Hey, I’m Vincent. I’m a dad 👨‍👧, husband 👫 and an independent programmer 👨‍💻 that also freelances.

Just to keep my mind busy, I’ll be announcing yet another personal project that I’m working on. Hope to share more next week. It’ll be a web application. Aimed mainly at developers, creators and small businesses that have their own apps and sites.

Pushed out yet another TestFlight build for Gluon. The main item is auto-suggestion for usernames. Just start typing with an “@“ and then the username. It will update the reply toolbar with any matching users in the conversation or your following list. Tap to insert. Simple.

Didn’t see this before:

On the iOS 13.4 Simulator you can now toggle Appearance in the “Features” dropdown. I usually went to settings and did it there! Happy to see it.

Just pushed out a small update, on TestFlight, to Gluon that adds yet another “nitpick” setting allowing you to auto-hide the post title bar, until you reach 280 characters.

Also tweaked the layout of the compose screen for posts - I’m hoping it will solve layout issues.

Xcode is updating… think it’s going to be a while. Will work on something else whilst I wait.

I’ve added a few extra feeds to my site for project specific posts. As an example, for any specific project, just add /feed.json at the end of the URL and you’ll get a nice JSON feed.

Here are a few:

• Gluon for Micro.blog
• Picard.sh

Useful for something I have planned.

Today I decided to block major news websites with 1Blocker. I just can’t take it anymore… too much going on. I need to focus.

Finding myself unfocused again today. Need to get back into the flow quickly. Going to have a break now, make food, recharge.

There are days I wish the IndieWeb Wiki is modern and easy to look at. I think more people would be inclined to look at it in this day and age. People love pretty things!

Schools closed until Easter here in Poland, that’s an additional two weeks to what they announced already. I’m good with that. Everything except essentials (food shops) have been closed since last week also. Cases still low here and there is a very slow spread.

The rumours for iOS14 are plenty already. I really look forward to the reveal. Pretty excited.

The new iPad Pro with the new keyboard looks really good! I would be tempted if I had a viable, native, solution for continuing my development work on it. If I were a writer, or other, I would only use it and no longer have a main machine.

Adding a few extra “Nitpicky” settings in the next Gluon build.

Finally managed to get some work done today. If I can’t do any more for the rest of the day, I will be happy with what I managed at least! Productivity 90% for the time I spent today.

0% productivity today.

I’m not going to lie… I think I’m currently at 10% productivity.

If you’re working from home - a gentle reminder that realtime chat apps (Slack etc) are productivity killers. Yes, there can be a place for them… but only allow a certain reachability period in that case. I reject any project that requires “real time” presence.

Continuing from the registration section, I started working on the Login part last week. There were a few more moving parts here as I had to cover both a password login and of course a magic link login. As I was completing it and testing it there were a few edge cases that had to be dealt with also.

A form is born

You start with your normal email form:

Nothing special. I’m not really a fan of having email only first and always prefer when there is a password field also. However, as we have to deal with both passwords and magic links, this was for the best.

Pressing “Go” will check the email to see if it’s valid and that the account is active. Next it will check what type of login you have. That means either magic links or passwords. Here is the magic link screen:

I’ll probably change the wording here. Once you receive the email, you tap/click on it and you’ll be on your way. Magic links are only valid for 15 minutes.

For password logins I will show you the below:

Easy enough to navigate. There is an addition of a “use magic link” button. This will send a magic link your way, just in case you forget your password. This also sets your login method to be magic link only until you change your password.

Once you’re all confirmed with email, password and/or magic link, you will have to enter your one time passcode:

I still don’t have back up codes set up and I’m thinking of doing something else to facilitate that, so for now I just say to email me. I could trigger the two factor set up on the account once again.

To be honest, you shouldn’t be loosing your data - but I appreciate that it can happen - so I will work something out to make that less painful.

Some edge cases

As with everything I tried to think of a few edge cases along with the ones I came across. For example, when you register there are certain steps to take - but perhaps the user didn’t finish all of them. In that case, depending on the registration step you were at, it will ask you for details that you certainly know for example your email and password, but then it will go ahead and redirect you to the correct registration step to continue. As you probably don’t have any data/servers set up, unless you have finished the sign up, I think this is a good compromise.

All new accounts start with a magic link login, so even if you haven’t chosen you will still be able to login and continue where you left off.

I still need to implement failed logins attempts to disable the account. The database already includes the counter column, so it should be easy to add that.

Next steps

That’s it for now on registration and login. I would call it feature complete. The next task is to think about the Dashboard section - I didn’t have too much brain capacity to think about that just yet.

I wanted to write this post last week; kinda weird times at the moment. I’ll try and keep it more regular in the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any input… let me know!

For anyone finding themselves unexpectedly working remotely - it took me years to master it. So don’t worry if you’re not good at it. No one should expect everything to be “normal” for the next few months. Find your flow, do short burst, lots of breaks!

Just completed the login section and logic for Picard.sh. Pretty happy that it's done now. Going to do a write up tomorrow at some stage. Hoping to use it on another project, so I took care to get it right.