Collin Donnell

Yesterday was a good day other than that my knees were still hurting from last week at WWDC, which made running less fun than it could have been. I don’t want to hurt myself, so I’m going to try switching to biking until they feel better. I also made a point after work to get things I could make for lunch so I won’t have to eat downtown as much. That should save make hitting my calorie goals easier (plus save me money – you wouldn’t believe the cost of food in SF).

Stats

Weight: 165.6 (-1.9 lb / -1.13%)
Body Fat %: 20.9 (0.0%)

Active Calories: 621
Total Calories: 2485
Calories Consumed: 1470 (1015 Deficit)

Exercise

Outdoor Run

Active Calories: 210
Total Time: 30:49
Total Distance: 2.03 MI
Avg Heart Rate: 176

Mind

Meditation

10m Headspace (Foundation 2, Day 3)

State of Mind

Morning was okay for focus, but not great. After taking 10m out to meditate focus and productivity both improved and I felt less anxious. Going to try meditating first thing before I start work instead of waiting later in the day.

Back when I was working from home in Portland my weight didn’t fluctuate that much. I ate reasonably healthy food, and I rode my bike and walked a ton. Without trying, I stayed around 145-150 lb for years (which was perfect for me). Working at an office and living in San Francisco the past couple of years, however, it’s become something I do need to start thinking about.

I’ve been using a FitBit Aria scale – which measures body fat percentage as well as weight – for about two years. According to FitBit, my weight was 147.1 lb (22.1 BMI) with 15% body fat in July 2014. As of last Sunday (June 19) it’s 168.9 lb (25.7 BMI) with 20.5% body fat.

Something has got to change. I haven’t felt this uncomfortable in my own skin since high school. I hate it.

The Causes

Okay, moving on. The biggest things I can see that would be affecting my weight are:

1. I was taking Adderall for my ADD a lot more consistently before I moved. It suppresses appetite. I really hope the only way for me to maintain a healthy weight isn't through drugs. I weighed less than I do now before I started taking it though, so it's pretty hard to be sure how much this could have affected things.
2. I was walking and riding my bike more before I moved. The data I have for this isn't that good -- all I have is step tracking to go on. Steps seem pretty consistent, but the further back the less data I have. I also have no way to know how much I was biking.
3. I'm eating out a lot more for lunch, and the food in downtown San Francisco isn't the healthiest.
4. I've been drinking more than I was before. It's like all people do here. Plus wine is really tasty.

My Plan

I would like to not have to rely on Adderall for focus and maintaining my weight if at all possible. With that in mind solution is to try this experiment over the next thirty days and report the results:

What would happen if I replaced drinking and sitting with exercise and meditation?

Specifically what steps am I going to take? A few.

1. Using a standing desk. I don't expect this to make the biggest difference by itself, but it seems like there's pretty good evidence standing is better than sitting. Every little bit helps.
2. Do yoga at least 2 days a week at the gym.
3. Run at least 3 days a week. I'm using a Couch to 5k app on my phone so I don't burn out or hurt myself.
4. Track calories of everything I eat using MyFitnessPal.
5. No Drinking. I'm not planning to quit drinking forever, but I think for the duration of this at least, I should just cut it out entirely.
6. Perform daily meditation to help focus. I'm using Headspace because it's a guided meditation program meant for beginners which ramps you up slowly.
7. Use a Pomodoro timer app to help stay focused while working.
8. Blog my results every day. What activity I did, my weight, body fat, how I did with calories, and my state of mind.

So, that’s my experiment. I’m looking forward to seeing how it will turn out.

As I’ve written about before, going to bed and waking up early has been an ongoing problem for me as long as I can remember. I’ve had more success fixing my sleep issues the past ten days than anything else I’ve ever tried in the past. A lot of that has been due to what I’ve learned using this little ball called Sense that tracks my sleep, monitors room conditions, and has a Sleep Cycle style smart alarm clock. After everything I’ve tried, this feels the most like I’m actually close to solving this problem for myself. It’s a crazy feeling after struggling with sleep my whole life.

