The Hunt for a Better Search
Posted 2 weeks, 6 days ago.
It was all Twitter’s fault.
To be clear, I don’t mean the version owned by the over-confident billionaire. It started well before that. The service had always been a minefield to work with. GIFwrapped had users that really wanted to be able to download GIFs from their timeline, but I’d never really managed to articulate my needs well enough to be granted API access.
So I had made do with grabbing the HTML source with a URLSession and inferring as much as I could from there. Eventually, of course, that ended up breaking… almost as if Twitter never wanted people to have unrestricted access to its content in the first place.
For a few years, I just nailed on new features, workarounds for this issue and that one, until the architecture was a mess of code with wacky bolt-ons for dealing with Twitter’s nonsense. It had to be, because my customers demanded it.
At the end of 2022, it all came to a head, and I broke. I was constantly dealing with Twitter breaking the insane web of code, and I needed something better designed to be able to deal with its nonsense. Something extensible. Something I could use to run live tests way more easily.
That would allow me to validate whether my code was still working, and ideally stay ahead of issues, as opposed to playing catchup every time they deployed updates.
So I began to pull apart GIFwrapped’s search architecture, and rebuild it from scratch.
Tales of a Callsheet Icon
Posted 33 weeks, 6 days ago.
I was listening to Accidental Tech Podcast one day, and my good mate Casey Liss was chatting away about his upcoming app, Flookup. I don’t recall if he’d let anyone know what it was or what it was called at the time, but I was one of the lucky few who got a TestFlight build quite early on.
It was a great little app, even at that early stage, but the icon let a lot to be desired for me. Casey is many things. A great friend. An excellent developer. A half-decent podcaster. But an artist?
It’s no message bubble with feet, but the concept has hands.
So I found myself opening up Sketch and getting to work. Could I make an icon before the episode was done?
1Password Abandons the Robot
Posted 3 years, 26 weeks ago.
The internet is mad again, but maybe we should all remember the real victim here.
My Favourite Things: Helpsters
Posted 3 years, 27 weeks ago.
It caught me a little by surprise, but Zephyr and I have really connected with Helpsters on Apple TV. Cody, Scatter, Heart, and Mr. Primm bring a joy to solving problems and helping people that is unmatched, and I appreciate the chance to share something so amazing with Zephyr.
Hourly Comic Day 2020
Posted 5 years, 3 weeks ago.
I didn’t do Hourly Comic Day in 2019 due to, well… forgetting… but I was totally prepared to do it this year.