The BirchTree Podcast #28: Embarrassing code that works
I’m getting close to being done with my new weather app for iOS, and I took a few minutes this morning to reflect on the process of going from web to iOS development. It’s messy, it’s challenging, and I’d be ashamed to show a professional developer my code, but it works, and I’ll only get better.
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Thanks for being patient
I just wanted to take a second and thank everyone out there for being patient with the blog over the past month or so. My post volume has decreased a decent amount, and that’s because I have 2 major projects in the works that are keeping me from writing smaller, more regular posts.
Only an idiot would be planning on releasing their biggest article of the year and their first app to the App Store on the same day. 😶
— Matt Birchler (@mattbirchler) August 13, 2017
The first project is my watchOS 4 review, which is coming along very nicely, and I hope it will be the authoritative watchOS review this year. It may be overly ambitious, but why not go for it, right?
The second project is an open secret, and it’s an iOS app called Today’s Forecast. I intend to have this app released the same week as iOS 11, but that’s a little ambitious. We’ll see how things go in the current beta, but I’m currently on track to hit that release window. Fingers crossed!
BirchTree Podcast #27: Figuring out your competitive advantage
This week we’re thinking about your personal advantages and how to leverage them. It’s hard to always know what you’re advantages are over everyone else in the room, so hopefully this episode will get you thinking about that a little more this week.
Dallol Volcano Wallapapers
I had never heard of Dallol before this week, and that’s a shame because it is one of the most interesting, beautiful places I’ve ever seen! If you are also not familiar, I highly suggest you do a quick search for the Ethiopian volcano and marvel at it for a few minutes this weekend.
These are a little different from my normal wallpaper style, but I made a few of them that I’m enjoying right now and I hope you do too.
Would rather buy a new iPhone than keep using WhatsApp
About a month ago my wife and her sisters ditched SMS and started using WhatsApp for all of their messaging. See 2 of them use iPhones and the other uses an Android phone. They had been using SMS for years to have a group chat, but there have been tons of issues with that. SMS is slow, relies on a cellular connection instead of Wifi, does not sync across multiple devices, and is a poor option for sending images/videos. To solve this problem, they decided to start using WhatsApp instead.
WahtsApp seemed to solve all of their problems. It was a web-based service that they could use from any device they wanted, it was more reliable than SMS, and it was faster in every single way. It seemed like a win.
But today my wife mentioned in passing that she was browsing eBay for cheap iPhones. Apparently after a month of WhatsApp, she and her iPhone-owning sister have decided that it would be better to buy their sister an iPhone and use iMessage than stick with WhatsApp. Wow!
As with all of these stories, it’s a sample size of one, and is not indicative of how everyone feels, but I was honestly taken aback by the desire they had to use iMessage as their messaging platform over anything else out there. For them at least, it shows the value of iMessage and the power of Apple’s services.