Before I get start talking about my new iPhone 12 Pro Max, I wanted to show you the podcast that I do:
Apple’s podcast system now allows me to create an embedded for this website. Let me know what you think of the episode.Now we can start talking about the iPhone 12 Pro Max.
I’ve been working at IBM for almost 25 years now! During that time I have spent my career going back and forth between the technical and business paths. I’ve done that because I really don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I love learning and at various times technology had more things to learn, and at others there was more to learn in area like business models, markets, business processes, etc.
I was lucky enough to work for an internal startup back in 2007/8, and during that work I was able to get my promotion to Program Director, the highest non-executive, business level at IBM. I had helped drive significant revenue and partnerships for the startup. I took that role and when it was clear that we were not going to build a new business from the startup, I moved into business unit strategy within one of IBM’s software brands. It was an exciting time, as we acquired multiple companies and set a direction to help transform the brand. During this time, I learned a lot of business and technical skills, and began working more closely with IBM’s research teams. This lead me to the opportunity to ultimately work in research helping bring technologies to market. Again bringing together my love of technology and business. I worked with research scientists, and companies, to figure out how get real value from research.
About two and half years ago, my efforts allowed me to move back to a “brand” to help drive more adoption of technology. This effort was once again in Strategy, but my focus became more and more technical. I decided at that time, that if I was ever going to try and get my executive level at IBM, I wanted to do it as a technical person. For the last few years, I refocused back to more and more technical activities, including building technical demos with partners.
By refocusing my activities to technical work, that had a direct impact on the business side, I have expanded my impact at IBM. I also took a much more active role in mentoring new employees, coops, interns, and college students. Helping these individuals reach their technical goals, while also infusing the value off having a business mind set.
This impact and focus, lead me to successfully receive the highest non-executive technical position at IBM – the Senior Technical Staff Member, in early 2020. The next step is Distinguished Engineer!
I’ve finally gotten back to Wasted Time app for the Mac. Having figured out much of the issues with packaging for including the Mac version as part of a bundle. Now if you’ve paid the $0.00 for your copy of Wasted Time on iOS or tvOS, you will have a copy of Wasted Time for macOS for the low-low price of $0.00.
Save some money and stop wasting time!
I never learn. Each year I love the start of WWDC: The excitement of what is new, the demos of how Apple sees features working, and the inevitable download of new tools, apps, and operating systems. And this year, like WWDC19, something goes wrong.
I picked up the new iPad Pro 11inch (with the M1), and have made sure that I don’t have any work related content. It is my test device. I expect to lose data… And like two years ago, when macOS bricked my MacBook Pro, this year my brand new iPad Pro went into a reboot loop on install.
I am hoping that the iPad Recovery mode, will allow me install the restore image, if not, I will back level to iOS 14. And try again. So far, I am not frustrated, more disappointed. I have raised a feedback, but I don’t think I should wait for them to come back (usually after the next beta). More to come.
However, I think WWDC has already announced a few key things that I am very excited about, let me count the ways.
This week will be very interesting to review all the details over the next 200 videos.
While sitting at home and watching a live streams for 8 hours a day all week, is not the same as being at WWDC in person, I am really looking forward to see what Apple introduces this year. To prepare this year, I am doing the same as I did last year. I have setup a new boot partition on my development MacBook Pro.
After the horrible experience of installing the latest beta on my main machine at WWDC 2019, and having it go bad. I had to ultimately get a lab session to install Developer Beta 1 from one of the installation engineers. They had a SSD that wiped the machine clean, and installed a pristine macOS, as if Developer Beta 1 came on my machine from the factory. I have created a second Boot partition with the latest Big Sur installed, iCloud turned off, and Xcode installed. My goal is to install the beta and the latest Xcode beta on this partition next Monday after the keynote.
I used this same technique last year, and it really made a difference in the stability of working with the developer betas over the summer.
I have also taken all my day job content off of my iPad Pro, and will be removing it from my iPhone later this week. Minimizing the number of variables on the machines make it much easier to experience the ups and downs of the “summer of fun.” I love the fact that the team over at the Upgrade podcast call this time the “summer or fun”, as it really is that. Getting to play with the various new features that come out over the summer, is a great way to learn.
Wow, it’s already the end of May, and my last blog post was in February. Time sure flies when you work from home. Before WWDC happens this year I wanted to document my expectation. I talked about it during my podcast a few weeks ago, and even went out and bought a new iPad Pro – hoping that I am right.
While it would be very cool to run macOS on the iPad, I don’t think that is what will happened. Nor do I think Xcode will be delivered. But what I do think is going to happen is that we are going to say a flip from the Xcode Previews app. Last year – Apple introduced this app to allow your to preview your SwiftUI designs quickly and easily. I believe that this year, Apple will finally enable (at least on the iPad), on device UX design, which generates SwiftUI code for you in an attached Xcode instance running on a Mac.
The main reason that I don’t think that Apple won’t let you do full development is that the Mac is a premium desktop or laptop. And you pay that premium. If developers could do all their work on the iPad, then there would be a large drop off of Mac revenue. And with the new M1 MacBook Pro being rumored (14 and 16 inch models), there’s a lot of money on the table for Apple to make in 2021 and 2022.
What are your WWDC predictions.
