Slack has today announced their new logo on their blog. It was designed between Slack and Pentagram, and the result is a relatively flavourless icon, in my opinion.

I for one, and I think many others, associate the colourful octothorpe logo with Slack. And also their plaid pattern that is used in many places.

The opinion that I’ve seen best match mine, is John Gruber over at Daring Fireball:

Slack’s old identity had at least three good things going for it: they owned the letter “S” (much like how Netflix owns “N” — something Netflix has doubled-down on as their identity has evolved), they owned the “#” hash mark, and unique among technology companies, they owned plaid. When you saw plaid with those primary colors on a white background, you thought Slack. And plaid isn’t part of any sort of design trend right now. Slack simply owned plaid, to such a degree that Slack company socks — which simply used colors and plaid, no “Slack”, no “S” were necessary to make it instantly obvious these were Slack socks — became coveted swag.

When the Slack iOS app installed on my phone, I instantly forgot where I put it. Sure, it only took a few seconds, but the old logo seemed to draw you in. It had a colourful border, with a bright white background, and the typical “S” that you see with Slack. But now it’s a slightly dull purple, with a generic colourful icon on top. It just blends in.

It feels very much like change for the sake of change, which is exactly what Slack’s blog post said it wasn’t.

John Voorhees, writing for MacStories:

Today, DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused web search engine, began using Apple Maps for location-based searches. The company, which previously used OpenStreetMap, switched to Apple’s MapKit JS framework, which Apple introduced at WWDC in June 2018.

This is a very good improvement to DuckDuckGo. Hopefully this kind of integration will also lead to more visibility into any flaws that it may have, which can be rectified once for the entire service. That can only benefit the other platforms Apple Maps is on.

Thinking about DuckDuckGo a bit more, them using Apple maps is probably a very good fit, as I personally see them as the “Apple” of search engines, as they both put a big emphasis on anonymising data requests, and respecting user privacy.

What I want to see next, is DuckDuckGo become the default option on iOS. But as Google already pay a ton of money for this, I don’t see it as being that likely.

Today was the second day of a design sprint at work, so it was a busy day again! Fortunately, tomorrow is less intense, so I won’t be tired for the rest of the day.

I did manage to get one feature on Text Case “working” before I gave up doing anything work-like. I expanded the settings to included setting the title case style.

Throughout my commute to and from work I also slipped in a podcast. Another episode of The Stalman Podcast, and this time Marco Arment and Casey Liss were guests! I’ve started listening to an episode of The Instance (World of Warcraft podcast), but I’ll save the rest for the commute tomorrow.

As for the rest of the night, I’ve played a few games on my PS4. But mostly I’ve been annoying my girlfriend with my bad piano and guitar skills.

If you could class any day as a write off, today is that day.

I managed to get to work an hour early (7:30) for a few minor reasons, that really didn’t warrant that amount of time. We also started a design sprint at work today, so that took a lot out of me.

After work I’ve just been playing World of Warcraft, FIFA 19, and watching videos on YouTube. My mind just can’t cope with anything more complex than that at the moment. Although, I did just beat Barcelona 2-0, playing as Arsenal. So I’ve got that going for me at the moment. 😜

It turned out I wasn’t as productive today as I thought I would be. I had planned to work on the rest of the settings in Text Case, but it simply didn’t happen!

Me and my girlfriend had our weekly trip to the cafe, where our drinks were brought to us before we even ordered! We were then asked if we wanted the usual, we said yes, and they were brought to us! It may be a sign we go too often, but I find it rather efficient.

The rest of the day has just been both of us playing games on our laptops. I played World of Warcraft while she played Sims!

Maybe I’ll do a bit more work tomorrow.

Well, I guess I could say today didn’t start very well. Arsenal were playing the early kick-off this weekend (12:30) against West Ham, a team we should easily beat. However, the team selection was a bit off (No Mesut Özil), and it just was a bit flat. We lost 1-0, with their goal coming from a mistake from an Arsenal player. Thank god I have a bad memory.

Slightly during the game, my girlfriend was watching a series called Bodyguard. It turned out to be really interesting, and even though I only watched the last 2 episodes (6 total) of it, I worked out the entire plot, so I now don’t have to watch the rest!

The rest of the day has sort of been a rotation of three things, watching nature documentaries, working on Text Case, and playing World of Warcraft. I watched at least three episodes of Planet Earth (the first series) in a row, and then some I don’t even know the name of.

For Text Case, I was working on the Theme select tool. I had the list of settings “working” yesterday, but you couldn’t select anything on it. Today I wrote a generic way to select a setting from the menu, have it open a list of options, then after selecting one, have it reflected in the app. It works with the Themes pretty easily, as that’s not exactly a complex setting. But tomorrow I’ll have a look at importing all the settings in the current app to this new version.

There’s a bit more variety today.

I did something that I probably should have done a while ago, and that’s adding search to my blog. My blog runs on WordPress, so it only took adding a widget to the sidebar, and writing a small template for the results page. For some reason I’ve been putting it off. But it makes it so much easier to find old content.

While I was at work, I decided to start using my Apple Extended Keyboard II again. I stopped using it for a while, simply because I moved desk and I’ve been working mainly just from a laptop. But I’ve gotten used to the various different function keys for media and mission control. My current solution with the AEKII is trying out Keyboard Maestro. I have some custom macros set up for the function keys, and they’re media controls, volume, mission control, show desktop, etc. Hopefully I can make more use of it, then I’ll be purchasing a copy.