I’d used a FitBit Flex as a sleep tracker in the past, but it wasn’t super helpful. As long as I remembered to tap it when I went to bed it did a good job of tracking how long I slept and how much I moved, but that wasn’t enough. I could see I was taking a long time to fall asleep, sleeping too long, and moving a lot gave me zero hints why I could sleep for twelve hours and wake up tired.

The sleep tracking part of the Sense is similar to the FitBit, but has two things that make it better. First, I don’t have to remember to wear anything or tell it when I’m going to sleep (newer FitBit trackers are also automatic). The Sense has a tracker called the pill that attaches to your pillow and then you never have to think about again except to not accidentally wash it. Second, instead of just time and movement, Sense tracks the room conditions while I’m sleeping. I can use the report it gives me to maybe figure out what was going on during the night and why I’m I slept how I did. It also gives me a sleep score which – while I have no idea how it’s calculated – does usually seem to match up pretty well to how I feel the next day.

The report tells me: what time I went to bed, fell asleep, what phase of sleep it thinks I was in, when I was moved around, and if there were any noise disturbances during the night.

It also tracks conditions in my room 24 hours a day and tells me if anything is unideal for sleeping:

I started noticing that there were several “noise disturbances” every night, so that seemed like something to investigate. I downloaded an iOS app called Sleep Talk which records noises while you sleep. I then tried to match up the times the Sense said there was a noise disturbance to the recordings to see what was going on. It would be nice if the Sense did this itself, but the app worked well enough.

What did I hear? Snoring and labored breathing. I was “lucky” that I’d been suffering from especially bad sinus allergies and was even more congested than usual the day I got the Sense. Because of this I was able to see my sleep quality improve over the next few days as my congestion got better. I’ve never been able to breath well through my nose, and I’ve also always had trouble with sleep, but for some reason I’d never considered the two might be connected. I started reading online about breathing, and of course not breathing well affects your sleep. In fact, that’s probably why I could sleep twelve hours and still be tired – it took me that long to get enough quality sleep to be rested.

I decided to do an experiment. I knew that Zicam nasal spray would clear out my sinuses instantly, but that I could only use it for a few days in a row. I used it before going to bed one night to see what would happen. I also read that sleeping on your side is better for breathing and that a pillow between your legs helps you stay off your stomach, so I did that too. The next three days that I took the Zicam before bed I woke up by 8:30am after about eight hours of sleep feeling fine and rested. That’s remarkable for me. I honestly can not remember having a change like this before. My Sense sleep score also went up (from the 70s to the 80s).

Since I couldn’t take Zicam for more than a few days, I also began taking Claritin every morning (as well as D-6, B-12, and a daily multivitamin). The Claritin helps, but not as much as I’d like. After some research, I found out that Flonase is usually better for people with year round allergies, and so I’ve started taking that. It takes a few days to reach full effectiveness, but the initial results are promising.

I don’t want to speak too soon, but I think I may have figured this sleep thing out.

I’m really excited to announce that a new app I’ve been working on for several months has come out today. The app is called StoryWorth, and you can download it now. It’s a companion to the website of the company I work for. StoryWorth lets you collect and share (with recipients you choose) your family stories. To get started, you invite a storyteller (mom, dad, grandma, etc), and then we start sending them questions. They can answer through the app, email, or on the website with text, images, or audio. Once you’ve collected some stories, we can print them up in a nice book (you can pay to have audio transcribed) you can put on a shelf and keep forever, regardless of what happens to us. I should mention too that StoryWorth is a paid service. We’re not interested in showing you ads or selling your information.

Oh, also, we have an app now. It looks like this:

Design

For the design, a big focus was accessibility. We have users as old as one hundred, so we could be pretty sure some of the people using the app would have limited mobility or vision. The default sizes for text in the app tends to be a little on the large size, but I also did my best to support Dynamic Type so that users who needed to could turn up the font size. I’m looking forward to taking the accessibility stuff even further in future versions.