This past weekend I released updates to both WastedTime and WastedTime Watch. For WastedTime it was a minor bug fix, you can no longer end a meeting before it starts. Who would have thought of that one?!
For WastedTime Watch, this was the total re-write I was working on. It is now much more colorful – matching the design of both the TV and iOS versions. But it also ads support for Watch Complications.
I am still experimenting with the complications, as there is so little room to put things, but I thought I would get it out there and see what people thing. So if you don’t mind, drop me a review over on the App Store. Thanks
Ok, I had basically gotten frustrated trying to change WastedTime Watch to a fully SwiftUI based app. Apple changed the App Entry point which had completely changed how the AppDelegate function worked. I thought this app was the simplest of my apps, so I could easily convert it to the new Swift Architecture. Boy was I mistaken.
In September, after banging my head against the wall for days, I posted the problem on StackOverflow, and walked away. Over the last few months, I got a coupled of suggestions, but severally figured out how to address the problems.
The net of the problem was I could not create my start up objects multiple times, but always ended up with a nil object. The basic startup of the application had changed, and I was not following it.
Today while trying another suggestion, I finally realized that the problem was (here comes the big surprising reveal) – Me! I had been using a local object instead of the delegate I created. here’s the basic structure of the now working code!
//
// WastedTimeWatchApp.swift
// TestMe WatchKit Extension
//
// Created by Michael Rowe on 9/22/20.
// Copyright © 2020 Michael Rowe. All rights reserved.
//
import SwiftUI
struct DelegateKey: EnvironmentKey {
typealias Value = ExtensionDelegate
static let defaultValue: ExtensionDelegate = ExtensionDelegate()
}
extension EnvironmentValues {
var extensionDelegate: DelegateKey.Value {
get {
return self[DelegateKey.self]
}
set {
self[DelegateKey.self] = newValue
}
}
}
@main
struct WastedTimeWatchApp: App {
@WKExtensionDelegateAdaptor(ExtensionDelegate.self) var delegate
let prefs:UserDefaults = UserDefaults(suiteName: suiteName)!
@SceneBuilder var body: some Scene {
WindowGroup {
NavigationView {
ContentView()
.environment(\.extensionDelegate, delegate)
}
}
WKNotificationScene(controller: NotificationController.self, category: "myCategory")
}
}
class ExtensionDelegate: NSObject, WKExtensionDelegate, ObservableObject {
@Environment(\.extensionDelegate) static var shared
var meetingSetup: MeetingSetup!
var meetingStatistics: MeetingStatistics!
var meeting: Meeting!
func applicationDidFinishLaunching() {
// Perform any final initialization of your application.
print("applicationDidFinishLaunching for watchOS")
ExtensionDelegate.shared.meetingSetup = MeetingSetup()
ExtensionDelegate.shared.meetingStatistics = MeetingStatistics()
ExtensionDelegate.shared.meeting = Meeting()
}
}
The secrete ended up being that I had been using self.meeting = Meeting() in applicationDidFinishLaunch which was never actually exposed to the rest of the program. Now I should able to clean up a few simple problems in the views, and release version 2.0 of Wasted Time for the Watch
Well, it has been three years in the making, and I am finally starting to feel that this app may be ready. I’ve not had much time to work on it over the three years, but I’ve used this app to learn CoreData and CloudKit. On Christmas Day, I finally broke through and fixed my last MAJOR problem with CloudKit.
You see, I’ve been using this app to capture what cards I sent to which person. I’ve been storing the images locally in the app’s Documents folder, but I could not figure out how to easily get this to Sync. So I wanted to move the pictures into CoreData and then use CloudKit to sync the data between devices.
When I first started really working on this part over the US Thanksgiving holiday, I kept having issues where the app and CloudKit would crash. This only happened when I put on my devices, which had three years of card data! The simulator actually worked fine. I ended up learning how to finally use Instruments, and saw that I had two major problems. First was a memory leak. I had used sample code from https://www.raywenderlich.com to become a Transformable data type. What this does is make it so CoreData handles storing data in binary format, but your program just uses the appropriate format for the data. In this case a UIImage. Unfortunately this code didn’t free memory correctly, I fixed this by placing the code in a autoreleasepool{}. This means that when you program moves past that line in the code, it will release the memory allocated during the code. This solved part of the problem – no more crashes!
However, the program still didn’t sync the data. Looking in instruments again, I saw that CloudKit sync was crashing a lot too. I had converted the UIImage to a PNG data type. This is a lossless compressed file format, and as I’ve improved my iPhone over the three years the pictures had ballooned to about 30-40MB each! This is bigger than my first ever hard drive back in the late 80’s. (A 20mb hard drive which held all my programs, games and data at the time, with room to spare!).
So I ended up changing the image to a JPEG, using the least compression it would do, and now I have pictures in the 2-4mb range. Problem solved! All the images for the last three years have synced into CoreData and via CloudKit to my secondary device. Now I just need to wait for the App Store team to get back from vacation, and I will release the app to my Alpha testers!
Progress!
With the upcoming release of BigSur, I removed the Mac version of Wasted Time from the App Store a few weeks back. In the mean time the testing of the iOS version on the Mac has continued to be successful.
I have run into a few problems with minor new updates, since the Mac Version was a catalyst app, but had to be submitted on the store as a separate version. I am hoping that with the new Big Sur release coming any day, people can just use the iPad version. We shall see.