One section that I feel is going to become regular in these posts, is my podcast listening. I managed two episodes today:

• Star Talk Radio S04 E1: Food, Science, and Culture, with Anthony Bourdain 
• Core Intuition 356: Reach For The Stars

Of course, I did a bit of work on Text Case 2.0 again today. I tightened up a few things from yesterday, like fixing scrolling lag (that was due to me messing around with rending shadows on every format, which gets updated every character you type), and some colour contrasts. I then started working on the Settings, where it currently only shows the theme. It actually doesn’t work right now, so you can’t even select it. But a lot of the work I did here were the foundations of how settings are stored, and actioned upon in the app. So once that is complete, the whole system is quite modular, which will be nice for future me that may have to update it.

As promised yesterday, I wrote a post about the current progress on Text Case 2.0. I’ve done a bit more work on it today after that post as well, but it’s mostly been non visual stuff. But for the UI, I’ve added a small shadow/glow to the edge of the formats, and also changing the text colours to increase the contrast ratios.

Apart from that, I’ve also consumed a lot of media today. I watched loads of videos from a YouTuber called Nixxiom who mainly does videos about World of Warcraft, and I’m a massive nerd.

I also listened to a lot more podcasts than usual. It was pretty quiet at work, so I had a lot of time just working away with my headphones on. Here are the episodes:

• Under the Radar 156: The Nightmare After Christmas
• The Stalman Podcast 39: Real Computers, with Myke Hurley
• The Stalman Podcast 44: The Business of Internetting, with Stephen Hackett
• Ruminate 78: It Has All the Stuff
• The BirchTree Podcast 151: It’s Been a While, So Let’s Talk iTunes

As you may have already seen on my Twitter, or in my journal entries, I’ve started to work on the second major version of Text Case, 2.0. The major changes will be to the user interface, so I want it to be slightly more colourful, fit more in what I see as the latest design language Apple has set out in the Shortcuts app, and also have the formats structured better.

The project started with me making a list of all the things that I will need to implement for it to be level with the functionality of the current version. Here’s that list:

• Input
  • Drag and Drop
  • Input Field
  • Use Copied Text
  • From File?
  • Keyboard Shortcuts
    • Global Paste
• Formats List
  • Tap to Copy
  • Hold to Share
• Siri Shortcuts Support
  • Add to Siri
  • Shortcuts App
  • Backwards Compatibility
• Action Extension
• Settings
  • Theme
    • Light
    • Black
  • Title Case Format
  • Reorder Groups
  • Enable/Disable Formats
  • Custom App Icons

I started working on the most important section of the app, the formats list. Over the past few days I’ve been building up the style similar to the Shortcuts app, so instead of being simple white boxes that contain the formatted text, they’re more colourful and even have a slight gradient to add a bit of depth (I’m planning on experimenting with a small shadow as well).

So once the list was working, I added the core logic from the current version and made the formats work. I did adapt it slightly though, as it now groups similar formats together, which I think makes the app look a lot tidier. This change means that when I add the reordering feature, it will most likely me limited to reordering the groups rather than individual formats. You’ll still be able to hide any you don’t want to see though.

Then I added the input field. It’s also a bit cleaner, and fits with the new style. But it has essentially the same capabilities as before. I plan on investigating importing text from a file, and implementing drag and drop, but I think that’s supported automatically.

After I had the list displaying, input working, and the text being formatted, I worked on the interaction with the resulting formatted text. I’ve had a few bits of feedback in the past saying they would appreciate one-touch copying, and now I’ve added it! So you can simply tap any formatted text in the app, and you’ll get a nice alert at the bottom showing the exact text you’ve copied. Or alternatively, you can still tap and hold on formatted text to bring up the contextual actions, which are the same as before, copy and share.

The next step from here will be to start working on the settings section of the app, as that also allows me to test the rest of the app in different scenarios much easier. I’m already planning two changes to the settings in this new version. The first is changing the idea of an accent colour to a theme, as I want the format groups to control the colour. But I also appreciate that a light and dark theme is a minimum. The second change is custom app icons, they may be a basic selection, but the app no longer has a “main colour” so I’d like to give a few options.

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If you want to stay up to date with the development of Text Case 2.0, You can find more regular content on my Twitter, brief updates on my journal, and I’ll still post any major progress here.

A very productive day today!

I got a ton of work done on Text Case 2.0. So much that I think it deserves it’s own blog post. I’ll probably write something about it tomorrow, because by then I would have done a bit more on it as well. Because of that, I wont go too much into detail, but I mainly worked on the beginnings of the input section, how the app manages themes, and then the interaction inside the app.

It’s going a lot faster than I thought it would. But every time I look back at the feature list I’ve created, I realise how many features I’ve added already. For example, I’m going to have to make sure things like the Siri integration is the same. It may look slightly different in the app, but I don’t want it to break anything.

One thing I have to say to reassure people, is that I have no desire to push this out as fast as possible. Text Case is a very stable app, and people seem to like it. So I will only release something that is better.

Just for fun, here’s another preview:

Oh and something not related to Text Case. I listened to a great podcast today, it was episode 36 of Daryl Baxter’s The Outpost Show which featured Federico Viticci of MacStories. I’ve now subscribed to the podcast, and I look forward to future episodes!