Another day at work! Nothing amazing to really shout about, but nothing to moan about either.

I listened to only one podcast today, Core Intuition episode 357. It’s slowly starting to become one of my must-listens, as Manton and Daniel always seem to have an interesting take on things. And it’s also good to hear developers talk about things that aren’t directly to do with programming.

Following on from yesterday, me and my girlfriend also made another step forward in our house purchase. I had to print out 39 pages in total, with various forms and acknowledgements to sign. Tomorrow I’ll scan them in, and we can start the final proceedings. I would do this on my iPad like most of the document signing I’ve done in the entire process. But the solicitors seem to have an issue with this, and don’t class it as being suitable. I don’t see the difference between annotating directly on an iPad, compared to printing, signing in pen, and scanning it back to PDF. But I’m not in a place where I can change anything!

So apparently it’s “Blue Monday” today.

Blue Monday is a name given to a day in January (typically the third Monday of the month) claimed to be the most depressing day of the year. – Wikipedia

The reasoning behind it is that by this time of year, most people’s New Years resolutions are starting to fail, the weather is cold, and everyone has no money because of Christmas.

I wasn’t hit by this strange condition, as my day went pretty well!

I went to work, as usual, got some Swift development done, worked on some more customisation with the Charts framework I’ve been using, had some discussions about the cool things were about to start at work, and just generally had a productive day!

I also listened to the latest episode of Mac Power Users (#466: John Gruber Returns), and it was a really great episode. Three of my favourite bloggers/podcasters all talking about how they perform live shows, the background of Markdown, the Mac, and also the iPad. I always like it when there’s a podcast about blogging, by such long-lasting bloggers.

After work, I discovered something that I’m supposed I didn’t notice the other day. On Saturday I watched the first episode of the second series of The Punisher. I thought that was all that was released. But I forgot that it was on Netflix, and that they just give you everything in one go. So I’ve managed to watch another three episodes already. I don’t expect this series to last more than another week.

There’s also a tiny bit of progress about the house me and my girlfriend are buying. Nothing to write about exactly, as I want to save most of the discussion about it until it’s actually completed. That’s going to take a while longer, but it’s nearly there, and I’m going to be looking through Ikea catalogues a lot more now.

Today was a day for a trip to Reading for a party for someone in my girlfriends family. I was reminded how bad I was at bowling, and that I seem to be the only person that has a beer at 12 pm in the afternoon.

It was a bit of a long day, because of the added travelling. But since we’ve been back, I’ve mainly been doing more research into the things we will need when we move our, and also some inspiration for the garden, and my future office.

I’m a big fan of Japanese gardens, but it’s nowhere near the size needed for that, so it’s going to be interesting seeing how I can develop that.

And regarding the office, I’ve got a bunch of ideas on how it could be laid out, and also what types of storage I’ll need. However, I’ve basically come to the realisation that it’s probably best to postpone any purchasing until we actually move in. Because I’ll most likely want to at least paint the walls a darker colour, then I can focus on adding furniture.

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.