Someone on the train is talking about an exciting new app that a friend of his discovered. It lets you translate words from other languages, so you can pass a phone around your friends while you’re in a restaurant, so you can read the menu.

He then followed up with: “I think it’s Google Translate”. Completely as if he had never heard of Google, or the ability to translate words.

And some of the developers have responded:

After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:

1. Push notifications will no longer arrive
2. Timelines won’t refresh automatically – apps-of-a-feather.com

Twitter has always had a strange relationship with developers of third-party clients, with certain features never even making it into their hands. A quick example would be Polls. They don’t show up on apps like Tweetbot, because they don’t know they exist.

I’m not so sure how much of a loss timeline streaming would be, but push notifications?!

Maybe this is time for more people to check out Micro.blog.

China have a water problem. Their solution:

China is testing cutting-edge defence technology to develop a powerful yet relatively low-cost weather modification system to bring substantially more rain to the Tibetan plateau, Asia’s biggest freshwater reserve.

The system, which involves an enormous network of fuel-burning chambers installed high up on the Tibetan mountains, could increase rainfall in the region by up to 10 billion cubic metres a year – about 7 per cent of China’s total water consumption – according to researchers involved in the project.

I wonder if the clouds will have “Made in China” printed on the bottom of them.

Read the full post.

Yesterday, I was getting pretty excited about the “new” iPad:

That’s why this iPad seems absolutely perfect. I get to use one of the most exciting accessories for the iPad, it won’t cost me a huge amount of money to do it, and there are a ton of extra upgrades that I’ll be getting in the mean time. For example, I’ll use this upgrade to move from 64GB to 128GB, the A8X will be replaced with the A10 Fusion chip (currently used in the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus), an ever so slight improvement to the camera (it can take Live Photos), and around a 19% increase in battery capacity. Along with some more improvements that will probably cause additional delight.

Since then, I’ve discovered one tiny spec of information that completely flipped this article on its head. As much as the new iPad was an upgrade to my Air 2, the display is actually a downgrade. Specifically, it is not a laminated screen like the Air 2, and more recent models. So the screen is actually clearly behind the glass.

I can’t buy a product like the iPad, knowing I’m going backwards in regards to the display. Because that’s 90% of the iPad experience!

I think my only solution is to get an iPad Pro if I want the Pencil support. I didn’t want to do that though, so I’ll have to have a think.

Apple have just announced their newest iteration of the iPad, at their education focussed event. They also announced a lot of other school related software, and integrations, but I’m not interested in that at all really.

However, I am very interested in the new iPad. Even if it is geared towards the educational market. And that’s mainly down to two factors: the low price, and the Apple Pencil support.

I should probably interject here with more details on my current iPad situation. I have an iPad Air 2 WiFi, with 64GB of storage. It is actually only my second iPad, after the iPad 2, and I think it’s quite near as perfect as it can be for what I use it for. I watch videos, read blogs, write for my blog, listen to music, play games, etc.

Basically all the usual stuff. Apart from working. But I’m an iOS developer, so it’s not as easy to switch as some other professions. Anyway, I’m completely happy with my Touch Bar MacBook Pro.

Back to the iPad. One of the few features that has made me super jealous of iPad Pro users, is the Apple Pencil. Because it’s such an obvious extension to the iPad, and I can see myself using it for a wide range of tasks. Like taking notes, sketching (of course), mapping out ideas, and maybe I’ll even find a way to write for my blog by handwriting. I would probably prefer it.

With all of that said, it’s probably surprising why I haven’t already just purchased an iPad Pro. I have been very close to making the leap, but the one blocker has always been the price, compared to the added value it would give me. Sure it’s powerful enough to warrant that price. But it’s not worth it for me.

That’s why this iPad seems absolutely perfect. I get to use one of the most exciting accessories for the iPad, it won’t cost me a huge amount of money to do it, and there are a ton of extra upgrades that I’ll be getting in the mean time. For example, I’ll use this upgrade to move from 64GB to 128GB, the A8X will be replaced with the A10 Fusion chip (currently used in the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus), an ever so slight improvement to the camera (it can take Live Photos), and around a 19% increase in battery capacity. Along with some more improvements that will probably cause additional delight.