Aesthetically, we wanted to go for sort of a book feel, while still looking cool and app-like. We did that mostly by focusing on typography and restricting the color palette so that the content and actions really stand out from each other. We use a sans-serif font (Lato) in our primary red color (except in navigation and toolbars) for actions, and a serif font (Merriweather) for most content and long form text entry. Overall I’m really happy with how the design of the app turned out.

When choosing what features the app would have, our goal for 1.0 was to get parity on the most important things (writing, reading) with the website. It’s not completely one for one yet, but it’s an awful lot of it. Having a solid basis of a native app is also going to let us do things that the website can’t do easily when it comes to things like recording audio, offline reading.

Technical

StoryWorth is the first app I’ve shipped that’s entirely written in Swift. In the beginning, learning Swift while writing the app probably slowed me down a little bit, but it didn’t take me very long to become productive. At this point I feel completely comfortable in Swift and think I made the right decision. Swift still has some rough edges, but there’s enough good there to make it an overall win. Mostly the problems I run into have to do with using it with the iOS frameworks, storyboards, and other things that came around before Swift existed.

Speaking of storyboards: I don’t know, man. I used them, and I guess they made things easier, but I also sort of want to tear them out half the time. I hate how they’re stringly typed, I hate prepareForSegue:, and I hate how using them pretty much precludes being able to use non-optional properties in my view controllers. On the upside, they’ve improved a bit over time. Storyboard references make it easier to break up a big monolithic storyboard into many smaller ones. Setting up child view controllers is really easy in a storyboard too. I only used a static table view in one place, and it ended up needing some cells to show or hide conditionally, so that wasn’t especially useful. As cool as that is, it turns out I never end up having more than one or two static table views in an app.

Going back to Dynamic Type, there’s a couple of things I did to implement that. The first was to create UILabel subclass which listens for content size category notifications and adjusts itself as needed. This worked pretty well for pretty much anywhere I had labels, but not for some other things. Dynamically sizing table view rows were also a godsend, since all I had to do was set up my constraints and the table view would do the right thing if the font of it’s contained labels got bigger. Overall, I found working with Dynamic Type sort of a pain when it comes to native views. I’d like to come up a better solution in the future that will make it easy for me to support it in the places I didn’t get to in 1.0.

I do use web views in a couple places in the app though, and it turns out supporting Dynamic Type in those is crazy easy. All you have to do is use one of the -apple-system styles for your CSS font property, set font-family and font-size (in em) to whatever you want. Make your controller listen for UIContentSizeCategoryDidChangeNotification, and whenever a notification comes in, reload the web view. Easy. There’s a good post about it on the official WebKit blog.

Grab Bag

• UIStackView is rad.
• Protocol extensions are neat and useful.
• The new Swift selector syntax doesn't like nil targeted actions.
• Carthage breaks much less than CocoaPods for me.
• I love universal assets.
• I don't know if I'm going to stick with Core Data.
• Color spaces are confusing.
• App review remains a magical experience.

Conclusion

I took a job at StoryWorth because I wanted to work with nice people on something that’s actually useful, whose business model I understood, and where I could have a big impact. It’s been a while now, and I really like it still. I’m excited to improve the app over the next several months. Please download the app and invite your family. There’s a free trial, and if you decide to subscribe it helps us a lot. Getting to know your family and having something to hold onto forever is something you’ll thank yourself for.

I found this post called “How to reduce the cognitive load of your code” through Gus Mueller’s blog, and I wanted to endorse it as well.

A good set of guidelines are: don’t be cute, don’t use weird formatting, keep it simple, and really, really, don’t be cute.

I spent a good part of the weekend playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD that came out Friday for Wii U. I played the Wii version of Twilight Princess a bit, but bounced off of it because I found the motion controls tedious. This remastered version is based on the GameCube controls, and so it’s all buttons instead of waggling a Wii remote at the screen.

