I’d forgotten how much I enjoy "Warrior" till I started watching it again 🙂

I was beginning to think that it was gone for good after the Cinemax cancellation and the whole HBO reshuffle. But I was glad to see it back.

I’m still on the first episode of the new season but the show still appears to be gritty, witty, and full of old-school Kung Fu which reminds you of the days of Bruce Lee. So, I’m definitely happy to see it back again!

#TV #KungFu #BruceLee #Warrior

When I was younger, I would watch a movie trailer and remember all the details of the movie enough to remember to watch the movie months later when it came out. Now, if I can even remember some details from a trailer a week later, it is an achievement 😛

So, I decided to create a ToDo app which would remember stuff for me — movies, books, TV shows etc. and allow me to add a link to a site with details (such as IMDB) so that I can read about the movie in the app itself instead of going searching online.

This actually works pretty well for me in terms of remembering to catch up on a movie when it came out — especially after I added a release date to the list 🙂

But then, I realized that I can use the same app for coding tasks too. Sure, I guess it should have been obvious, but I already had a separate app for jotting down coding tasks …

Now, my app is morphing again as I look at ways to make the coding tasks side of things work with my regular flow.

Would it have been better to keep this as two separate apps?

But then I’d have to split development time between the two apps. This way, I can do all the dev work in one project.

However, the app might become “heavier” trying to accommodate two separate types of data/workflows …

Decisions, decisions 😛

#Coding #Swift #SwiftUI #iOS #macOS #Tasks #DesignDecisions

Whether it's software development, or simply using software, it’s the little things that get you 🙂

For example, quite a few Mastodon clients (or Twitter clients for that matter) do not allow you to simply highlight a bit of text and copy it … Sure, this might come from platform limitations, but still, it’s something that a user might reasonably expect to do.

Similarly, most URLs can only be clicked on to open in a browser — you can’t copy the URL or share it directly (except of course, by first opening in the browser and then sharing).

I ran into the latter issue with my Ice Cubes fork since I read Mastodon posts on my MacBook but share links to my iPhone to read longer articles there.

“Why?” you ask, well that’s a longer story for a different post perhaps, but the fact remains that we are constantly being constrained as to what we can do with content and software.

Is it just laziness on the part of developers? Or developers thinking that something wouldn’t be needed since 95% of the users don’t do things that way? Or, is it just that we are being herded in a certain direction by the platforms themselves?

I don’t know … But this is probably one of the reasons why I increasingly turn to building my own software — because then I can shape it to meet my own needs 😛

#Coding #UX #Features #UserFriendly

If you are interested in Apple Vision Pro from a technical/hardware perspective, you might want to read the analysis from Hypervision here:

https://www.hypervision.ai/apple-vp-optics-insights

And once you are done with that, you might want to take a look at Karl Guttag’s fourth article in his series about Apple Vision Pro which breaks down the Hypervision article into a slightly more digestible format 🙂

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/26/apple-vision-pro-part-4-hypervision-pancake-optics-analysis/

The Guttag post isn’t very heavy on Vision Pro info (besides what Hypervision said) but it does give some additional background on Hypervision itself.

#Apple #VisionPro #Hardware #Optics #AR #VR

Watched “Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3679040) today …

I’m not a huge fan of post-2000 Salman Khan. I used to enjoy his 90s movies a lot. In fact, his “Maine Pyar Kiya” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100095) was instrumental in me getting back into Hindi movies and for me learning Hindi. But the post-2000 (or somewhere after the 2010s maybe?) Salman Khan became a bit of a cliché for me — he lost the charm that he had in the early movies and became all about the muscles and about speaking a certain way.

This movie started in the same style that has become habitual for Salman Khan movies these days. Then I began to get a sense of déja vu, it felt as if I’d knew certain plot elements from somewhere but couldn’t quite put my finger on it …

A little bit of research revealed that this was a remake of 2014’s “Veeram” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3320578). OK, so that made sense 🙂

The good parts? The callbacks to “Maine Pyar Kiya” (and the Bhagyashree cameo) which brought back old memories, the appearance of Telugu stars like Venkatesh and Jagapathi Babu and the bit of South Indian exposure.

The rest, for me at least, was mostly average. I find it interesting that “Veeram” was written for an older Ajith Kumar and it mostly worked, but here, Salman still tries to be a young man instead of playing an older character 😛

#Movies #MiniReview #Hindi #Bollywood #Remake

So, I've been working on a new Mastodon client. (It’s what, my fifth or sixth Mastodon client? 😛)

I started with IceCubes since it seemed to work well with Akkoma and I simply wanted to add a couple of features that I wanted and then be done …

But unfortunately, “seemed” turned out to be the operative word here 😀 The existing implementation worked relatively OK with Akkoma, but there were things which were failing behind the scenes with no warnings.

Basically, their POST implementation for API endpoints was flawed, especially when it came to non-Mastodon servers. I had pointed this out a while back and they seemed to have made some changes but the changes basically worked for some API endpoints but not for others and when it failed, there was no warning to the user.

So I had to either know that something failed, or run the app via Xcode and watch the console for issues.

I basically ended up reworking the project totally so that it was easier to work with and then began adding the fixes that were needed for Akkoma and the features I wanted.

It’s taking shape slowly but I’m happy with where it’s going …

#Coding #Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #iOS #MastodonClient

The Tree Robot
Midjourney 5.2 AI Art
#stablediffusion #dalle2 #midjourney #aiart

Little girl offering cookies to the monster from under her bed
Midjourney 5.2 AI Art
#stablediffusion #dalle2 #midjourney #aiart

Part 3 of Karl Guttag's series of articles analysing Apple Vision Pro is now up. The first two parts looked at the hardware and possible pitfalls (as well as what Apple did right, or at least, better than Meta) and this part (and the following ones) take the same approach with the software.

