I have been a user of Google Analytics since 2005, although I rarely even look in there. The only report I found interesting was the monthly report over a long period to see if my websites were growing. Since Google recently switched us all to GA4, finding simple information is frustrating. There was just too much info, and I wasn’t interested in almost all of it.
I keep jumping around programming languages for the past few years. For work, I’ve been learning C# with .NET. Prior to that, it was Python and Vue.js, and before that, it was PHP, GraphQL and a few other things.
But I want to learn SwiftUI again, so I’ve started writing tutorials on my other blog. I have created three so far that show how to make requests to OpenAI to allow a user of an iPhone app to hold a conversation with ChatGPT. The three tutorials were fun to write and getting into SwiftUI again was good. The articles are:
One problem I keep facing with trying to learn SwiftUI is that I struggle to maintain time to learn each week. Each time I start learning it, I get sidetracked onto building something else in a different language, and yet, I still really like mobile dev, particularly for the iPhone.
(more…)I have been a user of 1Password for several years now. I use the personal subscription on it which is something in the region of $36/year. I have four vaults with 560 passwords/logins/bank details, etc… stored. I use it every day on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro and it has proved invaluable for storing complex passwords that are unique for every website I visit.
1Password updated 1Password this week. I typically don’t bother paying attention to updates because I find them mostly uninteresting. I’m not saying the updates are not good, but I just typically don’t read what is new and I just use 1Password as I always have used it.
I accidentally stumbled upon one new item in the latest 7.7 update that launched this week that said there is now an option on the Mac to unlock 1Password with an Apple Watch. As an Apple Watch user I appreciate my MacBook unlocking automatically almost every time I wear my Apple Watch. This feature intrigued me.
The 7.7 update arrived on the App Store for me this morning, so I quickly updated to test and see how the feature worked. Enabling it was quite simple. Open up the preferences, select security, and then check the Apple Watch box in the “Unlock using” section at the top.
I manually locked 1Password and then opened it. My watch made the familiar clicking noise that sounds when you log in to the Mac. Rather than automatically allow me access to 1Password on my Mac, I was notified on my watch to double click the bottom button. After doing that, 1Password opened.
The downside is the double click on the Watch button. Reaching over to use Touch ID is a little quicker for me, and I’ll probably carry on using that method. I don’t use an external keyboard for my MacBook at the moment, but I plan on doing so sometime next year when I renovate my home office. At that point I believe Unlock with Apple Watch will become a more useful option for me given that I wont have easy access to Touch ID if opt for a dock that requires my MacBook to be closed.
What I do like is that both Unlock with Touch ID and Unlock with Apple Watch work simultaneously. Even though my watch clicks to indicate I can use it to unlock 1Password, I can still just use Touch ID if it is the most convenient option at the time.
I do look forwards to other apps implementing this feature including DayOne and anything else I like to keep behind security.
Since updating my iPhone 6, and an iPhone SE to iOS 11.4.1, I’ve seen many disconnections from my wireless network at home. I’m running a Virgin SuperHub 2. After checking the config on that device, as well as the WiFi extender, I figured it was time to call Virgin to see if they could look in to the issue. However, I held back because my iPad Pro running iOS 12 beta, and my MacBook Pro running Mojave beta were both working just fine.
I realised this evening that perhaps iOS was the issue. I updated my iPhone 6 to iOS 12 GM, and the iPhone SE to the same, and so far, there have been no disconnects from the network.
iOS 12 ships in a few days on September 17th, so if you’ve been having problems then it should correct itself in a few days if you update. Alternatively, you can register for a free developer account and download the latest beta which is very stable.
Today I decided to get started on my goal of creating iPhone apps for myself as an indie developer. As mentioned yesterday, I have a few things I want to accomplish this year. My first release will be a pedometer app. There are several already in existence on the app store, but none of which do exactly what I want them to do.
If we rewind back a few years to 2013, I actually started this project in September that year just after the iPhone 5S was announced. However, like all other previous attempts at finishing my own apps I was sidetracked and ended up doing more work for clients. My app never got finished and sat in BitBucket gathering dust.
