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WEEK 2 2015

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Thirteen
Years
Ago,
This
Week
2002

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2011

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2012

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2013

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Year
Ago
This
Week
2014

Saturday 10 January 2015

Saturday - Still raining, off and on. Well, we certainly need it! It's a warm rain, and there isn't any wind, so I guess it's not a Gulf of Alaska storm.

Worked on the app a bit in the morning.

Off to lunch at the Indian place down in Palmdale. My friends wanted to drop off some goodies for the pet adoption people at PetSmart, and pick up some groceries at Trader Joe's, and Mahli's was nearby.

In the evening I went over for pizza and movies at S&R's place. Th movies were "Safety Not Guaranteed" and "The Incredible's", booth good. I'd never seen the Incredible's Jack-Jack short, which was pretty funny.

I showed her the app on my iPad, and she liked it, but was a bit concerned at the complexity of use being too much for her target audience. I asked her how she did it in her office and she explained it to me, and we realized simultaneously that we could almost imitate that, and it'd be a much better and natural way to do it! Gahhhhh.

So, back to the drawing board. All is not lost, most of what I've done is recyclable to the new way.

Left to do on the old app was "localization" (different languages) and assistive device stuff, which I've been saving until last.

I also discovered that there is now a 6MB memory leak, every time you leave the play window and re-enter. I'm almost sure it's the audio again - ARC doesn't seem to clean that stuff up properly.

Friday 9 January 2015

Friday - Rain - much to my surprise the ground was wet when I went outside in the morning. It rained a sprinkled for most of the day.

I fiddled with the segmented switch issue for several hours. I was, by dint of various methods, able to make it do when I wanted...about 90% of the time. Which isn't good enough. And since it might well have turned out to be an issue at the time of app submittal I finally decided not to do it that way.

"Why", you might ask, "does Apple not have a vertical segment switch, or an image map object?" I'd guess: they just don't care. This is simple stuff, that's been around literally for decades in other products, so it's not the tech.

Anyhow, after lunch I started on a home rolled method, using a standard "locationInView" touch recognition method, and had it going in a couple of hours. And fixed a couple of other things.

Suzy, just hanging out with me. Jimmy does the same with Riley...

Thursday 8 January 2015

Thursday - High haze and clouds, but warm. I went for a walk in the early afternoon and it was about 70F.

I've upped my walk to just over 4 miles, from just over three. I want to go to 5, but it's best not to rush these things. The current boots are nice, not pressing on the ingrown toenail on my big toe, which is an improvement. They feel loose, comparatively, but maybe the old channel inspection boots were too tight, given that they deformed the previously fine nail.

It was a generally a productive day on the app, I worked through a lot of the update/punchlist items in about 10 hours. One of the last items was to make a "signal strength bar control" out of a segmented button bar. The idea was that rather than just show the game level on the settings page the image would allow you to change it by touching it, which is kind of an Apple-ish idea, right?

I figured I'd just stretch the bar in the vertical direction and overlay the image while allowing touches to pass through. Only...you can't stretch the button bar in that way. The height is grayed out in the interface builder, and a quick look says that's what Apple wants. WTH?

I'll look into it tomorrow, there might be some easy workarounds.

Re: Book #3, I looked at Amazon's author page for L.E. Modesitt, and there are (currently) 18 books in the 'Recluce Saga'. Holy cow.

Wednesday 7 January 2015

Wednesday - It's cooling down a bit, with high haze and clouds now and then during the day. There is even a faint chance of rain by the weekend predicted. However I've observed before that the Weather Channel is ignoring and abusing their purchase of Weather Underground: it is not nearly as accurate as it was a couple of years ago.

I mentioned to my brother that I hadn't had a chance to see Comet Lovejoy yet, and he emailed back to say "No worries, it'll be around again in 14,000 years". Hmmm. Somehow I'm not as comforted as I might be.

I fixed the bug I'd introduced yesterday, the old fashioned way, by carefully going through the code. A fairly simple assignment error when cutting and pasting code to create "superprompt" objects from the existing "prompt" objects (as I suspected).

I never got the Xcode snapshot to work, indeed, I discovered that not only did the exported snapshot not work, but it was entirely deleted from the snapshot archive as well! It's hard to imagine how much more effed up Apple's CVS system could be.

After putting the working version on the iPad I took it over to S for lunch, and showed her the state of things. She had some input on that, and she's been working on the Settings page, and had some good ideas there. It'll look professional and spiffy soon.

Made a discover: t I already had the Year 2002 first 11 weeks created, though 'content' for weeks 1-6 only. I only have a faint memory of that, but so it goes, it makes things easier. None of my extant email accounts go that far back it turns out. I used work email for a long time, then used a local dial-up internet provider and email for years, and have a vague memory of archiving them when I left, but I've no idea of where the archive disks are.

Tuesday 6 January 2015

Tuesday - Even warmer than Monday.

I worked on the app in the morning, trying to get the last punch list item for V2 done. About 1:00pm I realized that I'd broken some earlier functionality. "No problem!" sez I, "I'm a professional who religiously uses Xcode's Snapshot, and I'll use that functionality to make a copy of the earlier version to see when I broke things..."

Oh Apple, Apple, Apple...

Even the basics are screwed up. The snapshot doesn't see the Game Model object, the most important code block, with quite literally over a hundred references. It's there, I can see it, edit it, print it ... but the compiler doesn't see it and gives a linker error.

Looking at StackOverflow I can see I'm not the only person with this kind of issue.

StackOverflow sidebar for "Problems with Xcode Snapshot"

Interestingly, Slashdot had an article about Apple this Monday: "Tumblr Co-Founder: Apple's Software is in a Nosedive".

Ya think?

After struggling with it for a bit I just decided to go for a walk and think about it. It was warm, and by the time I'd reached the end of the block I'd ditched the wool shirt and was down to just a t-shirt.

Dave had called in the morning, and said that we have passes to walk across the Grand Canyon in May! He's been battling some minor injuries, and I thought he'd given up on obtaining permits, but he's determined to give it a try.

I walked about four miles, without any issues, so that was a nice start to training. But of course the flat valley floor without gear is a lot easier than the Grand Canyon. But I want to build up a bit, and not hurt myself.

I was going to work on the app in the evening, but I had company over and (later) a nasty headache, so bagged it until tomorrow. I have a couple of ideas.

Book #3 is Cyador's Heirs, by L.E. Modesitt. I can't really keep up with M lately. Originally there was a land called Recluce, with an enemy, Cyador, that he wrote books about. Then he switched to writing about Cyador. Then he destroyed Cyador (and Recluce maybe, I can't remember) and is writing stories about people in the third country. I guess it pays for him, though I personally gave up buying these years ago, and just get them from the local library.

Monday 5 January 2015

Monday - Clear and reasonably warm out - in the high 50's, maybe even low 60's.

I ran the sprinklers for a few minutes, just to keep stuff from getting too dry. I guess I need to get out and trim roses and fruit trees soon. Usually it's around February, but these early warm spells can really confuse the plant life.

Working away on the app, got most of the punch list done, except for one major item. Things are coming together....

I was delighted to find a little package of oatmeal-raisin cookies in Tim's care package. Probably my favorite cookie, perfect for nibbling while seated in a sunny spot reading documentation about some bizarre iOS functionality.

Sunday 4 January 2015

Sunday - Not a lot to say. Got up late, did some minor errands.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Christmas Art Book present, 2015.

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