As always, I’ll start with a short description of what I got up to at work today. My main tasks were trying to think more about how we’re going to build our next app. We’ve decided that everything is being written using TDD from the start, and hopefully, we can figure out a way to use BDD style tests, but there aren’t many great options available in Swift. Or at least so I’ve found.

And now the second favourite of the journal, Text Case progress updates. I did a fair bit of work tonight, but nothing really finished that I can show off. I did complete the Siri intent donating that I mentioned yesterday, and I’ve basically finished off the entire Siri Shortcuts feature, but I’m going to do a lot of testing on it when I have a big block of free time. Apart from that, I started to move the Action Extension over to 2.0. It’s built much better than the current version, as it reuses the same classes that are used to display the list of formats in the main app, with a few minor things specialised for the context of an Action Extension.

I’m hoping tomorrow I can tidy up a few more things, and then I can tick them off the big list and move closer to the public beta.

A mixed day at work today. It involved me presenting the prototype I mentioned yesterday that I was working on, at our biweekly team demo, working out some stuff for a future big project, and also trying to squish some bugs.

I also managed to have another productive day with Text Case 2.0, as I managed to port over the main logic of the Siri integration from the current version, and it works perfectly! The only bit of work remaining on this is figuring out when to “donate” intents to the system, which is basically where the app informs iOS that an action has been performed, so it can suggest it to you at a later date/time. Hopefully when you’re most likely to need it.

This step also means that I’m nearing the beta testing phase. I’ve been hesitant to put out any beta versions of this for a while simply because it didn’t have all the functionality that the current app had, so I knew any testers would be degrading their Text Case usage. But as soon as I can tell that everything in 1.4 works in 2.0, and that nothing breaks because of the update (I’m mainly thinking about Siri Shortcuts integrations), I’ll send out a public beta link on the newly created Twitter page (@TextCaseApp).

Another thing I have to mention is a great podcast I’m now starting to listen to. It’s called And You Are?, and it’s by Greg Morris. It’s a conversation-based podcast, where he talks to test about what they do for a living, their life, and other interesting topics. I probably didn’t summarise that well, but if you just look on the episode list, you can already see the list of great guests that he’s already had on. So far I’ve listened to the first episode with Daryl Baxter, which was really interesting, and I plan on listening to every episode!

Today at work was not one of a usual iOS Developer, as I spent most of the day using online prototyping tools to work on a little demo I’m doing at work. It’s all part of a task I’ve been doing the past few weeks, and I’ve gone from drawing rough diagrams on a whiteboard, to writing long user stories in Ulysses, which I then created a huge flowchart from, and I took one specific route and make that into a prototype!

Outside of work, I actually finally got around to giving TextCase 2.0 (the redesign I’m working on) a chunk of time. Firstly, I created a Twitter account for it (@TextCaseApp) so I can share specific news about the app in one place.

Then I finished off two different settings, enabling/disabling specific formats, and also changing the order of the format groups. In the current (old) version, each format can be moved around freely, but it offered no sense of structure, and as the number of formats grew, it became a bit of a mess. So I’ve now grouped them together, and you can arrange the individual groups. If a group has no formats enabled, the entire group will be hidden, so it doesn’t mean you’ll always have to see the headings.

One other thing about TextCase is that it got featured on the latest episode of AppStories! Which is a podcast all about apps by Federico Viticci and John Voorhees of MacStories.

As I mentioned in yesterdays entry, last night me and my girlfriend put together some Ikea furniture. We managed a two-seater sofa, a tv unit, and a small coffee table. You can find pictures of the first two on my Instagram. I topped that off today by building a small storage unit for my office! And It turns out it fits absolutely perfectly in the corner.

While building it, I watched another interesting video from Joe Robinet. He’s a Canadian backpacker/bushcraft guy, and in the video I watched, he spent 10 days in the Canadian wilderness with just 10 items. His videos (or at least the ones I’ve been watching) are usually just over an hour long, but they’re good to have on while doing something like building Ikea furniture!

So today was our first visit to Ikea for the new house. It was the most stressful visit to Ikea that I’ve ever had. The major issue is the one-way system they have, so everyone has to follow the same route. And as you can imagine, not everyone works at the same speed. So there are old people walking slowly, people just taking their time and browsing, kids running everywhere, and me just trying to get to the next department. It also didn’t help that we weren’t in control of the time, as we had to come with someone that we knew that had a van, so we had to be as fast as possible.