Besides Link glowing in one scene for no apparent reason, the updated graphics look fabulous. While I don’t find the art style quite as appealing as what they did with Wind Waker HD, and the graphical fidelity is nowhere near something like The Witcher 3, I haven’t ever felt like I’m looking at a ten year old game. If anything it’s exceeded my expectations graphically. Some of the controls have aged less well, but nothing that makes playing the game not fun. The two control issues I’ve noticed is that the camera will sometimes do strange things, and getting Epona to turn around is painful.

Anyway – I’m going to be playing more of it this week. If you have a Wii U and like Zelda games, definitely check it out.

Parse is shutting down, and if you want your app to keep working, you’ll need to move to something else. I’d recommend doing it sooner than later. Thankfully our app isn’t out for another few weeks, and since the only thing we were using Parse for was push notifications, it wasn’t more than a couple hours of work to switch over to something new. The thing we found to handle our push notifications was One Signal.

Aside from Parse I’ve also used Urban Airship, Push IO, and a custom push server. Custom was definitely the worst. If I were writing the backend myself, custom might not have been so bad, but since I was always working with other developers, it was always a pain because it required involving someone else to test the thing and there was always something wrong with the certificate setup on the server. Out of all of those OneSignal has been the easiest, followed by Parse. I like OneSignal better than Parse though because it’s just push instead of one part of a larger thing that sort of expects me to be using their whole platform.

I’ve been using this extension on on String to make checking if a string is a valid email easy. If you know a better place this could live, let me know, but an extension on String felt as good a place as any. I didn’t write the original regex (although I did need to tweak it to make addresses with + in them work), but I’ve tested it and it works well as far as I can tell.

extension String {
    func isValidEmail() -> Bool  {
        if self.isEmpty {
            return false
        }

        guard let regex = try? NSRegularExpression(pattern: "^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.\+]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$", options: []) else {
            return false
        }
        return regex.numberOfMatchesInString(self, options: [], range: NSMakeRange(0, self.characters.count)) == 1
    }
}

This is a really ugly piece of code I’ve found myself writing in Swift whenever I’m preparing a storyboard segue where the destinationViewController is a UINavigationController whose root view controller is the thing I actually need to set properties on:

override func prepareForSegue(segue: UIStoryboardSegue, sender: AnyObject?) {
    if let viewController = (segue as? UINavigationController)?.topViewController {
        // Set up the view controller
    }
}

And so I decided to make this slightly less terrible by adding this category to my app:

extension UIStoryboardSegue {
    var navigationController: UINavigationController? {
        get {
            return destinationViewController as? UINavigationController
        }
    }
}

So now that ugly line becomes this:

if let viewController = segue.navigationController?.topViewController {
        // Set up the view controller
}

I’m planning on finding time tonight and this weekend to stream the last five dungeons of “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past” this weekend on Twitch… along with full color commentary (probably a lot of swearing when I die for the sixth time). If you have their iOS app installed, you can subscribe to my Twitch channel to get notified when the stream starts.

Last week I tried playing a game on my Mac for the first time in a long time. About a minute in I realized that a trackpad or Magic Mouse was not going to cut it. I needed something with actual separate buttons that click. The one I landed on, after reading a few positive reviews, was the Razer DeathAdder Chroma. Yes, I agree the name is ridiculous. I choose not to focus on that.

I like it for a few reasons:

• It's the number one gaming mouse on Amazon, but doesn't look too much like a gaming mouse, which is good, because I couldn't look at one of those and take myself seriously.
• It only has two side buttons, which is just the right amount for me. I bound them to back and forward in Safari, Xcode, etc.
• The driver software is fantastic for the tiny bit of tweakiness I want (assigning those side buttons), and also totally Mac compatible. You can even easily set different button configurations for different apps, and it will switch automatically.
• It feels pretty good in my hand. The buttons feel nice and clicky, too. The Magic Mouse gives me hand cramps.
• It was only $50.

