Thoughts

I don’t feel like coding again today. Don’t know what is going on. I’ll update the computer and have a shower me thinks. Read a bit for an hour. Forcing work is the worst.

Couldn’t get my head into the game today. Going to bed and start fresh tomorrow.

And here’s the second screen. Hasn’t changed much tbh, except the raft of games, because my daughter likes to play together with me (which I love). Apple folder. Random (idea) folder. Money/Bank folder (trying to keep it minimal). Games - just some random ones.

Here is my home screen I have settled on. I don’t use the calendar too much, but I like it there. Having Books in the dock was a great move as I find I start reading mostly. Dynamic background to give iOS some life.

I’ve tried a few meditation apps and general wellness apps over the past few weeks. Doing research. And the sad thing is, they almost all require personal details to sign up to an account before you can even start. I reckon there is a market there.

I felt like writing a short story. It’s a bit dark and I have no idea where it’s going to go. Felt good to write though. Not sure about the title.

Driving my daughter to Kindergarten now. Can’t wait to have a coffee when I get back.

I’m not 100% sure who said it (probably Bruce Lee), but this stuck with me for life:

To truly know oneself, is to rid yourself of the influence of others.

This is true more than ever in our modern, connected and always ‘on' society.

I have two questions for anyone using Gluon.

• I’m planning on removing “Favorites” as a prominent tab item and replace it with “Photos”, which will be a specific timeline just with photos (and some other cool photo things). Favs will live under your profile instead. Good idea? Bad?
• ”Your Feed” - I’m planning to rename this to either “My Feed”, “Feed” or “Timeline”. Which one do you prefer?

I would totally use CloudFlare if they didn’t have “Analytics” on the domains...

Let’s talk about the Web… shame.

The result of the first local push for a @-mention. I received two from Gluon because I send a blank push with details for the currently logged in user. I get them through every time a background task is run = many 😬

I’m testing local push notifications for Gluon. If anyone on Micro.blog could @-mention me, then that would be really awesome.

Homescreen for March. Trying to keep it to a minimum with low noise. I may remove Mail from here too as I find myself distracted looking at emails all the time.

Experimenting with nice looking backgrounds for the profile view, using the profile image.

Understandably I find myself reaching for the phone a lot. Going to put it in a different room or out of sight. Reset myself.

The Gluon Android Alpha 2.0 is propagating through the Play Store. I’m going to keep an eye on it to see when that updates. Once I’m happy I’m going to add everyone that emailed me. Google Play Store is super confusing, but I hope that it should just work for the existing list of users.

I’m adding swipe actions for “Favor” and “Reply”. I’ve got favourites working nicely and that also triggers a reload of the “Favorites” feed. Next up is replying, but not today. Here are the colours behind the table cell. Always nice to see.

Here’s a screenshot showing dark mode on Android, including a yellow accent. There are a few weird bugs still, but it’s totally usable at this stage. Nothing to stop me from not releasing it.

This week I’ll be working on Replying and Posting for Gluon. I have some ideas that I want to try. First up will be replying though.

I just completed the Appearance section of Gluon. You can also now choose a font that is used to display timeline items. I don’t apply the font app wide, but I could if enough wanted it. Too much of the same font doesn’t look great.

I renamed Hilbert to Status, as I prefer it. Also brought across all the goodness that is in Gluon so that there are great foundations.

Status will be specifically for updown.io and will also introduce push notifications. Will have a small web app supporting the app.

I haven’t spend much time on it except just the design and basic login.

I hope that Family orientated things get better with Apple. For example, the TV app, doesn’t show me purchases from other family members. Can’t stream either. Don’t see rentals. Nothing. Basic stuff. Frustrating. 😞 There’s a huge potential, but they don’t choose to play those basic things.

I just released Gluon build 20190301.4, which adds the ability to switch themes and accents instantly. Give it a go and choose a nice combo. I’m yet to style that section so please bear with me - you’ll be able to accents now though. If you want more accent colours, just let me know.

Also added a double tap to reload the current feed you’re on. Just double tap the tab bar icon and you’ll get a haptic feedback event, followed by a reload/fetch. Thanks to @nitinkhanna for this one.

Today was my daughter’s 5th birthday. Time really flies and it’s amazing how far she has grown up already. It always amazes me. My love for her grows day by day, it’s hard to describe what that feels like. Happy Birthday Amelia ❤️

I’m about to push out a new build for Gluon (20190228.3) . It will include a very early experimental “Appearance” option in Settings. When you change any values, you’ll have to press the “Reload App” button at the bottom. Wait 1 second before pressing that, otherwise the settings will not save.

Themes are Light and Dark - these change the overall skin of the app.

Accents will change link colours and colours in the tab bar and header areas.

I’ll be hopefully completing this tonight, and get it nice looking and reload on the fly (it’s nearly working but took it out for now for this build).

Working on a dark theme and also the ability to have different colour accents (for both light and dark). Let’s see if I can add it before the weekend.

I’m about to start another round of Gluon coding. Probably work on the “Following” screen or start work with adding replies. There are a few plans for Favourites and Discover, but they need to sit in my head a little longer.

If anyone is interested in using a bad project management tool, please just go ahead and give Asana a try. Bad UI, terrible UX and worst... I don't think they know what their product actually is. A client of mine recently switched and I'm getting to the point where I tell the project managers to just email me.

Fixed a few minor Android issues for Gluon. I’ll have it ready by the weekend and will write a post about a new beta invite 😊

Does anyone have any recommendations on a Sci-Fi book that is modern, easy to read and has a great story?