We still managed to buy quite a lot of stuff. The main things were two sofas, a tv unit, and a big storage unit for my office. We purchased two, two-seater sofas, but unfortunately, one colour wasn’t available to take away, so we’re going to have that delivered. But it’s going to be a big bonus having somewhere to finally sit down!

Tonight I expect to put together the sofa and tv unit, and then tomorrow it’s back to work!

Nothing exciting to talk about today!

It’s been a day of moving things to the house again, and also organising what we have already moved in.

Tomorrow is the first visit to Ikea, so no doubt that will add to my back pain!

It snowed quite a lot in the night, so that means another day of working from home!

I made full use of my office today, and simply by being in the room for a long period of time, I have some ideas of what I want to add:

• Introduce another colour other than white to the walls.
• I want places to hang my many backpacks on the wall.
• I have a lot of little ornaments and gadgets, so a mini bookcase/shelving unit would be helpful.
• Either curtains or blinds, because right now there’s nothing in front of the window.

For dinner I made another traditional Italian carbonara, which I think I’m getting the hang of!

So last night was the great night in our new house, and today was my first full day living in it.

That’s mainly because I was working from home today, while a few deliveries arrived.

After work finished, I went to Vegan Nights with a friend, in Shoreditch. I’m by no means a vegan, but I go to a lot more vegan restaurants than most vegans!

I can’t really remember where this was from, or what was inside it, but this Tempeh sandwich was very nice!

Tonight I’ve managed to get the tv set up, so Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and YouTube are all enabled. And with our remote, each of those is only one button press away.

Very big day, very short journal entry.

So today, me and my girlfriend moved into our new house!

We got the keys just before 2 pm, and we spent the rest of the day moving things between houses, picking up appliances, and then trying to at least get things in the correct room.

Of course one of my main concerns was my office because I now have a whole separate room for that! All I’ve done so far is move my desk, chair, and wired up a few things. But I want to get a lot more storage in here. I’ll probably paint it another colour as well.

After a long day, we finally got around to eating dinner just after midnight! I cooked the first meal in the new house, and it was a chicken stir fry!

Another good day for podcast listening! I managed another three episodes:

• A Slab of Glass 25: Why are you Microwaving a Notebook?! (With Alex Cox)
• The BirchTree Podcast 157: Pixel…Um…Perfect
• StarTalk Radio: Inside The Big Bang Theory, with Simon Helberg and Bill Prady

I also got a bit more packing done, which involved dismantling my desk and poking away most of my electronics. It’s all roughly ready, so hopefully, it won’t take long to actually to move.

Between the various bits of preparation for the move, I also managed to fit in watching Arsenal! We played Cardiff City and beat them 2-1. Not a totally convincing result, but other top teams lost points, so it edges Arsenal just slightly back into the top four.

Tomorrow is going to be a big day.

A pretty average day at work, I did some code, wrote out some ideas for future customer journeys in the app, and other stuff.

But outside of work, I managed to do a bit more.

I wrote/linked to a blog post from New Scientist, where they were claiming that the ECG feature is actually a bad thing.

And I also managed to listen to three podcast episodes:

• The Tim Ferris Show 355: Greg McKeown – How to Master Essentialism
• Core Intuition 358: Accidental Dark Mode
• Under the Radar 157: Editorial Content

That was helped by the fact that I spent a bit off time tonight packing up some of my things in my bedroom. Getting ready for the impending move in a few days!

A few things I did notice from my packing exercise:

• I really underestimate how many books I own. I filled up two big boxes with them, and I have a couple left over. For someone that didn’t think they owned that many, I easily have over 50. It also varies a lot, from Harry Potter to Swift development books, to even books on theoretical physics.
• Maybe I own too many keyboards. I currently own a Cherry Windows keyboard, a Unicomp Spacesaver M, Apple Extended II, a Magic Keyboard for my iPad, and of course the Smart Keyboard that’s now attached to my iPad Pro.
• I have a lot of items that have just been stored in a cupboard for quite a long time. Some of it is stuff for the new house, so mugs, glasses, board games, etc. But a big chunk of it just hasn’t been used. Maybe it’s time to get rid of a few things.

I must admit, I already see a theme emerging from that small list. So I think I’ll end it prematurely. My bad memory is quite visible to me when I come across all of my belongings that I have completely forgotten about.