The things I miss are interial scrolling and gestures. But those suck on the Magic Mouse anyway, and are easily fixed by placing my trackpad on the other side of my keyboard for gestures.

I’d never beaten the original Legend of Zelda before. It’s a hell of a game. Really hard, too.

Surprising open world games with a save feature never really caught on after it.

I’ve come up with a list of things I should ask myself and do if I’m feeling anxious or antsy. Here it is:

1. Did I not have any coffee today? Have some.
2. Have I had too much coffee? Drink some water. Take a walk.
3. Did I sleep not enough or too much? Keep working on that.
4. Am I worried what someone is thinking of me? Talk to them.
5. Am I worried about something I'm not doing? Stop worrying and do some of it.

No matter what:

1. Remember you're not stupid and people like you.
2. Drink some water and take a walk.

Brent is harping on limitations you hit when trying to use protocol oriented programming in Swift:

But these days we’re smarter: we use protocols. There’s no reason Folder and File should descend from the same class — they’re almost entirely different, and inheritance is a pain to deal with, so we use protocols instead. And we’re happy. It works great. Until you realize that, in Swift, you can’t do this.

I hit something like this yesterday. So no, it’s not just him.

This post on Medium by John Zeratsky echoes a lot of what I’ve felt, and what I’m trying to get to. This part describes how I’ve been my entire life:

It didn’t come naturally to me. When I had to wake up early—for a meeting, an event, or class—it was like the vignette above. I struggled to get out of bed. Often I barely made it to my engagement on time. And that rushed, zombie-like morning loomed over my day like a hangover.

John also was motivated by the same thing I am though; the promise of how much more you can get done by being a morning person. Whether I like it or not, the world isn’t likely to adjust to my natural schedule, so if I want to get by in it, I need to figure out a way to change this about myself. Missing mornings – or being awake but useless for them – means I’m missing a couple hours every day I could be participating in the world, or doing something good for myself. The best part is that it worked for John, and he’s kept it up:

It worked. I traded a typical night-owl schedule—up ’til midnight or later, staring at a screen, writing, doing design work, coding—for an uncommon routine where I go to sleep early, wake up early, and get a lot of work done in those quiet morning hours.

If he did it, maybe I’m not hopeless.

I’m not accountant, I don’t financially analyzing anything besides my personal budget, and I have almost no occasion in my work to ever use one, but I get excited about pretty much any time I can think of a use for a spreadsheet. There’s a lot of times where a spreadsheet can replace an app made to do the same thing. A lot of the time the spreadsheet will be even better, because it’ll be customized to just the fields you need. Plus Numbers/Google/Office all sync now – which isn’t at all a given with apps. And if something I’m tracking becomes cumbersome with a spreadsheet, it could turn into a great proof of concept for my next app.

Let me give some examples.

Sleep Journal

As I wrote about in my last post, I’m currently in the process of trying to fix my sleep schedule and become more of a morning person. The way I’m tracking that is with a Fitbit Flex I wear to bed and a spreadsheet that I keep in Numbers. Fitbit tracks most the data I need, but not everything (what time I put on my blue blocking glasses and misc notes). Also, leaving that data locked into Fitbit doesn’t help me if I want to analyze my habits overtime with charts, or if I want to share that data (in a future blog post, for example).

Commute Journal

To get from my apartment in the Sunset District (also known as Mars) to downtown San Francisco and back, there’s a few routes I can take, and I’d like to know which one is the best. What I’ve started doing is tracking my trips by using the iOS clock app and marking laps at points I want to track (when I get on/off public transit). This way I can track the average time each route took, how much time I spent walking versus public transit, and maybe if there’s a way to combine those segments differently to cut a few minutes off my travel time.

