Jun 19, 2020
The whole Apple antitrust talk has got me thinking about something else and that is about Safari Notifications. At WWDC 2013 which is almost 7 years ago as I write this a feature was released for OSX Mavericks which allowed you to program notifications into websites, a useful feature that unfortunately some sites use instead of RSS feeds and little allow customisation.
Even though this feature was released 7 years ago it has yet to be released on iOS or iPadOS 6 or maybe 7 years later.
Jun 18, 2020
I think it is time we discussed the ecosystem around apps which are on the Apple App Store and around how it works with managed services and how there’s an almost two tiered system with who is allowed to keep a margin and who has to pay Apple 30% for card processing.
Overall it is the 30% for card processing, if I developed an app and deployed it for free I would pay the Apple Developer Program fee but I would not pay Apple for anything else, I could have push notifications, wallet services, pretty much everything in my app and distribute it for free.
May 14, 2020
I think it was my 14th birthday, with some birthday money in the wallet I went with my dad to the local computer games store and had the aim of buying a Playstation. I had looked at the deals and found one that included 2 controllers a memory card and any two games. Those two games I selected were Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy VII.
I was initially more drawn to Gran Turismo with the ability to start off with a smaller car and modify it to include various performance items, which I have no idea even now how they improve performance for the car but it made the numbers bigger.
Jun 28, 2019
With MacOS Mojave it introduced an operating system wide dark mode, which is great as I prefer it and now with it coming to iOS 13 I will look to use it there as well, but there is a problem, whenever I look at a website which is plain white after I have used a dark website for a while it is rather jarring.
Because of this I never use it as I do not get the opposite effect so I like sticking to a light mode because for every site out there that does not have a dark mode that I use I am better off not using it.
Aug 11, 2018
The UK has a lot of different ways in which you can watch TV without watching Live TV, but I will add some parts around that in here towards the end because of an unfortunate genre which I am a bit interested in myself.
Put simply, if you want to watch anything other than on demand services you need to get a TV Licence and this will cost around £150 for a year unless you are over a certain age where it is free or you are registered blind and get 50% off.
Apr 14, 2018
People make mistakes, this is why in software engineering testing is as important a role in development as developing the software itself. if you cannot as a team delivery software which is reliable and secure this can damage your reputation as a business.
It is because of this I am also a fan of things like big bounties - it is important that the right people look for anything you miss and a good bug bounty system coupled with a culture of giving priority to security means that you are doing things right.
Apr 8, 2018
Content Management Systems have traditionally been systems developed on a platform which runs some code, hosts some files, and stores data around the content and application in the database.
This is fine, but over time the amount of functionality has been added to them which has caused them in a lot of cases to be bloated. Some additions are useful and can be used by an editorial, marketing or development team; but rarely are these compartmentalised in a way where you can easily disable or enable functionality.
Apr 7, 2018
I think that day will be today, normally I have a kind of issue around writing a blog, mostly around the fact that writing it is something I have to remember to do, then thinking about words that people would be interested in reading and then being content around where it is posted.