Moving back to today, I actually created a new project a few weeks ago and started creating some classes to stub out. Christmas happened and I took time off, and then today is when I am officially starting and writing some code for the app. The reason I created a new project is that I want to create this version (and finish it) in Swift. The previous version was written in Objective-C. It just seemed like a better option to start from scratch than working with everything I had from the previous attempt.
Just for fun I decided to download the repository for the app as I left it in 2013 and after adding a couple of privacy description keys to info.plist it worked. To the left is a very bad looking screenshot. At the point I got to in developing it a few years ago I had just extracted data and had it represented on an hourly chart. The chart I used in the demo app was MyAppControlls iOS Bar Chart View. I may use this in the new project if there are no problems with it, or I may create my own with PaintCode in a similar way I demonstrated how to create a line chart with PaintCode on my tutorial blog.
Having redone the design a few weeks ago to bring it to iOS 10 standards, I have everything I need on paper. I know what each view will look like. I’ve been through the several steps of design of which I highly recommend reading this article by Michael Flarup who speaks of the process of designing an app. I even have the classes I need written out and the relationships between them although some testing is needed to determine if modifications are needed (see next paragraph).
So my first step in the Xcode project is to work on fetching the motion data, then work on fetching Health Kit data for historical data, and finally I want to work on tests to see how quick data can be extracted from Health Kit. Will it be acceptable to just extract direct from Health Kit for weekly, monthly, yearly data representations? or will that cause delays in putting the data on the view? I don’t know yet as I haven’t tested the import speed. It might be that I opt for Core Data and do a one-time import of historical data from HealthKit so the app can analyse it more quickly when needed.
By the end of the day I expect to be extracting data from Core Motion and passing that to the view to put on screen.
I was disappointed to learn recently that Evernote decided to bring in an intrusive change in to its privacy policy and then default that change as an opt-out rather than an opt-in. I first saw this reported on TechCrunch which informed me that the change was coming in to play on January 23, 2017.
Evernote decided that they would give employees access to reading your notes stored in the service. Although this access would be given to a handful of “trusted” employees, it still gave me the shudders to think that people might be reading my personal notes.
Although there’s nothing illegal going on in my account, there is certainly some private information that I believed was private and that only I could access. Think things such as medical information and pay slips from my past employment. I don’t want someone random reading those. For Evernote to automatically opt me in to this showed to me that my notes are not my notes, despite them claiming otherwise with the first of the 3 laws of data protection which inform me that my data is mine. Likewise, the second law could also be questioned as well.
What surprised me most is that Evernote would think it be acceptable to automatically opt-in all users in to their machine learning algorithm with human assistance. This should never have been opt-out. The big mistake they made was assuming that everybody would be OK with this.
As it turns out, there was a backlash on Twitter with many people cancelling their accounts. Trust was immediately lost for many. After a day or so of pressure on social media (perhaps not the pressure, but the number of people terminating their account), Evernote did the right thing and made this change an opt-in meaning that to be included in the service you will need to give permission.
To me, this is an acceptable fix to the problem for now. However, I feel I’ve lost a lot of trust in Evernote. I decided not to jump ship for 2 reasons. First, the date for the change was January 23, 2017, so a little over a month away which gives me some time to think about this. Second, a quick jump to another service might be a bad move. Consider OneNote as an example, I have yet to read their privacy policy. Had I quickly jumped to another service I might find that my notes are even less secure or less private.
For now, I’m sticking with Evernote. I like the service. I’ve been a premium user for maybe 5 years or more. I use it daily. I like many features such as being able to quickly sync across devices, easily scan documents with my ScanSnap scanner*, clip items from the web, store PDF’s and search them, amongst many other things. But I am on the lookout for something else where I can keep my notes to myself.
I tried Bear and although an amazing looking app (one of which I will keep on my iPhone and desktop), I didn’t feel it had all the features I needed just yet. A positive side of Bear is that it syncs with iCloud which means that Bear does not/cannot read your notes, although sync comes with the paid accounts only.
