It was a big day for football today! Time for a North London Derby, with Arsenal playing Tottenham at “their ground”. I was watching it in a pub with friends. It was a game full of referring mistakes, and although for most of the game Arsenal were winning, Tottenham were given an incorrect penalty and it ended in a draw. There were positivities to take from it though, and we still didn’t lose, so that’s not as bad.

After getting back from the pub, I was greeted with a delivery. It was a bonsai tree that I ordered a few days ago. It’s a Zelkova (Japanese Elm) and it’s going to be sat on my desk in my home office.

In the evening, I’ve been playing some more World of Warcraft either side of dinner. I think I’m getting hooked on it again.

It was a very interesting day at work. We spent the second half of it doing listening to some internal tech talks that people made, and a few cool workshops, with my favourite being one about thinking of an idea about your first talk. I may end up doing one myself!

On the train home, I wrote a piece about a cool menu bar app I found called RunCat. It’s basically a running cat animation that syncs to your CPU speed.

When I got home I just watched YouTube for an hour, and ate dinner. But then I got invited to the pub, so I’ve been there for a few hours with friends.

Now I’m back at home again, so I’m watching the latest episode of The Instance, and I’ll probably end up playing World of Warcraft in a minute! I keep thinking to myself about the time, but then I remember it’s Friday!

There are loads of apps that track your Macs CPU usage. But only one of them uses a running cat to visualise it.

RunCat is a free Mac menu bar app that features a running cat that adapts to your CPU speed. If it’s running relatively slow, then the cat will just be running at a leisurely pace, but if it’s running really high (try building a huge Xcode project), then the cat will go crazy!

It’s really fun!

Runners

It’s not just a cat either, you get to choose from 21 different “runners” for free – Cat α, Cat β, Cat γ, Cat Tail, Mock Nyan Cat, Parrot, Human, Push-Up, Sit-Up, Rubber Duck, City, Sausage, Dots, Dinosaur, Terrier, Hedgehog, Horse, Penguin 2, Hamster Wheel, Octopus, and Steam Train.

There’s also another 21 runners if you want to pay for them – Cheetah, Dog, Puppy, Rabbit, Frog, Bird, Penguin, Dolphin, Dragon, Owl, Cogwheel, Bonfire, Drop, Rocket, Pendulum, Newtons Cradle, Sine Curve, Pulse, Coffee, Reindeer & Sleigh, and Snowman.

And if you really want to personalise RunCat, there’s a paid option to unlock the “Self-Made Runner”, which will let you create your own animation to track your CPU usage.

Options

There are a few options in RunCat to change the way it works:

• Show CPU Usage – This puts the CPU usage percentage as text next to the runner.
• Invert Speed – This means the runner will be running fast when your CPU speed is low, and vice versa. Sounds weird to me.
• Flipped Horizontally – This flips your runner, so it will run in the opposite direction.
• Launch at Login – I shouldn’t need to explain this.

Download

Check out the RunCat website, and download RunCat for free from the Mac App Store.

I finished something at work today, which was pretty cool, and now allows me to clear my plate ready for the next task! It was the networking layer of an app I mentioned in yesterdays entry. It’s as good as it can be at the moment, but I’m aware it may need slightly tweaking when adding in any requests later, as the api is being built at the same time.

One thing that did disappoint me was the fact that my code coverage is no longer officially 100%. Our aim is 80%, so it was going pretty well! But I was working on core logic, so it was all pretty easy to cover. However, as much as I can split up, and mock parts of the networking functionality, there’s some code that will only be used when making real HTTP requests. And that’s just something I haven’t best worked out how to test reliably.

I did finally get around to doing a bit of work on Text Case on the commute home. Nothing big, but I added support for encoding and decoding Base64! It’s not exactly something that is hard to find somewhere else at the moment, but it was very easy to add, and it means that Text Case now has two more formats, bringing it up to 18! (If you count the four variations of Title Case as one) You can sign up for the beta on TestFlight!

After I got home, I had my dinner while watching yet another episode of Lost. One thing led to another, and I ended up watching about 3 episodes. But luckily there’s literally over a hundred episodes to watch, so I’ll be fine for a while.

When I finally decided that was enough Lost (well I’ll watch a bit more before bed), I put my Switch in the dock, and started to play Pokémon on the big screen! And that’s what I’m doing right now as I write this entry!

A very good day today!