I don’t generally read many books but I’d love to read more... so, suggestions are welcome. I wouldn’t know where to start.

Gluon was approved for public TestFlight a few hours ago 😃 There are many things on my plate and I'll do my best to ship regular updates. Whilst it doesn't look like much changed... everything has!

There are a few things still missing and I'm hoping to be in a good spot in a week or so. I'll also need to check the Android build and get that ready.

Gluon TestFlight build is "in review" 🙃

I solved most of the Gluon HTML issues now, unfortunately now I have to fight with WP Smiley emojis again. One step at a time.

Added the conversation view to Gluon. Just uploading that to TestFlight. I'm thinking of releasing what I have (just for laughs). Unsure if I have to get Apple to approve the 2.0.0 increase first though. If it goes straight through... oh well, then everyone has an updated app 😋

I always try and push many internal TestFlight builds. That way I always test on my test device and also on my main phone. Happy I do that because I actually find stuff that's not in "dev".

Apple Music should steal a few things from Spotify, for example "Never play this song again"... instead of "Dislike". Once I mark it I expect it to never ever play again... but nope, got to listen to it again and again.

Out of interest, if you use Micro.blog, how do you generally prefer to use Favourites on the platform or in an app? For example, I use them to refer back to someone later on or if I really really like something that I want to refer back to later. Please send me use cases 🥺

Which one do you prefer? Ignore the "following" text for now - that's a WiP.

Left image:

Or right image:

Here is a more refined version of the profile view. I'm thinking of adding the image to the right section and flowing the bio full width below the initial data. Will report back with a different version.

What would a great way to write this line shorter?

"Following 486 users you aren't following" - I know it's pretty much on point, just trying to think if that can be made shorter. "Following 486 unique users", "Following 486 other users". They all seem to miss the mark though.

I'm about to start another round of Gluon coding, so feel free to ignore my rapid fire posts. I'll be working on the conversation view and some other tweaks. Maybe I'll even do something totally different. I won't have too much time today as I also need to work on some actual client work 😋

Today’s plan is to add the Conversation view into Gluon. As a stretch goal I’ll also add the currently logged in User Profile view.

I fixed the profile view bug very early AM and added the “Follow/Unfollow” button on a profile. Pretty happy with that.

That would leave the reply functionality and image viewer. I’m hoping I get to that tomorrow.

There is also some work required on my HTML parser... as it’s not working as I want it to - it sometimes just misses part sentences and images.

This means that the next TestFlight should be ready for end of this week.

Fixed a crashing bug when not logged in, kept going with loading data for the profile screen. I do need to make a few changes here, with the way I navigate to another profile (as I load a new Author Profile model, which overrides the last profile I was on - oops).

For the login part of the app I decided to also load everything else but in the background, so that Mentions, Favourites, and Discover are available straight away (within a few seconds anyway). Important, though, is that I don't hold you up initially.

I added more spacing to the feed item, so it doesn't look so condensed. Think it looks good.

Just getting back to work with the Profile screen. I'm using colours inspired from my own site, just to keep it simple. There will be more themes down the line.

Right, time for a break now until the evening. Thanks for reading and I'll see you perhaps tonight.

Starting to mock up the profile screen. I use the red so I can see the header area nicely. Ignore the posts, they are just the normal feed for now.

There are some technical limitations with grabbing the data first time around. Here is the API call, which grabs 40 posts (although I set a count of 20) - just a bug.

That would be 7 seconds of waiting for seeing any type of profile information and posts. Setting the count to 10 (which returns 20 post items for the user) has a similar response time. That's not super great. I've spoken to Manton about this already and I'm hoping there will be a few updates to this soon.

To mitigate this, on first time load, I'm actually passing the data that I do have, from the post, to the view - this way I can show the avatar, name, username and website address straight away. Then my plan is to fire off two requests, one empty with no posts (count = 0) and one with posts. The count = 0 request usually returns under 2 seconds, which means I can grab the profile data and all other related things that I'll need to show like the following count and, of course, the bio. Then we just need to wait for the posts to come back. Once we have this data, I'm going to keep it in the cache, which means it will load from cache as soon as you come back to the particular profile. This should keep loading time to an absolute minimum.

With it loading from cache I'll do a normal request to the API, with posts, in the background so I can update it if it changes and rewrite anything we have in cache.

Full belly. Digesting. Here is my Profile screen sketch. Now to implement.

Next task will be to work on the User Profile screen. I'm going to be using a different design, but I need to sketch it out first on a piece of paper. However, first I'm having a break and lunch.

And now testing Android quickly. Had a few issues as I'm also playing with swipe-able actions on each cell. Fixed that now, mentions working. The text is grey on Android if you set no colour, kinda weird - but I will tackle that.

Let there be Mentions:

Here I'm saving the User Mentions. Of note, you can see I pass in the 'Account.currentUser' to the AsyncStorage call. You can guess why I do that :)

Here is a code snippet where I go about grabbing all the Mentions. Not perfect, but nothing ever is. It works and I'm happy with it. For info, the 'Account.currentUserToken' is the currently set/selected user account model. Oh and I don't use "count" just yet - I need to refactor that params stuff.

Size matters! 5MB so far, gives me room to play. And yes, I've been publishing regularly up to the internal TestFlight, just so I can test it and keep an eye on it. Actually found a few fatal "TestFlight only" bugs.