rock and scroll

Making progress

In software, the word soon doesn't always mean what you think it means. I've been working on a lot of things, and some will soon bear fruit. I'll then take the seeds of those fruits and plant them in some other apps. I want to strengthen the root system of the current crop of products; if their roots cross, I'll look down, anthropomorphize, and see it as holding hands.

As an independent developer, I'm a serial processor.  I'm CPU-bound. If I work on one thing, I'm not working on others.

Interrupts generated by peripherals may be processed slowly, or indefinitely delayed.

I don't mind this, though I sometimes feel guilty about not being able to do all the things I want to do right now.

This morning I was working on a feature that positions some buttons above the keyboard.  It didn't take long to get that working, but I spent twice that time afterward making sure all kinds of additional situations were handled.  Need to track state to make it toggle-able. What happens if the keyboard goes down; what happens during memory warnings, what about device rotation?  What if text is selected when a certain one of these keys is pressed? Pretty soon you have a lot of peripheral code around a pretty simple feature.  It feels good to set-and-forget after you're confident all the cases are handled.

Each feature is that way.  I'm going to go finish another one tonight, and handle more tomorrow.

The diaries of John Adams

Last night I was flipping through the John Adams biography by David McCullough.  He frequently mentions Adams diaries.  I don't know if the list is exhaustive, but you can see his entries (along with photos of the actual written page) at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

What's interesting is how mundane some of the entries are.  Information that is perhaps unimportant is preserved where it would otherwise be unknowable. They're fun to read in part because of this.

A typical entry from his college days:

At Colledge, a Clear, warm morning, and so Continued.

During his time in France with Ben Franklin he often wrote:

Dined at home.

In a sense, these are the tweets and check-ins of another generation.

There is, of course, a lot more to find in his writings, but it's worth noting that keeping a journal doesn't mean having to write pages every day.  Start, and perhaps finish, with a sentence.

Roosevelt's diary

Saw this picture of a page from Roosevelt's journal, written the day his wife died.

via Reddit.

Administrivia

I have some nice developments in progress and woke up wanting to
continue where I left off. Instead, I need to hit the brakes and
tackle taxes today. I'll be more available for email than usual today
so if you want to give me a break from organizing and inputting data
send me an email!

Sizing app icons

Last night I was working through some issues related to updating older apps for the new iPad's Retina display.  Now that there are essentially four screen sizes between the various iOS devices (not to mention the Mac), it's a lot more work to make sure images and icons look good.  It'd be nice if it were possible to simply create one large vector graphic of each image and simply export it at all the necessary sizes, but this doesn't work well, especially at smaller icons sizes.  The reasons are outlined in this great post about the dream of vector icons.

Some decisions I made in the past related to various icon packs (available in fixed sizes) and my own app icon designs make getting Retina-ready quite a feat.  I'm trying to codify some practices to make this easier in case an iPad mini debuts a year from now.

Making buttons

An up-close shot of a simple stretchable button. On the device
(Retina or regular) it looks good.  Interesting how simple shapes and colors give the illusion of depth and lighting at the appropriate scale.

Pregnancy time-lapse on the Today Show

I saw this cute time-lapse video this morning on the Today Show.  A similar video was extremely popular a year or two ago and was part of the reason I decided to make the BabyBelly app.  I think it's cool when people take the time to make something like this as it lets you appreciate the changes you can't see day-to-day.

Banquet Speech

"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers
palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his
writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and
often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a
good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries
again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try
for something that has never been done or that others have tried and
failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only
necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is
because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is
driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help
him."

From Hemingway's Nobel banquet speech

 

Create a task from your notes in Meetings

In case you haven't seen it, Meetings for iPad can create an action item from words in your notes section by selecting the words.  The new action item will be titled with the words in the selection and you can further edit the action item (due date, notes, etc) as usual.

Working

I've noticed that the crash reports Apple collects aren't plentiful
enough. At first I thought this was because I was writing rock-solid
apps. Eventually I realized that only a small number of iOS users
have opted-in to crash reporting via iTunes; additionally they have to
sync with iTunes for the crash reports to be uploaded. I'm using a
crash reporting library now and have already seen some strange (and
exceedingly rare, thankfully) crashes. So far, it appears just under
1% of Meetings users are experiencing crashes. I'm researching fixes
but am having a lot of trouble reproducing the issue.

I'm also working on some new things related to my favorite writing and
journaling apps. I haven't sent many newsletters but do plan on
announcing things that way. You can sign up at slidetorock.com

Meetings update

An update to Meetings for iPad will be available soon. I fixed a
couple bugs, started integrating Dropbox, added PDF export, and made
creating action items from text you wrote in your Notes much easier.

Thank you

Meetings for iPad climbed steadily after debuting earlier this week.  I'll have more to say about all this later but this is certainly one of many things I'm thankful for this year.