David Sparks had an interesting take on AirPower, that maybe not many people actually care about it. But also that it would be good to end all the rumours:

I hope Apple does perfect and ship the AirPower, if for no other reason, so we can start talking about it. Regardless, I can’t help but think in the overall scheme of things, AirPower is small potatoes.

Maybe this is why Apple haven’t came out at any point with updates to the availability of it. They have had real issues with AirPower, like the heat caused by placing so many charging coils together. But there’s been zero news about it since the announcement, at least officially. Maybe because it’s just an accessory that only a tiny fraction of people will get, so it’s not actually a big deal.

Today started with me playing quite a few hours of World of Warcraft! At the same time, I was listening to some podcasts, and music from a German artist called Azet. He has an album coming out soon, Apple Music has a couple of them available now.

Football was on for most of the day, and Arsenal played the late night kick-off (17:30). We beat Chelsea 2-0 at The Emirates, and it was a really good game. The entire team played well, and with a high-intensity throughout. There was a down-side to it though as one of our players, Hector Bellerin came off the pitch with a knee injury.

Between lunch and dinner time I tried out some cooking. I made a spaghetti carbonara, and I made it as authentic to the traditional Italian recipe as I could (I was watching actual Italian chefs make it on YouTube). It only needed four ingredients: pasta, egg, pancetta, and parmesan cheese. No cream.

One of my favourite television shows is also back for a second series, The Punisher. The first episode is now available on Netflix, and it’s looking just as good, maybe even better, than the first series.

An interesting day at work today. I had to reimplement a line-chart in one of our apps, because the framework that we previously used was producing inconsistent results.

The chart we have shows time-based data, and the problem stems from the fact that the data provided by the API isn’t consistent with the timing of records. So for example there might be 10 data points for one day, two for the next, and six for another. We spread out the values on the y-axis and the associated dates on the x-axis, but the spacing of data is based on the amount of data points, with no way to override this.

Luckily I done a bit more research, and there’s a framework called Charts by Daniel Cohen Gindi, that’s actually a Swift/iOS Chart framework for a Android. It also happens to be the one used in our Android app, so just based on consistency it’s better than the one we had before.

Apart from that, it’s been a pretty average day.

Nothing that impressive to write about today. It was a busy day at work, and afterwards I mainly played games and watched TV.

But I came into a problem at work today, where I couldn’t add any padding easily to a UILabel in an app. So I wrote a small subclass that adds an insets variable, and made sure it still worked with AutoLayout. You can find that here on the blog, or the code directly on GitHub.

I ran into a situation at work today, where I was already using a UILabel to display text, but it was styled in a way that really needed some padding.

UILabel doesn’t directly support this, and the most common way to get around it is to embed the UILabel inside a UIView, and control the constraints that way. I didn’t really want to do that for what I was doing, and I also wanted to just make my own label that could handle padding.

It didn’t take long and was a lot more straightforward than I thought. I subclasses UIClass, added a UIEdgeInsets variable, and then made sure that intrinsicContentSize, sizeThatFits(_ size: CGSize), and drawText(in rect: CGRect) took that into consideration. So it still works perfectly with AutoLayout.

It’s certainly not a major open source project or anything, but it could be a quick way to add padding support to a UILabel!

Back to work as usual today. The design sprint that I was part of didn’t require me at all today, so that meant I could get back to some actual development. I was starting the build the structure for a new project, so that’s pretty interesting.

On my blog today, I linked to a piece from John Voorhees at MacStories, about DuckDuckGo now using Apple Maps for location searches. I also wrote a short opinion on Slack’s new icon. Not a huge essay on Medium, or any other type of insightful take on it. But John Gruber shared a few thoughts, and they seemed to resonate with what I was also thinking, so I thought I’d say a few words as well.

As usual I listened to some more podcasts, and what’s even more typical, I’m ending the day with one in-progress.

• The Instance 545: Old Zoners
• The Dent 20: A (Delayed) Look Ahead At 2019
• The Talk Show 240: ‘Drastically Shakier’, With Special Guest Ben Thompson

Practically no work on Text Case today, except from I finished up the Title Case Style setting. But that took about 15 minutes.

Slack has today announced their new logo on their blog. It was designed between Slack and Pentagram, and the result is a relatively flavourless icon, in my opinion.

I for one, and I think many others, associate the colourful octothorpe logo with Slack. And also their plaid pattern that is used in many places.

The opinion that I’ve seen best match mine, is John Gruber over at Daring Fireball:

Slack’s old identity had at least three good things going for it: they owned the letter “S” (much like how Netflix owns “N” — something Netflix has doubled-down on as their identity has evolved), they owned the “#” hash mark, and unique among technology companies, they owned plaid. When you saw plaid with those primary colors on a white background, you thought Slack. And plaid isn’t part of any sort of design trend right now. Slack simply owned plaid, to such a degree that Slack company socks — which simply used colors and plaid, no “Slack”, no “S” were necessary to make it instantly obvious these were Slack socks — became coveted swag.

When the Slack iOS app installed on my phone, I instantly forgot where I put it. Sure, it only took a few seconds, but the old logo seemed to draw you in. It had a colourful border, with a bright white background, and the typical “S” that you see with Slack. But now it’s a slightly dull purple, with a generic colourful icon on top. It just blends in.

It feels very much like change for the sake of change, which is exactly what Slack’s blog post said it wasn’t.

John Voorhees, writing for MacStories:

Today, DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused web search engine, began using Apple Maps for location-based searches. The company, which previously used OpenStreetMap, switched to Apple’s MapKit JS framework, which Apple introduced at WWDC in June 2018.

This is a very good improvement to DuckDuckGo. Hopefully this kind of integration will also lead to more visibility into any flaws that it may have, which can be rectified once for the entire service. That can only benefit the other platforms Apple Maps is on.

Thinking about DuckDuckGo a bit more, them using Apple maps is probably a very good fit, as I personally see them as the “Apple” of search engines, as they both put a big emphasis on anonymising data requests, and respecting user privacy.

What I want to see next, is DuckDuckGo become the default option on iOS. But as Google already pay a ton of money for this, I don’t see it as being that likely.

Today was the second day of a design sprint at work, so it was a busy day again! Fortunately, tomorrow is less intense, so I won’t be tired for the rest of the day.

I did manage to get one feature on Text Case “working” before I gave up doing anything work-like. I expanded the settings to included setting the title case style.

Throughout my commute to and from work I also slipped in a podcast. Another episode of The Stalman Podcast, and this time Marco Arment and Casey Liss were guests! I’ve started listening to an episode of The Instance (World of Warcraft podcast), but I’ll save the rest for the commute tomorrow.

As for the rest of the night, I’ve played a few games on my PS4. But mostly I’ve been annoying my girlfriend with my bad piano and guitar skills.

If you could class any day as a write off, today is that day.

I managed to get to work an hour early (7:30) for a few minor reasons, that really didn’t warrant that amount of time. We also started a design sprint at work today, so that took a lot out of me.

After work I’ve just been playing World of Warcraft, FIFA 19, and watching videos on YouTube. My mind just can’t cope with anything more complex than that at the moment. Although, I did just beat Barcelona 2-0, playing as Arsenal. So I’ve got that going for me at the moment. 😜