WWDC22 wishlist

In no particular order and not particularly well organised.

iOS 16

  • A more comprehensive Map component in SwiftUI (support clustering, custom layers and so forth)
  • A way to persist list expansion state for deeply nested Swift UI lists
  • TranslationKit (allow apps to use Apple’s translation service instead of needing to send users to Google Translate)
  • Better picture and video quality in shared albums (currently limited to 2048px on the long edge and 720p, respectively)
  • Fix the autocorrect mess
  • Walking instructions in public transportation navigation. In other words, give me turn-by-turn instructions if I need to walk from the last stop to my destination.

macOS 13

  • Native collapsing of menu bar items in macOS (please Sherlock Bartender)

Xcode

  • Code autoformat for Swift & Objective-C (in the vein of gofmt or prettier)
  • More reliable SwiftUI previews

Moonshots

  • A Music app that isn’t terrible (both on iOS and macOS)
  • A redesigned Home app
  • Having an Apple Watch shouldn’t block iOS app builds if they don’t have a watchOS build target (“Preparing the watch for development”)

Awair PM2.5 sensor repair

Awair PM2.5 sensor repair

Recently the fan on the PM2.5 sensor on my Awair had started to make an annoying amount of noise and no amount of canned air seemed to fix it. As I didn’t want to spend €329 on a new Awair Element, the best option seemed to be to replace the whole sensor (a Honeywell HPMA115S0-XXX).


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DIY Hot Ones

DIY Hot Ones

Da Bomb really is as terrible as everyone says…

Cape Town ⛰️☁️

Cape Town ⛰️☁️

View from the Norval Foundation

Untitled Evening Walk

Untitled Evening Walk

Kumpula, Helsinki

Winter Mist (-11°C)

Winter Mist (-11°C)

Photographed from the Mustikkamaa island in Helsinki

Picking the worst year to pitch for Euruko

Happier times

In 2019 I travelled to Rotterdam to attend Euruko 2019 with the intent to pitch Helsinki as the next Euruko host city. While I had a great time at Euruko 2019, in retrospect 2019 turned out to be the worst year to win the privilege of being the next host city.

Matz handing over the Euruko gong to me
Photo credit: Megin Zondervan / Euruko 2019

After bringing home the Euruko gong we quickly got to work planning where and when to host Euruko 2020. In the end, we chose the beautiful Savoy Theatre as the venue and August 2020 as the date.


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Software developers describing their work in 1973

Clips from the Finnish TV program “Computing as a profession”, shown in “School Television” in 1973.

Et tu, Signal?

Signal is a still a great piece of software. Just do one thing and do it well, be the trusted de facto platform for private messaging that empowers dissidents, journalists and grandma all to communicate freely with the same guarantees of privacy. Don’t become a dodgy money transmitter business. This is not the way.

Like many others, I was disappointed to hear that Signal is going down the cryptocurrency rabbit-hole.

This blog post from Stephen Diehl covers the problems with this move pretty well.

Hacking my Pedometer++ data

I’ve been using the Pedometer++ app since 2015 to track my daily steps and overall I’m very pleased with how it work and looks but a little while ago I noticed an issue: the number of floors I’ve supposedly climbed is wildly off in the app.

Daily and lifetime floor achievements in Pedometer++


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