castro, so I can better handle my podcast list. But I’m always going to be hoping for the day when Castro comes to the iPad.

It’s the last day of the Easter “weekend”, and we spent that at my girlfriends sisters house. So that means we’ve visited both of our families over the break!

It also means that I’m back to work tomorrow, which I’m totally not ready for. Thinking of myself tomorrow, I did cook myself some lunch just now, so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Now I’m going to make sure I read at least the first few pages of Essentialism, as I’ve totally failed to do that so far.

Easter Sunday! 🐣

Today started with me watching some more Lost. I watched two episodes, and it means that I’ve finally finished all 6 seasons! I really don’t know what I’m going to watch next.

That wasn’t an issue today though, as I spent the afternoon and early evening at my parents house, followed by one of my aunts houses. As usual, my rather large family used Easter as an excuse to get together and have a bit of a drink.

After seeing my family for quite a few hours, I went out for coffee again. Other than that, I’ve basically been doing a bit of house work, and watching trash tv.

I have been doing some writing today, and hopefully I can get that finished tomorrow, and share it here on the blog. After that’s done, I’m going to try to start a book I bought recently, Essentialism.

 

Today was one of the most relaxing days I’ve had in quite some time.

Me and my girlfriend started the day with a little lie-in. I then made the tea/coffee, and we sat in the living room for a while.

After we were fully awake, my girlfriend went to read in the garden, as the weather was very nice! I watched a couple of episodes of Lost, and eventually joined her. I didn’t end up doing any reading myself, but I did catch up on over 24 hours of Twitter.

For lunch, she made nachos with the remainder of the chilli she made yesterday. While eating that, we discovered the “One Planet” series on Netflix. So we watched the first episode of that, which was very interesting as we expected.

After some more time spent hanging about the house, I cooked Mexican chicken and rice for dinner. It turned out pretty well.

In the evening, my girlfriend had to go to work for a night-shift. So I went out for a coffee with a friend, and since then I’ve just been playing some Fifa and World of Warcraft. I think I’ll get an episode of Lost in now, and then it will be time to go to bed!

It’s the start of a bank holiday weekend!

It started like a typical Sunday in some ways, with mySelf and my girlfriend relaxing for a few hours with our fluffy cat.

It was very good weather as well, which was very beneficial, as we spent the evening with her sister and her partner. We went to an adventure golf course, called Lost Jungle London. It was a pretty fun day our!

After eating dinner, we spent the remainder of the day at the pub with my family. And by family, I mean an absolute huge family. My mum has five sisters and a brother, and there’s tons more kids to go with them. It was a very fun evening.

I was a bit lazy today. Somehow I managed to sleep through my seemingly silent alarms. It wasn’t a disaster though, as my work are kind enough to let me work from home on these occasions.

It means I lost out on some of the real-life interactions at work, talking to people on my team more about problems, and just general benefits from being near the people you work with.

That doesn’t mean it was all bad, working at home. It meant that I could actually make myself a cooked lunch, and then when the work day finished, I was already at home. There’s also the monetary benefit, because I didn’t have to buy a train ticket.

After work, I linked to a great tip by Jeff Perry at Rocket Panda, about an alternative escape key on the iPad.

At home, we had quite a busy evening as well. We made dinner for my girlfriends sister, and her girlfriend. We were then greeted by my parents, who also came over for a few hours.

It was a bit crazy, but we had a cat that people were giving a fuss to, and the football which myself and my dad were watching. It was, of course, Arsenal. We played away against Napoli, and we won! With a beautiful free kick from Lacazette. 🇫🇷

Now it’s time to unwind before a long bank holiday weekend.

Jeff Perry, writing at Rocket Panda:

This is just a quick little tip for iPad users out there. If you are like me and using the Smart Keyboard or any keyboard that doesn’t have an Escape key you can press command . and that will most likely work as a way to escape from any text input you are in.

I think I’ve heard of this vaguely in the past. But after seeing this post, I tried it in a few different places in iOS, and I can confirm that it’s probably the closest escape key alternative.

The escape key on a Mac does all kind of things. Such as cancelling a drag action, cancelling some kind of input, or closing a temporary window. This “escape key” is more limited, in that I’ve only see it escape from text entry. That doesn’t mean it’s not handy though, and I’m sure I’ll use this quite a bit.

A pretty boring day from start to finish today.

I was at work as usual for most of the day, I then went food shopping with my girlfriend, and most of the night I’ve been spent just doing things like sorting through email, Twitter, etc.

The only entertaining thing I did today was listen to the latest episode of Connected, live as it was being recorded. It was a pretty fun episode to listen to.

I also watched a few minutes of the Man City vs Tottenham game, unfortunately although Man City won, Tottenham still progressed to the next round, due to the away goals rule. I really wish they’d get rid of that.

Right now, I should be going to bed. However, what I’m actually doing (apart from writing this) is sitting in my office on my iPad, trying to find a good email app.

There was one other thing, I settled on a “project management” tool for the app I’m currently planning. I went with Trello in the end:

I was thinking about how I’m going to plan this app, and after considering JIRA, Todoist, Things, GitHub issues, and a few others, I’ve settled on Trello.

So far my lists are:
– Ideas
– Features
– Next
– Now
– Done

— Chris Hannah (@chrishannah) April 17, 2019

I chose Trello mainly because of the cards concept, and how it’s not directly related to the code. The different lists should help me manage my scope, and work better with small iterations, while also having a backlog of undeveloped ideas, and fleshed our features.

— Chris Hannah (@chrishannah) April 17, 2019

 

I woke up with a furry face next to me this morning, which was a pleasant way to start the day. Unfortunately that’s now how the day went on, as after making myself and my girlfriend coffee/tea this morning for our commutes, I put them down to shut the door, and somehow they spilled all over the floor. And then I was greeted with train problems after I got into London.

Luckily, my day at work was alright. So it wasn’t a totally bad day.

Just as I was finishing work, I had a sudden realisation about an app that I want to work on. It’s still a fragile idea, so I don’t particularly want to share details just yet. Which is why I sent out a pretty cryptic tweet about it earlier.

Once I was home, I spent some time writing as much as possible about the idea. And also some form of task/feature list that is going to grow rapidly in the next few days. I’m not rushing into development though, as I want to spend a lot of time planning the project, and getting some tools ready before I start.

That didn’t consume my entire evening though, as I managed to watch the Barcelona vs Manchester United game (Barcelona is my second team), coupled with a pizza!

Right now, we’re just watching another episode of Hanna, and then it will be bed time.