Interesting (and thought provoking) reading 🙂

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/21/apple-vision-pro-part-3-why-it-may-be-lousy-for-watching-movies-on-a-plane/

Note: If you’re an AVP fan and don’t like the article, please don’t bother messaging me to tell me how much you disagree with Karl. I’m not his messaging service 😛

But if you’d like to discuss AVP (or AR/VR in general), I’m happy to do so …

#Apple #VisionPro #Software #AR #VR #MixedReality #Entertainment

Xcode 15 beta 2 with just macOS 14 beta 2 support built-in, is about 3.5GB. iOS 17 simulator is 7.5GB. And then VisionOS 1.0 simulator is another 7.5GB.

So it all adds up to about 18GB in terms of the download. Wondoer how much space it takes up on disk …

Gotta install it all to see how it works, right? 🙂

#Xcode #Betas #BleedingEdge #Downloads

New iOS, iPadOS, and macOS betas are out! Alongwith Xcode 15 beta 2 with VisionOS 1 beta support. I guess time to start downloading and testing?

#Xcode #Betas #VisionOS #BleedingEdge

You can't spell the word gullible without the word acrobat.

I think it was only yesterday that I posted about needing to cut down on personal coding projects since they put the burden of maintenance on me, and what do I do since then?

I’ve gone ahead and started yet another project 😛

I’ve been using a macOS-ified version of Tusker as my default Mastodon client. I had it tweaked to fit exactly my needs — it had filtering, cleaning up the main timeline based on list membership and/or hashtags, showing images in a gallery instead of the tile layout most Mastodon clients seem to have inherited from Twitter and so on …

But … I discovered a few days ago that for some reason, the post threads on Tusker are not as comprehensive as they are on at least a couple of other clients I knew of.

The sane response to this probably would have been to fix Tusker by figuring out why the post threads in Tusker did not pull in all the relevant posts. But instead, I decided to take one of the clients with the right post threading and update that to work for me under macOS 😀

There are reasons as to why I opted to do it this way, but the biggest is that the new client (Ice Cubes) is easier/cleaner to modify at this point than it would be to work on Tusker to achieve what I want.

Unfortunately, since Ice Cubes does not have some of the features I had implemented on the Tusker side, I’ll end up having to do that too. C’est la vie? 😛

#Coding #PersonalApps #Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #MastodonClients

We are swept in the dark to see the light in our dreams. #AI #Midjourney

One thing that's often annoyed me about Mac Catalyst apps is that when you close the app (via the Close butotn on the top left of the window) the app terminates instead of minimising to the dock.

This behaviour can be changed with two Info.plist changes:

Application Scene Manifest > Enable Multiple Windows - YES
Application can be killed to reclaim memory - NO

#Xcode #Catalyst #Coding #Fixes

I had a Python script which would post a daily dynamically composed tweet to Twitter. That stopped working last week because something went wrong with Twitter’s API set up. The service came back a couple of days later but my old info was gone and registering again apparently did not fully work.

So I decided not to rely on the API service and looked around for an alternative …

One possibility was to use macOS Shortcuts to create an automated tweet. Most of that seemed fairly straightforward and I got a workable workflow, but on macOS, there is no way to run a shortcut on a schedule …

So I thought of coding a quick app to do the job. The job would compose the tweet with the dynamic bits set up in Swift and then pass the tweet content to Shortcuts to be used as input. The app would also handle the scheduling so that the shortcut is executed daily at a given time and give me some logs indicating how it all went …

Seemed simple enough and the basic implementation was pretty easy. The only fly in the ointment was that I decided to use a third-party library to handle the scheduling 😛

It was a great library. It had all the features you could think in terms of defining a schedule, but it also seemed to not quite work in subtle ways. I discovered this only after I’d used the new app for a couple of days and had to debug scheduling issues.

I ended up writing the scheduling part as a custom component which handled only the scenario I was interested in and not the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. But using the third-party library did give me some great ideas about features to add to my own scheduler to make it (and the reporting) better 🙂

#Coding #Swift #macOS #Shortcuts #Automation #Scheduling

When I can’t find an app that does what I want, or, if I feel that the available apps are too heavy/resource hungry, I tend to write my own apps to fill the need.

The trouble with that approach is that I sometimes end up with a lot of software to support/maintain. Since I’m also the customer, it can get a bit hectic 😛

This week was one where I was reminded (once again) why I try not to write my own software — I had at least two apps that I’d coded over the past couple of months that needed that one extra feature that I wanted. Then, I discovered that I needed a whole new app (because of Twitter shenanigans … grr) and that I had to add a new feature to yet another one of the apps that I’d coded.

That was a lot 😀

I managed to get quite a few of the changes I wanted done over the weekend (and also coded a new quick-and-dirty app for the Twitter issue) but I’m not sure if I should continue doing this … sometimes it just gets to be soo stressful juggling all these to-do items 😛

#Coding #PersonalSoftware #Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #iOS

In case you’re not aware - I’m working with the Mastodon team on #DevRel and community 🚀

If you’re building a client on the #MastodonAPI I would love to get connected and help you stay up-to-date. Drop me a line andy@joinmastodon.org and let me know what you’re working on! 🙏🏻

(pls boost for reach / tell the devs of your fave apps)

Part 2 of Karl Guttag’s series of articles on his thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro is now up on his site.

He discusses the possible issues with the AVP this time around from a hardware perspective. If you’d like to get a thoughtful perspective on all the various factors that you might want to consider when trying to decide if AVP is for you or not, you might want to give the articles a read and so that you can make your own mind up instead of relying purely on hype, or how excited others are about it 😛

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/16/apple-vision-pro-part-2-hardware-issues/

#Apple #VIsionPro #Dissection #Analysis #Hardware