For a disappointing change, they managed to turn it around a little and settle things down somewhat. But I do need to pay more attention to privacy policies when signing up to new services and I need to regularly check for changes on any other services I use which contain important information. I don’t know how long I’ll be with Evernote for now, but it certainly has me a little concerned.
Each time a new version of iOS launches, a huge number of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users quickly grab the update. The adoption rate is quite amazing and in fact, it has got better since iOS 5 launched last year due to over the air updates being available.
Chitika has done some analysis of the numbers and found that within the first 48 hours that 25% of iOS devices were running iOS 6. Comparing that to the latest version of Android which is currently Jelly Bean 4.1, we see a HUGE difference in uptake. At the moment Jelly Bean is only on 1.2% of devices and it has been available far longer than 48 hours. In fact, it has been available since early July this year.
So why do iOS users update far quicker than Android users? There are a couple of reasons for this. Let me explain below:
First, Apple control all hardware and software for iOS and the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. This means that there are only a handful of devices available and as Apple have built those few devices they can quickly make compatible versions for all the latest generations which is currently the iPhone 3GS up to the iPhone 5 as well as the iPad 2 and 3. All except the latest generation of the iPhone run the same screen size although the 3GS has a lot lower PPI. But, we are talking about 2 screen sizes and 3 different resolutions which isn’t many (for the iPhone that is).
Second, Apple doesn’t let carriers control the updates. All updates are pushed out by Apple either over the air or via a download in iTunes.
If we quickly compare that to Android:
First, many hardware manufacturers create devices that run the Android operating system. As of May this year there were apparently 3,997 different devices that run the operating system. Each have one of many screen resolutions and sizes which need to be taken in to consideration.
Second, carriers often control the updates for Android devices on their networks. The reason is that they each need to adapt the software to be more compatible as well as bake in changes to make it a “Sprint” device for example. The main group of users who get the latest seems to fall in the line of those that run an official Google Nexus device of the latest or previous generation. Most others get updates, if at all, months later.
Although this is just an unfortunate way of how it works on Android… ie, the diversity of devices and manufacturers and carriers, it does show the benefit of a single operating system running on a handful of devices all updatable on the same day. The downside for Apple of course is that users get little in the way of diversification. You typically get stuck on a similar device that runs the same OS that cannot be customised too much, unless you jailbreak of course.
The Apple model works great for many, think 5 million sales of the iPhone 5 last weekend, while for Android, it works great for those users because they get to customise their device and choose from a plethora of different devices of which one will suit their needs.
What OS do you prefer and why? Does the easiness of the Apple updates… ie, knowing your device will probably get it, make you sway towards Apple? Lets not get in to any fanboy type stuff here. It really is OK for someone to prefer Apple while another prefer Android although I’m still interested to know which OS you prefer and why.
Google is keeping to its promise by dropping support for Internet Explorer 8 on Google Apps. The reason for this dates back to a blog post made last year when Google stated that only the current version and immediate prior version will be supported of any browser. At the moment that means both IE8 and IE9 are supported. Next month Microsoft will be launching Internet Explorer 10 (26th Oct 2012) which means that supported versions after that on Google Apps will be IE9 or IE10 with support for IE8 dropping out.
Dropping a version of a browser isn’t really big news as it only prompts the user to update to a more modern, faster and more secure version of the browser. The problem lies with Windows XP… you see, the latest version of Internet Explorer that will run on that operating system is Internet Explorer 8. At the moment, 42% of Windows users are on XP which means that a large number of them will struggle to access Google Apps. Although Apps will likely work there will be some functions that will not and as time goes on and technology advances there will be more warnings and errors as well as things that simply do not work within apps.
There are several options. If you use Windows XP at home then one option is to install another browser such as Google Chrome, Firefox or Safari. The latest versions of those will run and will fully support Google Apps on Windows XP.
If you are a corporate user then unfortunately you are at the mercy of your IT team and management above them. Some companies might already have plans in place, specifically those companies that utilise Google Apps. An option here is to also install one of the other browsers, but some companies will not allow you to do that yourself.