I don’t need up working from home, so that’s a bonus. I was working on the networking layer of an app, and at the same time trying to make everything flexible enough so it can be properly tested.

And after work I headed into London to watch the Arsenal game! It was a complete domination, and we beat Bournemouth 5-1! One of the beat games I’ve been to at The Emirates.

Hopefully I’ll get to go to a few more games before the end of the season.

I had possibly the most unentertaining day today. It wasn’t bad in anyway. But, there’s only so many ways you can write “I went to work and did the same thing I did yesterday, and the day before that…”.

As you may have already guessed, I went to work today. I did work stuff, and when I finished the stuff, I left.

Apart from work, I went back to my parents house for dinner, went out for a coffee with friends, and I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since.

Maybe tomorrow will be a bit more interesting. Maybe not.

A busy (and hot) day at work today! I’m working on a lot of “utility” stuff in a new app. Things like caching data, saving data to the Keychain, encrypting/decrypting data, and doing this all in TDD. So my testing skills were getting a good workout.

I feel like this shouldn’t be included anymore, as I do it every day, but I watched a few more episodes of Lost again! I’m now halfway through episode 23 in Series 1, so that leaves me with list two and a half episodes left. I forgot how many episodes there were!

That wasn’t everything I did while looking at a screen though, as I got an email from the iTunes Affiliate Program team, about the minimum payment threshold. I shared this on my blog, I now consider the case closed. There’s not much else I can do or find out about this anymore.

Back in August last year, I shared some information about the minimum threshold, in regard to getting payments from the iTunes Affiliate program. The issue back then, was that as the app program was ending, any money sitting in currencies that were below the minimum threshold, would be forever stuck in limbo.

I was worried about this, so I asked the Affiliate Program team. They responded with some good news:

Regarding App Store commissions, we will waive the payment threshold requirement after the program change takes place in October. These payments will be available to you approximately 60 days thereafter with our regularly scheduled invoice cycle. You will be able to release these payments once they have been received by Performance Horizon and processed.

So the threshold would be lifted, and they also informed me that the payments should be all be released by mid-December. Perfect.

However, on Friday I decided to query them about this again. As I heard from yet another person saying that the threshold still seems to be there, and they cannot release any payments. Even though I’ve had some released myself, that would have previously been below the minimum.

This time, they came back with a very clear statement. Which I presume is directed towards the balances left in my own account:

At this time, all available currencies are below the absolute minimum 2 GBP threshold and cannot be released.

While they’re not saying that all money will be paid. I think it’s reasonably understandable that 2 GBP is a hard-limit. I can’t imagine after converting currencies, and then adding on fees for the actual payments, that it would be beneficial for anyone.

At least this case should now be closed.

Today started with me waking up at around noon. I honestly have no idea how I slept in that late. I must have had about 10 hours.

After I finally woke up, I made a beacon and cheese omelette for “breakfast”, and watched some Lost!

Then, at 4 pm, it was time for the most important part of the day. Arsenal were playing Southampton! It was a very impressive game, and we ended up winning 2-0. Which really doesn’t show how much Arsenal were dominating. On a good day, it could have been 5-0 or higher.

After that, me and my girlfriend got around to stripping the rest of the wallpaper from a room in our living room. Next, we’ll have to sand it down to make it smooth, fill in any holes, and decorate it!

After that, we both didn’t do much. We watched the latest episode of Call the Midwife, which I’m just as interested as my girlfriend is. And then I’ve just made myself lunch for tomorrow. I’m having spaghetti carbonara!

Finally, a day with good weather! There was a clear sky, the sun was out, and it was even a bit warm.

I took the chance to install a little bird feeder in our garden. It’s basically a vertical pole, with a few different attachments on it. And so far I haven’t actually seen any birds eating anything yet, but I wouldn’t say our garden is exactly attractive to animals. As it’s literally just a lawn of grass with a bird feeder. Not one bush. And the neighbours are similar.

Apart from that, I’ve done a few chores. While the sun was out, I went and posted some mail. Then I done the more boring tasks, like cleaning, laundry, etc.

It wasn’t all boring though, as I managed to fit in quite a few episodes of Lost, and some World of Warcraft!

I’ve now started to watch a film called Life, on Netflix. I’ve been waiting for it to be available for a while, and although I’ve only seen half of it so far, it’s certainly not what I expected it to be. It sounded like a peaceful film about emerging life, but it definitely isn’t!