Chris Hannah
My little piece of the internet

Currently Listening

Journal: 12 Mar 2019

I’ll skip talking about my day job today, as there really isn’t anything exciting to talk about.

However, on my blog, I published three different pieces today. Not three major articles, but three different things. Firstly, I shared a story from Laurie Voss (Co-founder and Chief Data Office of NPM) about a major bank that accidentally pushed private code to the public NPM registry. Then I found this headline – “Amazon’s Alexa has 80,000 Apps—and No Runaway Hit” on Bloomberg and had to link to it. And I also saw that Professor Stephen Hawking is being commemorated on the new 50p coin, so I had to share that as well.

From a developer perspective, I pushed another build to the Text Case beta. There’s no new features in this build, but I worked on a lot of optimisations to how the UI is drawn. Especially as all content needs to be updated every time a user types in the input field, or uses the “Use Copied Text” button. Before there was some weird glitch-like behaviour, where the coloured headings would flash different colours. This is because the interface elements are “reused”, so when they’re reloaded, old components would be cleaned and configured to load the list from scratch. That wasn’t exactly necessary though, as it’s only the text content inside the interface that needs to be updated, so I’ve got a lot of manual UI handling for that now.

Another thing I did notice in the Text Case build I shared recently with custom icons, is that they’re not that optimised for all screen sizes. And for some reason the edges on the “TC” seem quite harsh. I plan on getting that fixed very soon.

Then it will be time to implement a “Text to Emoji” format, because I’m 80% sure I’m going to add it. After that I may start wrapping up the 2.0 version. Although I want as much to be in the update as possible, I really want users to use the new app. And simply adding useless things to the app is not going to benefit anyone.