Matthew Lang

A nice reminder from John Gruber about new Apple products and the fine art of shipping that product.

I wasn’t a fine of the first Apple Watch. The idea of a smartwatch that doesn’t just show you the time felt wrong. Over the years though, Apple has been chipping away at it. A few iterations later and I’m starting to like the idea of owning an Apple Watch.

And then they did what Apple does: iterate, iterate, iterate. They started knocking down Apple Watch’s glaring flaws one by one. Battery life improved significantly. They identified what Apple Watch is meant for: health and fitness tracking, and notifications. They added optional cellular networking, so your watch could remain utterly useful while out of the range of your iPhone.

— Apple Watch Series 5

The always-on display didn’t seem like a big feature at the time, but having persisted with a Fitbit for a few years, I can appreciate that gesture to see the screen. It just wasn’t always possible.

I’m hinting to Jennifer for an Apple Watch Series 5 for my Christmas now. We’ll just need to wait and see if she takes the hint.

I had no idea that Basecamp offered a free plan for smaller teams and individuals. Is this a recent change in their product or have they always had this?

Spent the afternoon watching the Paisley Golf Club juniors play in a local competition at Elderslie Golf Club. Some good scores coming in. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

That’s the garden sorted for the winter. Time to reward myself with a couple of hours watching the Solheim Cup. Go Europe! 🇪🇺 ⛳️

In my development work I usually find that the simple way works best and is also easier to maintain. However, the web development industry is still insistent on progress and not always for the better.

This comparison between AirPods and the headphone jack by Bastian Allgeier is a great way to describe the issue.

Modern web dev tools and services are like AirPods. It’s fantastic to get rid of the cable. The experience is far better 95% of the times. But they also have connection issues from time to time, they are massively over-engineered, expensive and you can easily loose them.

Bluetooth headphones are likely the future. But I still have more love for a set of standard headphone with a regular cable and headphone jack that has been working reliably for decades.

— Simplicity (II) by Bastian Allgeier

It’s why I use Rails as my go to framework for new projects. Sure it’s not as simple as editing files on a server but it’s as simple as a tool you can get for building web apps.

Nothing new today that would make me want to buy an Apple Watch. An always-on display isn’t a deal breaker, but I am consdering it.

Still, the new iPad might be a good future purchase for the boys.

I’ve been using it almost daily for years, but it still amazes me how flexible and verstile Trello is for managing … stuff. I say “stuff”, because it’s so versatile. You can use it to manage and store lots of things.

Curious about potential Apple Watch releases today.

My Fitbit died a few weeks ago and I’m now wondering if an Apple Watch might be more my thing.

I’ve pushed back on getting an Apple Watch for sometime, but I’ve been slowing coming round to the idea of a smartwatch.

Every year, our home town has an open doors day where many building and places that are usually closed off, are open to the public.

We usually miss this as the boys have something on this day, but this year we had a free day so decided to head into two for a wander.

We enjoyed a wander round the Thomas Coats Memoria Baptist Church where Jennifer spent much of her student life included taking many exams in the halls of the church and graduating from university here.

We wandered through the town to a few more places but we wanted to see Paisley Abbey and the views from the roof as this section is usually closed. The views didn’t disappoint and with the weather being great we managed to get a few great photos as the sun shown through some of the windows.

It’s nice to have a town with centuries of history and be able to walk through those places and experience some of that history.

I’ve started using Bear to write up features for a product.

Instead of going straight a user story and coding, I’m spending a bit more time writing about the feature, and it’s risks and benefits.

It’s working well so far.

Another great update to Bear, the notes app. Back in the day the best thing I used for managing notes was Backpack. This is probably the next best thing to Backpack for me.

Tis the season for notebooks! Just backed @rohdesign’s Sketchnote Ideabook on Kickstarter.

Ordered the bundle of three so my youngest can get one.

The Brexit train wreck continues.

Hobonichi’s ordered for me and Jen. It’s becoming a little tradition this.

I loved this post from the Signal vs Noise blog about trading off tracking people through email for content.

Not everything needs to be tracked. Not everything needs to pay off. It’s perfectly fine to do things because it’s fun, feels good, is interesting, tickles your brain, or just helps someone out.

— [Let’s stop shaking people down for their email addresses] (https://m.signalvnoise.com/lets-stop-shaking-people-down-for-their-email-addresses)

The benefits of hard work.

Personal projects do make you a better developer.

My focus just now is on a larger project though. It still affords me much of the same benefits, just less of an opportunity to try new things. I’m okay with that though for the sake of getting it off the ground.

For the last few months, I’ve been building a content management system aimed at a particular industry.

I’m close to finishing the first working version of the product. There are still a few things to do, like account management and theme options, but these are trivial things that will not present any problems.

While reviewing the CMS source code this morning, I spotted a way that I can refactor a part of the CMS. The change involves simplifying the different content from multiple types of content to a single base content model that I can base other content on. This is a significant structural change to the product. It involves changes in how the CMS presents and manages the content.

If I spend the time making the change now, it would be much easier to handle any created content and migrations of data in the future.

If I schedule the switch for later on after the release, I’ll always know that I have this change in the structure to make and will be presented with an increasing problem of migrating data.

Thinking on it, I like the idea of taking the hit now and getting this right before the product gets released. I’m just wondering now why I didn’t see this before when I was modeling the content for the CMS.

Michael Wade reminds us of the important things.

Second day on the new job.

Another day of online courses, health and safety training and getting myself up to speed with the organisation.

God, I miss freelancing.

Feedbin for iOS is now available on the App Store.

Great to see Feedbin now have their own native app for iOS that matches the website, feature for feature.

NB reminds us to embrace the simplest of movements, walking

I’m starting to wonder if running a side product is worth the hassle, given the amount of regulation on privacy and payment processing there is now.

I can’t wait for this.

I remember watching this as a kid. Everything about it was amazing. And judging by the trailer, it looks like it will retain the sense of magicalness when it lands on Netflix on the 30th of August.

As part of a side-project I’m working on, I’ve been trying to build an informative weather widget that gives current and forecasted stats for the next few hours.

I’m using the card component from Bootstrap to structure the widget. The card component is excellent for this, as it allows me to structure the widget but will enable it to have different styles for different websites. I’m surprised by just how much I’ve been using the card component, as it’s quite versatile.

Dark Sky provides all the weather stats that I need. I have a background worker that fetches the stats from the Dark Sky API and saves it to the database. I can then query the database for the stats as well as cache the widget for a short period.

The Dark Sky API is excellent as the forecast request gives you minute by minute forecasted weather for the hour, as well as hourly and daily forecasts for the next seven days.

The Dark Sky API also includes descriptions for icons that you can use. These standard descriptions can then be used to map to whatever icon you want. I’m using Font Awesome for my weather widget’s icons. I have a helper method in my application that maps the icon description from the Dark Sky API to the correct Font Awesome icon.

So far I’m pretty happy with the results.