Perhaps the easiest option is to use a “new to me” plugin called Google Chrome Frame. Google Chrome Frame is a free plugin that gets installed on older versions of Internet Explorer and allows you to use those older versions of IE while utilising more modern web browser features. As the name suggests, you are running Google Chrome in a frame on Internet Explorer.
In my opinion, the best option is to try install another browser such as Chrome and if that doesn’t work, try use the Google Chrome Frame plugin mentioned above.
As for the lifespan of Windows XP, Microsoft has currently listed the end of life data as April 2014 which means that after that point there will be no more security updates and development work done. Perhaps now is a good time to plan saving for a new computer within the next 18 or so months although I have to admit that I still use Windows XP on some computers and still think it works extremely good. It’s a shame to see it killed off although in 2014 it is far over a decade old which is quite an impressive life span.
I mentioned yesterday that the iPhone 5 was announced recently. Today the pre-orders went active around 8am in the UK. Within just a few hours, the first batch of pre-orders have now sold out. This means that any pre-orders made now will be shipped 2 – 3 weeks after the release date of September 21.
Obviously the online Apple store is not an option, so what I would suggest you take one of the following options:
1.)Queue up at the store on the morning of launch. Apple stores tend to have more stock than non-Apple stores, so your best bet is to wait in line. Some who are extreme queue up for days before the event and camp out, but having attended the iPhone 4 launch my self, it took just a few hours in a queue from arriving at the time the shop opened.
2.)You could try the various carriers. A number of them such as Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and O2 will be selling the device although at the moment it isn’t clear when they will be shipping out the new smartphone to users. This might be an option should you want it on contract to lessen the blow of the £529 price tag.
3.)Try an Apple reseller. These stores in the UK are occasionally tucked away in a corner somewhere and queues can be a lot lower. Some even take reservations over the phone if you let them know which model you get.
Other than that, you might be able to pick one up at somewhere like Carphone warehouse although I suggest you hunt around.
As with all, or most, iPhone launches, Apple runs out of stock quite quickly so in the future it’s best to just try and order as soon as pre-orders open up if you want to avoid queues and have the device delivered to your door.
It’s actually difficult to say that YouTube was taken away from the iPhone because technically it hasn’t been taken away yet for regular users. But, as soon as Apple release iOS 6, which could be as early as tomorrow, the built-in YouTube app will be gone. It was taken away at some point in the beta version of iOS 6 due to the contract between Google and Apple ending. Well, it is now coming back thanks to an app released by Google on the App Store today.
The good news with this version of the app is that it looks extremely good. YouTube on the iPhone has been the same ever since the launch of the iPhone. The new version makes accessing YouTube feel a little more up to date. It runs smooth, has a number of new features built-in and is actually great to use.
One thing I find disappointing at the moment is that Google hasn’t released a version for the iPad which could potentially leave users out in the dark when iOS 6 is released. But, there’s still a bit of time for Google to remedy this. My personal thoughts are that Google is just taking a bit of extra time due to the difference in screen size. The YouTube app on iPhone is far different to the version on the iPad and Google will need to take this in to consideration.
Of course, not only YouTube is being removed from iOS 6. Another big app which is part of the iPhone and iPad line is Google Maps with street view built-in. Simply put, Google Maps will be gone when iOS 6 is released as Apple has replaced Google Maps with its own mapping technology. This also means that the very handy Street View is gone. It is likely that Google will also release a Google Maps app for iOS 6 within the next few weeks. I believe that many people will download it. Google has years of experience with mapping technology and street view is extremely handy for getting more perspective on a place you are trying to find.
Apple Maps are not bad though. Essentially, it’s another mapping system. A few novelty features include the 3D flyover which looks amazing (Google now offers this as well). Also, the vector based maps work extremely well. iOS users will also benefit from the navigation functions built-in. Google withheld navigation from iOS users (not sure why… could be so that Android had the upper edge or that the contract simply didn’t allow it). Either way, iOS 6 users will get navigation with Apple Maps although note that it is only current generation devices only. From my understanding, iPhone 4 and older and iPad 1 (possibly 2 as well) also do not get it.
I look forwards to what Apple is announcing tomorrow. We should hear more of iOS 6, but also another important one is the iPhone 5 that is expected.