Recently, here in the UK, the chicken fast-food restaurant KFC were being forced to shut down restaurants for not having enough chicken. It’s completely laughable.

The way KFC dealt with the issue however, is pure brilliance.

They put an ad in the national newspaper:

And they also created website for the issue, named “Crossed The Road”. Where you can track the progress of your local store, and even sign up to their members club for a little reward for when your restaurant does open back up.

They’ve certainly made the most out of a bad situation.

🍗

I’ve been playing Alto’s Odyssey (the sequel of Alto’s Adventure) a lot recently, and it’s quickly become my go-to game no matter my situation.

I’ve read some reviews about the game already, and it appears that everyone on the internet has something good to say about it. I can only add to that.

The whole game is quite a mix, in that it’s very relaxing, while requiring your complete focus. And also having a potentially very long game time, while offering short term goals.

I find it very easy to be sucked into, and it’s a great game to take your mind away from other things. The achievements and Game Center leaderboards help my own competitiveness, and I really want to move up in the Best Score category. As of the time writing this, I’m ranked 11,157 with 65,065 points. But at the same time, I also enjoy playing it when I short bursts of free time, such as commuting to work, or just between other tasks.

Apart from the gameplay, the game is a really immersive environment. With ambient music, relaxing sounds, and super colourful settings. It’s enjoyable to just look at the thing.

Alto’s Odyssey on the App Store.

Jason Kottke, writing about a few experiments where totalitarian regimes were tested in some schools:

The nation’s youth, raised on The Hunger Games and Harry Potter, are reminding the baby boomers that considering what their own parents went through in the Great Depression and World War II, they should fucking know better than to slam the door on succeeding generations.

That was the bit I laughed at. But overall it’s an intriguing idea.

You may have heard of the open-source framework, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s a framework for developers to create faster-loading mobile content on the web. Beyond simply loading pages faster, AMP now supports building a wide range of rich pages for the web. Today, we’re announcing AMP for Email so that emails can be formatted and sent as AMP documents. As a part of this, we’re also kicking off the Gmail Developer Preview of AMP for Email—so once you’ve built your emails, you’ll be able to test them in Gmail.

It just keeps getting worse.

This year I’ve been posting a photo every single day, to my micro blog. Seeing as January is well over, I’ve compiled the entire month into a quick video.

Watch on YouTube.

After signing up my blog for Carbon Ads at the start of January, I’ve just had my first set of earnings calculated!

Maybe some people wouldn’t make this sort of thing public, but it’s on such a small scale there’s nothing really to hide.

Here are the stats:

• 3087 Impressions
• 5 Clicks
• 0.162% Overall CTR
• $7.58 Payout

So it’s nothing really, but it’s my first ever payment from ads, and my blog costs $10 to run. So it’s not actually far off!

It’s certainly a motivational push, to make me post more, and better content!

I think anybody that has seen Owen Wilson, can hear him saying “Wow” in his voice. Well, some kind developers have taken various clips of this, and created a mod for World of Warcraft, and used them to replace various sounds in the game.

It’s pretty funny!

Watch on YouTube.

Download the Owen Wilson Mod.

Matthew Cassinelli, previously a developer of the now Apple-owned Workflow app, has started blogging recently. And I thought I’d share one of his recent workflows, about quickly saving webpages to the Bear notes app.

I’ve been doing more research on iOS lately as my iPhone is the device I use the most, so capturing full web pages quickly saves me a lot of time. While I really like Apple Notes’ latest iterations, it’s not easy to clip websites there – so I adopted Bear for notes, which has support for Markdown, images, and a handy Get URL function.

Bear’s ability to download websites as a note is killer, but it’s usually easily available for most people via their Action Extension. Rather than limiting my access to the share sheet, I’ve been taking advantage of the Workflow action Get Bear Note From URL1 to save web pages from anywhere on iOS.

I never knew Bear had that feature, and that may push me into using it again in the future. But this workflow has a bit more complexity that most, in that it can be run from the today widget using the clipboard contents, from the share sheet, and from other apps like Launch Center Pro.

Seeing as he used to actually work on the Workflow app, his blog is certainly one to keep an eye on.

Read the full post.

Apps

Workflow

Bear (iOS / macOS)

John Sundell has written a great piece about using custom operators in Swift. Some really interesting examples as well. I never really thought about custom operators like he has, but clearly they can be very powerful tools:

Few Swift features cause as much heated debate as the use of custom operators. While some people find them really useful in order to reduce code verbosity, or to implement lightweight syntax extensions, others think that they should be avoided completely.

Love ’em or hate ’em – either way there are some really interesting things that we can do with custom operators – whether we are overloading existing ones or defining our own. This week, let’s take a look at a few situations that custom operators could be used in, and some of the pros & cons of using them.

Read the full post.

From the Pokémon Company:

Don’t miss the epic new Pokémon GO trailer created in the style of a nature documentary, featuring Pokémon that have recently begun appearing near you in Pokémon GO.

[…]

The video is narrated by iconic actor and comedian Stephen Fry, with his dulcet tones complemented by an original symphonic score by legendary composer George Fenton.

This could quite possibly be one of the best game trailers ever.

Watch on YouTube.

Read the full announcement.