Car MPG & Maintenance

I don’t currently have a car, but I do have an RV. I track what kind of mileage I’m getting, and also when there’s maintenance done. When you’re driving around in a 27 year old vehicle, it’s best to stay on top of these things. If I see my gas mileage tank, I start to think there might be something up, and I take it in to get looked at before anything gets too bad. I used to use the app Gas Cubby for the same thing, but since it stopped being updated, Numbers has done the job just as well.

Sleep has always been a huge problem for me. My issue isn’t that I don’t sleep enough, it’s that I can’t sleep at night or wake up. If you don’t have a problem like this, that might sound stupid, but I’ve been like this as long as I can remember (at least since junior high). I’ve talked to a doctor before who thought I might have delayed sleep phase disorder, but haven’t gone so far as to do a sleep study.

Things I’ve tried are a sunrise alarm clock, a blue light I shine on my face in the morning, and over the counter sleep aids. They all helped somewhere between not at all and marginally. Last night, I tried something new: blue light blocking glasses. During the day, blue light from the sun tells your body it’s time to be awake and you start producing serotonin. At night the lack of that light tells your body to produce melatonin, which makes you sleepy. That’s what directs your circadian rhythm, which makes total sense evolutionarily. Unfortunately we didn’t evolve with televisions, household lights, and iPhone’s that produce that same kind of light in abundance. If you’re around any of those things, your body won’t produce melatonin and it will be harder to fall asleep (I’m sure this affects some people more than others). This web page explains it in more detail if you don’t want to just take my word for it. Anyway, I bought some glasses block blue light that I can wear in the evening to my body does the right things.

They are also the nerdiest looking things I have ever seen:

Never having company over in the evening again aside, the first night appears to have been a success. I started wearing them when I got home from work and was able to fall asleep earlier (surprising since I only woke up 11 hours before), and woke up the earliest I have in months (an hour before my alarm!) feeling fine. It would be sort of amazing if a $20 pair of yellow glasses really does that much to solve a problem that’s been ongoing for most of my life. My plan is to track my sleep (I love any excuse to make a spreadsheet) for the next couple of weeks and report back with the results. I also bought a new bulb for my sunrise alarm clock, so I’m going to start using that again, and I’m going to stop drinking coffee except in the morning.

Excited to see how this goes.

This post by eevee is specifically talking about video games, but I think a lot of it is a good characterization of discriminating behaviors, why they persist, and what people who don’t get it (saying “other side” feels wrong), don’t get. This part kind of jumped out at me:

There are, of course, also cultural biases that tip the scales towards people who are white or male or cis or whatever. But even if you don’t buy that, it shouldn’t be a stretch to think that there really are overt cartoon sexists out there in the world who are just not vocal about it. Some of them might be judges or managers or politicians. Some of them might even make video games. You might think of them as weighted coins that always come up heads. And therein lies the problem. You have 100 coins. You flip all of them. 60 come up heads. How many are weighted? 10, you might think. And you’d be wrong, because 60 heads is entirely possible, so you can’t actually be sure any of them are weighted! But there’s a much bigger problem: which 10?

I pretty much refuse to believe there is any such thing as a “meritocracy”, because even people with good intentions have unconscious biases. Good intentions (we just want to hire the most qualified candidate) aren’t enough to do the right thing. You need to actively and conscientiously work against unconscious feelings that you may have never even been aware exist. It’s really hard and it takes a lot of practice.

This article on Huffington Post lays out what I think is an extremely a reasonable take on gun control in the US, with action steps that don’t sound like they should be impossible (but probably are).

Here's some common sense for you. I want gun ownership to be as boring and annoying as car ownership. I want you to go to some Department of Weapons and sit for hours. I want folks who own guns to prove their skill, their mental and physical health, and to be licensed and reviewed over the years just as happens with our driver's licenses. You earn the right to own and drive a vehicle; earn the right to own and use a gun.

