Chris Hannah

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.

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.