Vincent Ritter

Thoughts

My thoughts, micro blog style.

Two years ago I left my full time job, working for "the man". The year after was incredibly difficult. I'm thankful that mid this year things have started to look much better. Looking forward to the next year of my adventures.

The amount of times online and offsite back up has saved me: 0. The amount of times Time Machine has saved me the past years, including my family (Hey Mom!): billion times.

Rewrote my About page. Less "blah blah blah", more "hey, this is me". Hoping to make more changes, especially with wording, around the whole site in the next few weeks.

I was looking for really great Christmas jumpers yesterday at the mall. No dice 🥺. They're all dark (colour wise) and not very joyful. Need to find a place online.

I've been using my laptop on battery power... all day! I mean... 7 - 8 hours and most of it was coding related. That's pretty cool!

Working on a Ruby on Rails project at the moment... falling in love with the simplicity of Ruby again! Inspired to get into it way more now.

I went through 1Password last week and logged into every service I could find that I'm not using, followed by trying to delete my account with said service. Some were easy to delete, some you had to email and some are just a right pain. I thank the companies that make everything a breeze!

I'm working on a few things to get ready for the new year... that includes planning a new code challenge (well, coming back to another one), perhaps even two, consolidating outgoings with things I use for work purpose (online stuff) and a general declutter of how I'll go about my day to day client work. I'll write about it more this week.

I go to the gym 3 - 5 days a week now. I stopped tracking my activity on the watch. I turned off any reminders about standing up or the nudging of "Hey, you can STILL do it!". At the end of the day it is how I feel that is the most important metric. If I feel good, then that's a win in my eyes.

"Please rate our support" - I get this a lot... but honestly... why track this metric? Knowing that your customers are happy by word of mouth and receiving no complaints... I'm sure that is all you really need.

Gluon build 20181124.2 is coming your way. Fixes issues with seemingly endless images loading in the image modal (1 image ~ 17 images, ha!). Also added experimental swipe to close, so drag that image down and it will close the modal.

And now that I posted a big blog post about Image Modals... I find a bug which basically just loads the same image over and over again. Hot fix in a moment! Will be build (20181124.2).

About to push out another update for Gluon. Gonna have a blog post for it too, but you'll probably receive the build before I finish writing the post. It's something small, however I'm happy that I took the time today.

Pushed out a hot fix build for Gluon on both iOS and Android (20181121.2). Fixes glaring issues with HTML and images. Hopefully content looks much nicer now.

I get the front-end user facing stuff, however I'm always interested on how the UI's look and work for the Apple Music team or other parts internally at Apple, which run all these services. Stuff like that interests me. That would be a great job (without knowing anything about what is involved).

Person A: “When I click on an item on my phone, how do I...” Me: “Wait, you have a mouse attached to your phone??? Surely you must mean a tap?”

I also think there should be a law that requires everyone to renew their driving license every 5 years. Pilots do this every year or every 6 months (or more). So why shouldn't drivers do the same? It seems people forget that they are driving heavy metal across the roads. Life is precious.

Well, I'm certainly up for self driving cars. Every time I go on the street and drive, I feel everyone is out there just to hurt and insult. I don't know why people are like this... I lost all hope.

Does anyone have any solid recommendations on a good air filter for the house? One that’s great against allergies like dust and scrubs other bad stuff. Needs to be available in Europe, otherwise a no-go.

I’ve been trying to watch Sabrina on Netflix. However, I can’t get past the blurry camera views...

I just pushed a TestFlight update out for Gluon - build 20181112.1. There is a breaking change for older installs, so I have expired them. That won't happen in the future as I stopped using "over the air" updates. Another build will completely disable OTA updates (just in case).

One feature I use on iTunes a lot is Internet Radio. Some great stuff there. Just talked to my Mom about it and we agreed that they should really add this on "Music" for iOS too. Was it ever there?

Just pushed out an update to Gluon TestFlight. Now I inline a "Reply" button for when you are in the Mentions section. Discover screen now allows you to browse via tag. I'm going to be adding a few more features to Discover 😄

A week ago today, I started developing Gluon. I'm happy with progress this week. Creativity is high and I had to grab the urge to make it! I've started planning features that I want to implement by next week and will work during the evening tomorrow and Sunday to get the Discover section up to scratch. Thank you all on the TestFlight so far, I really appreciate it!

Successfully added "Reply" functionality to Gluon. Now I just need to figure out the styling. If you'd like to test it before the official TestFlight build is out, you can go to "Settings" and tap "Update build and reload". Then when you tap on a post, you will know where to reply 😉 WiP!

I'll be sending out TestFlight invites for Gluon to everyone that messaged me their email. Then I will publish a blog post with details and a public invite URL. Android coming next week (or maybe earlier).

Just wrapping up a few things for Gluon, so it's ready for the TestFlight to go out. I added the "Conversation" view too - and it highlights the one you tapped on when you scroll down:

TestFlight build approved for Gluon. Tomorrow I will send out invites and share a link for everyone. This is exciting. 🚀

It’s 19:26 here... and I’m going to bed. 1 hour 45 mins sleep last night/this morning. It’s catching up. My wife has been super supportive too ❤️

Hopefully when I wake up Apple will have approved the TestFlight build for Gluon, that would be really good.

I added a basic "Following" screen for now. If you load your own list of followers you will see all. If it's a different user then I'll only show you who you're not following. Going to add a website button too, if there is a URL available (I guess there always will be).

Added follow and unfollow functionality to Gluon. Also started with displaying follower count. This will only show people you aren't following though once you tap through, in reverse order...

I made loads of improvements to Gluon tonight. I dramatically increased the speed of loading images and also the rendering performance. I fixed a few bugs and other things, which took me longer than I wanted.

Mentions and Favourites are all being pulled in now. I'll do a write up a little later. First some sleep!

Gonna work on getting a few bugs solved for Gluon and then adding Mentions and Favourites. I need to work on better error handling, for example when deleting your token and trying to fetch posts or other account related things.

One thing I want to try and solve with Gluon is to pull in posts that were missed or showed up later in the feed when initially grabbing the posts.

Would anyone be interested in trying out Gluon, via TestFlight, even though it's not finished and you can't do anything else except just look at your posts for now? I'm thinking of doing something by Thursday. I have the build up on TestFlight already, just need to submit it for approval.

Working on the profile screen for Gluon now. Won't be too complicated. I found a few issue that I'd like to address, for example loading the profile image on first login - because I have a feeling it might not always be the correct one. I might be wrong though.

Nearly 5 AM... to go to bed or just to stay up to get my daughter to Kindergarten on time... hmmm. I'm also quite hungry now.

Midnight here, just. Going to attempt to re-write some API calls for Gluon. Now that I slept on it I found a nice solution to some of the problems I had yesterday with setting new posts coming in from Micro.blog.

Evening 2 for building Gluon starting now. I'll work on the tab navigation, basic profile screen and perhaps basic styling for posts. Let's see.

Gluon - here's a quick peek at the user sign in flow. I've added the loading icons. Ignore the screens after login. And sorry, huge GIF... Of course, this also works with App Tokens, so no email involved.

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