Maybe I’m biased in my opinion here, and I’m 90% certain’t I am. But, I think that this could be the iPad model that pushes a lot of other “normals” to upgrade. Seeing as it doesn’t require any extra use of the device to warrant the price. It’s a super reasonable price, and it could potentially be a decent upgrade for someone on an Air 2 like me or earlier. It would certainly push up numbers for iOS 11 adoption, and from the user’s pont of view, it would give them another few years with a solid device.

I’m very much looking forward to using this device. And it’s been quite a while since I’ve felt like that about a new Apple product. Minus the AirPods.

Straight from the Pokémon GO blog:

New objectives lead to exciting rewards and perhaps a Mythical encounter in the latest Pokémon GO update.

A somewhat of a surprising (at least to me) update for Pokémon GO has been announced. It’s based around research, and it will add a whole new layer to the game.

All Pokémon Masters will already know about Pokémon research, and how prevalent it is in the games and television shows. But if you don’t, then ask yourself what Professor Oak was up to.

The update will bring two types of research, Field Research and Special Research.

With Field Research being the more regular of the two activities, which will result in rewards, and occasionally a stamp. Which is essentially an achievement. After you collect seven of these, you will achieve a “Research Breakthrough”, which may lead to encounters with legendary Pokémon.

The Special Research is story-based, and will be completed via Professor Willow. This is what I’m more interested in. The current story looks like it’s based around Mew, and the and mysteries behind it. I’m guessing this will be spread out over time, and will maybe mean people will start playing more regularly.

I just hope this leads to the ability to catch Mew.

We’ll just have to see, when the update launches on the 30th March.

Jordan Smith has 15 short Swift snippets, that may help you write more readable code, and also introduce you to a few new techniques. For example, custom subscript notation, labelling loops, and variadic parameters.

Read the full post.

Some more work going on in Slate today.

The next area I’m going to work on is speeding up the conversion from a post’s content (which is html), into it’s rich text counterpart (NSAttributedString).

The way it used to work was, it converted all the content, including all the inline images. Which would dramatically decrease speed, as it downloaded them synchronously. It meant I had nearly zero control over how the content was transformed or presented.

So the obvious way to test this was to remove the images from the posts as I’m parsing them. I did this with a small bit of regex, and it’s so much better. It can of course still be improved, but this was a massive boost in the right direction.

Obviously I can’t just keep all images hidden in the timeline, but one of my plans was to try and separate inline images into their own section anyway. This would also allow me to add a tap to preview action, and just generally better support for additional media/attachments.

Along with a few extra changes to the style, and maybe support for themes, this is what will be in v0.2.

As you may have realised, development on Slate, my Micro.blog client for iOS, hasn’t really been going anywhere recently.

I’ve been meaning to just get a very early build on TestFlight for a while now. Simply so people can have early access, and see how it feels for them as I progress.

However, since my first development log, I’ve spent most of the time trying to optimise the code and nothing that adds any features to the app. And at the same time, the only things I had left on my plan for the first beta version, was just some icons. So I’ve lost a long time, simply because I’ve been procrastinating about creating a few images.

I’m sure everyone will be pleased that, I’ve created some icons for the menu, and the tab bar at the bottom of the app. I did also plan to make an app icon, but this is really going to hold the project back because I simply can’t be bothered to make one yet.

So, right now I’m going to start all the boring procedures for getting the app set up iTunes connect, and then getting a build to TestFlight.

If you want immediate access to the first beta, then all I’ll need is an email address. Feel free to email me, or find me on Twitter or Micro.blog. Everyone’s welcome.

You’ve just got to remember, that it is super in development.

Matt Birchler has a pretty common request for Siri, and that is the ability to schedule requests.

While all of these assistants can turn things on, turn them off, move thing up and down, and such, they can only do those things now. I can turn on the lights now. I can open the garage door now.

It makes so much sense for this to be supported. Sure you might be able to schedule actions inside of an app. But if voice is an official method of input, you should be able to do everything with it.

There’s not even a particularly high barrier in creating a delay/schedule system. The simplest method I can think of, is that when a voice assistant hears a request with a related time, all it needs to do is store that exact request (even plain text is fine), along with the date/time. Then the system can set its own reminder, and at that time, it simply performs the request automatically, and deletes it from the queue.