I take Adderall as medication for ADD. It works for me. Getting ahold of it was a pain in the ass, not just the first time, but every time. First I had to find a doctor who would prescribe it to me, which wasn’t easy, and once I did explain what I was feeling in such a way where they wouldn’t think I was looking to score (I tried non-stimulant medication first. it didn’t work). Then I had to get my insurance to pay for it. Having achieved those goals, I now have to take a physical prescription to the pharmacy every month. Also my doctor is in Oregon, and I’m in California. Since Adderall is a controlled substance, they won’t fill my prescription here. I fly to Oregon once a month to fill my prescription because that’s easier than going through the whole process of finding a doctor again.

There’s some potential for abuse of the medication I take (although much less since I take the extended release version). Anyone probably shouldn’t be able to just buy it over the counter. But for fucks sake, why is it easier to get a gun – who’s only functional purpose is to take another persons life – than for me to get medication that helps me stay productive and focused and was prescribed by a doctor?

A list of what the title says from Mark Dalrymple. I’m sure he created this years ago, but it’s new to me. I’m considering putting this in my favorites bar. As an aside; it’s sort of amazing 8 years in how often I find myself reading the docs for NSString.

Brent wrote a post that pretty much describes how I’ve felt my whole life. This part grabbed me:

I hated school even through my couple years in college. And here’s what that kindergartener’s fear turned into: the conviction that most people are likable, but that somehow I’m marked, and people can tell instantly, just by looking, that I’m not likable.

This feeling of being marked, of being obviously unlikable in some fundamental and obvious-to-everyone way, persisted into my early 20s.

The difference for me is that this feeling has continued to persist (I’m 30). There’s a few assumptions I’ve held onto for long enough that I don’t even have to think about them consciously:

• None of my friends like me as much as I like them.
• Others have a strong sense there's something wrong with me.
• If I ever really needed help, I'd be on my own because no one else deep down really cares what happens to me.

If someone as instantly likable and personable as Brent could have some of those same feelings, then maybe I’m not really all that bad either? I can’t believe I’m actually sharing this with other people.

Overcast 2 by Marco Arment is now available on the App Store. I’m sure I use Overcast more than any other app on my iPhone, and I think people are going to really dig the new streaming feature. Since I think I’m one of the people for whom streaming isn’t really a big deal, my favorite feature is the ability to support Overcast by actively (and optionally) patronizing the app. None of the features are locked behind a paywall anymore, if you like the app, give what you think it’s worth. I’ve already done it.

Marco explains why he went this way on his blog:

80% of my customers were using an inferior app. The limited, locked version of Overcast without the purchase sure wasn’t the version I used, it wasn’t a great experience, and it wasn’t my best work. With Overcast 2.0, I’ve changed that by unlocking everything, for everyone, for free. I’d rather have you using Overcast for free than not using it at all, and I want everyone to be using the good version of Overcast.

I got this from somewhere I can’t remember. I’ve been using it a while and it works very well. I have it setup so that it will happen whenever I archive a new build for beta or release. You’ll want to change those configuration names to whatever your configuration names are in your project.

if [ "${CONFIGURATION}" = "Release" ] || [ "${CONFIGURATION}" = "Ad Hoc" ]; then
    buildNumber=$(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print CFBundleVersion" "${PROJECT_DIR}/${INFOPLIST_FILE}")
    buildNumber=$(($buildNumber + 1))
    /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set :CFBundleVersion $buildNumber" "${PROJECT_DIR}/${INFOPLIST_FILE}"
fi

Add a “run script” phase to your targets build phases with this script and put it just below “Link Binary With Libraries”.

Cocoa at Tumblr:

Factories are a fairly well understood design pattern in software development. The benefits of using factories include:

1. Abstracting constructors away from clients.
2. Encapsulating data that clients do not need to know about.
3. Allowing for more testable code by enforcing the idea of passing objects into initializers instead of referencing singletons directly.

This post will show the power of a few Swift features as well as of first­-class functions.

I was asking on Twitter if there was anywhere to get an overview of what’s new in El Capitan that isn’t book length. My friend Andrew graciously pointed out that in fact there is… and it’s Apple’s own marketing page for the release. Duh.