(Image credit: BBC Earth)

If you’re interested in nature documentaries, then the BBC have quite the announcement for you. In two news articles (linked at the bottom), they announced 8 new television series about natural history.

The five main shows are:

• Perfect Planet
• Frozen Planet II
• Planet Earth III
• One Planet: Seven Worlds
• Green Planet

And they also announced three extra shows:

• The Mating Game
• Primates
• Earth’s Paradise Islands

That’s such a massive commitment from them, and I’m already super excited.

Perfect Planet

In the five-part series, we’ll see how the entire planet which is seemingly “perfect”, operates. It will show how the weather, ocean currents, solar energy, and volcanoes all play their part in supporting Earth’s diverse biological population. We’ll also get to see how certain animals are well-suited to their environments, such as the Vampire Finches in the Galapagos, which are part of the diverse group, known as Darwin’s Finches.

Episodes: 5 x 60 mins

Transmission: 2020

Frozen Planet II

Ten years after Frozen Planet first aired, the second series is being released. As the name suggests, it focusses on the quarter of the earth that is entirely frozen. Animals such as the Siberian tiger, snow monkeys, penguins, and polar bears all thrive in cold conditions. But as temperatures rise, they might not be able to cope as easily.

Episodes: 6 x 60 mins

Transmission: 2021

Planet Earth III

Following on from the second series, that aired only back in late 2016, is coming back for a whopping eight-episode series. As usual, improvements to technology, such as robotic cameras, better submersibles, and stabilised rigs, will only help us see the planet in more detail.

Episodes: 8 x 60 mins

Transmission: 2022

One Planet: Seven Worlds

This series will be split into seven episodes, one for each of the continents (Well actually Eurasia is one continent, but people treat it as two). We’ll see how distinct each continent is from each other, and how they have shaped the life that’s found there.

Episodes: 7 x 60 mins

Transmission: 2019

Green Planet

Something that sometimes gets ignored on tv documentaries, is plant-life. Usually, the focus is on the animals living in specific habitats, but this series will focus on the surprisingly intricate life of plants.

I’ve read a lot on how trees communicate, using electrical signals through their roots (that are connected by fungi), so I hope this gets shown in more detail.

Episodes: 5 x 60 mins

Transmission: 2021

The Mating Game

Okay, so nearly every species on the planet needs to find some kind of partner to mate with. This series will show how various species have completely different ideas of what’s the best method of finding one. Some fight, others sing songs, and some dance. This sounds like it could provide a very interesting insight into unknown behaviours of animals. And there’s a technological bonus with this series, it’s being filmed in 8K!

Episodes: 5 x 60 mins

Transmission: 2021

Primates

There are a huge number of species of primates. Including apes, lemurs, and monkeys. They’re found all over the planet, in vastly different habitats from one another. And there’s one writing this very blog post. We’ll get to see new sides to these animals, how they use tools, solve problems, and also have a glance into their politics.

Episodes: 3 x 60 mins

Transmission: 2020

Earth’s Paradise Islands

Madagascar, Borneo, and Hawaii, are all exotic and remote islands. And in each of them, there’s fascinating animal species, and human cultures. So it sounds like it will be two sides to each story.

Episodes: 3 x 60 mins

Transmission: Unknown

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Sources:

• “BBC announces new factual commissions” – BBC Media Centre
• “BBC reveals unprecedented commitment to natural history with announcement of new landmark programmes up to 2022” – BBC Media Centre

After moving into our house just over 10 days ago, me and my girlfriend finally had a day of peace. No big shopping, no huge crowd of people visiting, no furniture to pick up.

It started with a trip to our usual Cafe for breakfast. They had put drinks ready minutes after we sat down, and they only came to us to confirm our usual order. Pretty handy!

After that, we did a tiny bit of shopping. A toilet seat, some wallpaper, some decorations, and other small things.

For dinner, I cooked Spaghetti Carbonara. Not the Italian version, it was a “British Carbonara” that’s much more creamy. And in my opinion, not as good as the original.

Then tonight we watched a 2007 film called The Bucket List. It had Morgan Freeman in it, so I was instantly interested, and it turned out to be a really funny and enjoyable film!

Today I went for a trip to Whipsnade Zoo, the largest in the UK, and one that’s only a 15-minute drive from my house. It was a very cold and windy day, so as you’d expect, most of the animals were inside, and not particularly that active. I didn’t pay for entry though, as I had some free tickets that would expire at the end of this month, so I had to use them.

The best animals we saw was the African Hunting Dogs. They make some unusually high-pitch squeaks, and we made it just in time to see them tear apart from what I heard was a leg of an Antelope. If you want to experience that for yourself, I’ve put a two-minute video of it on YouTube.

After that, my family came round my house for a drink, and we somehow ended up watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.

I then cooked some Teriyaki flavoured chicken and rice for dinner, and me and my girlfriend ended up watching the second half of The Social Network. I’m not a fan of Facebook now, but the early days portrayed in the movie seemed pretty cool!

Nothing too not worthy at work today, I wrote some more tests, investigated some bugs, and wrote some code. A pretty basic day.

After work me and my girlfriend had some of her family around, so we cooked dinner for everyone, and spent the evening watching Netflix and talking.

I also shared a quick tip on Twitter earlier about using the Error protocol in Swift, and making it provide the correct value for localizedDescription.

So today at work was spent creating the base bones of a new iOS app. Starting with TDD and MVVM in mode, I made a basic structure, along with starting to write tests and code for the API interaction.

