Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Apple back in court in the UK

On top of the court case against Epic, Apple is now facing another court case, this time in the UK. Apple is accused of over-charging people for the apps in their App Store.
The tech company has been accused of deliberately shutting out the competition in the store and forcing people to use its own payment processing system, generating “excessive” profits for itself in the process.

The claim, which is being brought on behalf of potentially millions of Apple users in the UK, has been filed in the competition appeal tribunal and calls for Apple to repay UK customers it says have been overcharged because of the company’s practices, with damages of up to £1.5bn being sought.

It says as many as 19.6 million UK users could be eligible for compensation.

— Apple accused of breaking UK competition law by overcharging for apps
As an Apple user of some years now, it's only recently that I've seen the argument against the use of a single App Store that is controlled by Apple.

Is it safer? Undoubtedly. Sometimes though, it might be too safe given the fickle approval process that apps must go through when developers submit new or updated apps to the App Store. Also the 

What would happen though if developers could submit to stores other than Apple's own App Store? Maybe they could even run their own stores. I would definitely think twice before buying an app through an alternative store though.

We’re getting a bit more daylight now, so me and Jen have started up our mid-week walks again. Lockdown or not, we’re going to keep this going.

Master & Commander, a masterpiece

I completely agree with Michael Wade. Master & Commander is a masterpiece.

I never got round to seeing Master & Commander at the cinema. If I'm honest, I don't even remember much of seeing Master & Commander being advertised at all at the time. I do regret not seeing it on the big screen, but at home, maybe with a good set of headphones, it is as close to the cinema experience as I'll ever get.

It's definitely one of my favourite movies of all time.

A productive Saturday

It was one of those Saturdays where everything through the day just fell into place.

A code and coffee session early this morning yielded another milestone met. I managed to close off another couple of widgets for my CMS product. There's just one more to go to switch out the old widgets for my new ones that offer better flexibility when it comes to putting pages together.

It was then off to the hardware store to get a few things for the garden. We missed out on a few things last year as we left it too late to get a couple of things, so we were quicker off the mark this year.

Back home, I spent a couple of hours getting the back garden into some shape for the summer. The next few Saturday's are going to be similar as we get a few more things done, but the hope is that we put in the work now, to enjoy the fruits of our labour when the sunshine and good weather really kicks in.

It not often a Saturday just falls into place like this, but its been great having a productive day. I can kick back a bit tomorrow knowing I've got a few things done today.

The not so fun weekend of debugging code problems

It's been a while since I last posted here. I've been getting my head down and working on my CMS product, which has left not much time for blogging.

Over the last few weeks, I've been putting in place a feature that should allow for more flexible page designs so that customers can use a series of widgets to build up pages. It's a three-level form with a page with many sections on it, and each section has a single widget. The thinking is that the sections can be re-ordered regardless of what type of widget it holds. It hasn't been without its issues, though. It took several attempts to get this overall widget design with the page in place.

Thankfully, that part of the feature is done, but I'm still working out some issues with this.

The main issue is when I add a new section and widget to the page, it clears any input elements that I have changed on any other sections widgets on that same page. The merry-go-round of possible sources of the problem includes the usual areas when things like this go wrong on the front-end—namely Turbolinks and Javascript.

The biggest problem just now is that of time, though. I don't get much more than a couple of hours at a time working on this, and when I do, I feel that I am problem-solving the same things over and over again. It's just as well that we're still in a national lockdown here in Scotland because it does afford me some extra time to work on this.

Hopefully, I can make progress with it this week.

Reminiscing of days with Sublime Text

Over the weekend, I decided to re-install Sublime Text to see If there have been any substantial updates to it. I haven't used it in a few years now since moving to VS Code.

The text editor remains snappy and fast as I navigated through a large codebase and made a few changes. Sublime Text was never a slouch when it comes to performance. It was always fast for me, even on larger codebases.

Intrigued, I turned to Sublime Text's package control to see if there were packages there for Ruby and Rails and general web development. While I don't really need these, there are nice to have in the text editor. What I found was quite disappointing.

Most of the packages that I have used in the past on Sublime Text have not seen much in terms of updates, with a few packages listed as missing. Clearly, VS Code has impacted the number of actively maintained packages as developers migrated from Sublime Text to VS Code when it first hit the scenes.

Although I'm pretty much baked into the VS Code ecosystem thanks to its huge library of extensions, I wouldn't be against going back to Sublime Text. Maybe one day I will. For the moment, I'll leave it on my Macbook and see what I get from it as a wee change to VS Code.

First hit of the year

First hit of the year for me and Drew at Paisley Golf Club today!

A glorious afternoon of weather and a welcome change to the snow and rain we’ve had the last few weeks. I was a bit rusty but Drew has managed to find some extra yardage to his drives over the winter. I’ve got some catching up to do!

Don't forget that text is everything

Graydon Hoare suggests we always bet on text.
Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close.

— Always bet on text
I wholeheartedly agree. You can keep video clips, online meetings, voice memos and all the stuff. Text is the ultimate form of communication.