I didn’t get that much time to do a
lot of work on Text Case, apart from making a few tweaks to the Action Extension, and also some changes to the Hashtags format. I fixed a few things that could have caused weird results, so I’ve made it so you should never get multiple # together, and also that every hashtag is separated by only one space. If words are separated by other things such as a comma or full stop, they will be converted to spaces.

Tonight at home, me and my girlfriend ordered a pizza as there were a lot of people coming to visit. My girlfriends friend came round, followed by both of our parents coincidentally coming round at the same time.

And in the mean time, I built a new sofa! I don’t have a picture right now, as I’m just about to go to bed. But I’ll most likely share one at some joint tomorrow!

As always, I’ll start with a short description of what I got up to at work today. My main tasks were trying to think more about how we’re going to build our next app. We’ve decided that everything is being written using TDD from the start, and hopefully, we can figure out a way to use BDD style tests, but there aren’t many great options available in Swift. Or at least so I’ve found.

And now the second favourite of the journal, Text Case progress updates. I did a fair bit of work tonight, but nothing really finished that I can show off. I did complete the Siri intent donating that I mentioned yesterday, and I’ve basically finished off the entire Siri Shortcuts feature, but I’m going to do a lot of testing on it when I have a big block of free time. Apart from that, I started to move the Action Extension over to 2.0. It’s built much better than the current version, as it reuses the same classes that are used to display the list of formats in the main app, with a few minor things specialised for the context of an Action Extension.

I’m hoping tomorrow I can tidy up a few more things, and then I can tick them off the big list and move closer to the public beta.

A mixed day at work today. It involved me presenting the prototype I mentioned yesterday that I was working on, at our biweekly team demo, working out some stuff for a future big project, and also trying to squish some bugs.

I also managed to have another productive day with Text Case 2.0, as I managed to port over the main logic of the Siri integration from the current version, and it works perfectly! The only bit of work remaining on this is figuring out when to “donate” intents to the system, which is basically where the app informs iOS that an action has been performed, so it can suggest it to you at a later date/time. Hopefully when you’re most likely to need it.

This step also means that I’m nearing the beta testing phase. I’ve been hesitant to put out any beta versions of this for a while simply because it didn’t have all the functionality that the current app had, so I knew any testers would be degrading their Text Case usage. But as soon as I can tell that everything in 1.4 works in 2.0, and that nothing breaks because of the update (I’m mainly thinking about Siri Shortcuts integrations), I’ll send out a public beta link on the newly created Twitter page (@TextCaseApp).

Another thing I have to mention is a great podcast I’m now starting to listen to. It’s called And You Are?, and it’s by Greg Morris. It’s a conversation-based podcast, where he talks to test about what they do for a living, their life, and other interesting topics. I probably didn’t summarise that well, but if you just look on the episode list, you can already see the list of great guests that he’s already had on. So far I’ve listened to the first episode with Daryl Baxter, which was really interesting, and I plan on listening to every episode!

Today at work was not one of a usual iOS Developer, as I spent most of the day using online prototyping tools to work on a little demo I’m doing at work. It’s all part of a task I’ve been doing the past few weeks, and I’ve gone from drawing rough diagrams on a whiteboard, to writing long user stories in Ulysses, which I then created a huge flowchart from, and I took one specific route and make that into a prototype!

Outside of work, I actually finally got around to giving TextCase 2.0 (the redesign I’m working on) a chunk of time. Firstly, I created a Twitter account for it (@TextCaseApp) so I can share specific news about the app in one place.

Then I finished off two different settings, enabling/disabling specific formats, and also changing the order of the format groups. In the current (old) version, each format can be moved around freely, but it offered no sense of structure, and as the number of formats grew, it became a bit of a mess. So I’ve now grouped them together, and you can arrange the individual groups. If a group has no formats enabled, the entire group will be hidden, so it doesn’t mean you’ll always have to see the headings.

One other thing about TextCase is that it got featured on the latest episode of AppStories! Which is a podcast all about apps by Federico Viticci and John Voorhees of MacStories.

As I mentioned in yesterdays entry, last night me and my girlfriend put together some Ikea furniture. We managed a two-seater sofa, a tv unit, and a small coffee table. You can find pictures of the first two on my Instagram. I topped that off today by building a small storage unit for my office! And It turns out it fits absolutely perfectly in the corner.

While building it, I watched another interesting video from Joe Robinet. He’s a Canadian backpacker/bushcraft guy, and in the video I watched, he spent 10 days in the Canadian wilderness with just 10 items. His videos (or at least the ones I’ve been watching) are usually just over an hour long, but they’re good to have on while doing something like building Ikea furniture!

So today was our first visit to Ikea for the new house. It was the most stressful visit to Ikea that I’ve ever had. The major issue is the one-way system they have, so everyone has to follow the same route. And as you can imagine, not everyone works at the same speed. So there are old people walking slowly, people just taking their time and browsing, kids running everywhere, and me just trying to get to the next department. It also didn’t help that we weren’t in control of the time, as we had to come with someone that we knew that had a van, so we had to be as fast as possible.

We still managed to buy quite a lot of stuff. The main things were two sofas, a tv unit, and a big storage unit for my office. We purchased two, two-seater sofas, but unfortunately, one colour wasn’t available to take away, so we’re going to have that delivered. But it’s going to be a big bonus having somewhere to finally sit down!

Tonight I expect to put together the sofa and tv unit, and then tomorrow it’s back to work!

Nothing exciting to talk about today!

It’s been a day of moving things to the house again, and also organising what we have already moved in.

Tomorrow is the first visit to Ikea, so no doubt that will add to my back pain!