Bad Art! No Biscuit: Another Fiasco

I'm in the final stages of getting an iOS app ready to submit to the Appstore. It's another silly, simple game. The basics are in place, I just need about 4-5 additional pieces of art and to fine tune the play matrix. But I haven't added any sound effects yet. I seriously dislike noisy apps to the point where I normally keep all sound effects turned off on all my mobile devices. And the only thing worse than a noisy app is one with badly done noises. Still games–even simple ones–should be immersive, even for brief episodic use, and adding sound helps that. 

I am not feeling enthusiastic about delaying this app in order to do sound design and source effects for it. I can add them in an update, but you only get one first impression, right? Except this is a free app. It's designed to be simple. The graphics are hand-drawn. The words are minimal. Ugh. Ok, I was planning submitting in early August. That gives me another week or so to finish things up. If I get inspired to design some sounds, then it will happen. If not, it's going ahead without them. Either way, there will be an update to the app before the end of the year–probably shortly after iOS 11 is released.

The next decision is whether or not I want to go ahead and write an Android version of the same app. I should. I just can't muster much in the way of enthusiasm for it. We'll see.

I finally won the lottery and was able to attend WWDC this year in San Jose.

Good grief, were there really only 5,000 attendees? It felt like twice that many. It was a lot of people and a lot of time spent in crowds moving from one place to another. On the other hand, Apple has definitely had time to figure out how to manage this type and size of event. There was a small army of staff functioning as cheerful and intelligent sign posts and bollards to back up the crowd control ropes. The timing of the presentations also left plenty of time to exit the enormous presentation rooms, get to the other end of the convention center, and line up to enter another enormous room for another presentation even with crowds so big that no one could move quickly.

There was a lot of thought put into the various break areas, and I do mean various. You could sit outside at a table or on a towel on the green (sadly, astroturf) parts of the plaza. You could camp out on cushions in a stepped seating area integrate into the main stairs. There was a bright seating area. There was a darkened hall that also had monitors showing the current presentations with closed captioning. There was music, just loud enough to cover the crowd noise, and places to sit out at the edges of the halls where there was no music. There were options for soft comfy seats, tables for groups, and tables for just working. And just about anywhere you went, you could find an electrical outlet.

The food options always included vegetarian and healthy choices, and the quality was decent. Once I figured out the timing and placement of snack services, I didn't have to worry about going hungry or being thirsty. The biggest issue with eating was finding a place to sit, and that generally meant having another chance to chat with someone from somewhere else in the world, whether from Germany or China or South Africa or Puerto Rico. I even met someone else from Kansas City.

Yes, there were women attending. Not enough of them, but they were there. I even had to stand in line for the bathroom a few times during the week. I even ran into a few black females developers. Honestly, there seemed to be fewer black developers than female developers attending, in spite of tickets being handed out via lottery. Still, it was a wonderfully diverse group of nerds.

It's great to see Apple continuing to push the implementation and use of accessibility features. It helps to put a human face on the people it really helps. (As much as I try to push for accessibility in the apps I work on and have for years now, I was still caught off guard by what a difference Siri makes in the lives of some people. I confess that when it came out, I thought of it as a silly convenience, not an accessibility feature. I was wrong, Thank you, Todd Stabelfeldt.) I still think it's potentially even more effective to show decision makers that properly implementing accessibility helps everyone, not just people you think of as disabled. Apple could do even more by requiring that accessibility features be implemented where appropriate in order to put apps into the app store. One step at a time.

So, I had a good time and learned a lot. Even more I have an enormous list of things I want to learn more about now that I'm back home. So many exciting ideas was a huge take-away from the experience. Still, one of the downsides to this even for me is that really using all this lovely technology tends to require getting locked into the Apple ecosystem. In my work world, that is almost never an option. Apple has chosen to chase profits over market share, but my clients have other constraints on their business choices and that affects what I can do. So I have to look at all the shiny toys with an eye toward the real world. If I sell a particular technology, can I also support it on Android? Life would be so much easier (and yet still complex and challenging) if I were only supporting one platform.

Would I go to another WWDC? Oh yes. Will I get to go? I don't know. At this point I'd be tempted to pay my own way if my employer wasn't willing. The problem is that just having money isn't enough because of the whole lottery thing. And if my team grows over the next year (and I'm surely hoping it does), we won't be able to risk having the entire team go to WWDC, and having finally been, I'd have to step back and let someone else go. Maybe I can try to go to Google IO nest year instead.

Dear creator of audio book apps, (Axis 360, I'm looking at you), we need to talk about how people listen to audio books. Perhaps, in an ideal world, everyone gets to sit down to listen to an audio book straight through. Or maybe they get to listen to a chapter at a time. But when I'm listening to an audio book using my phone, I am in a supremely interruptible context. The app I'm using should expect that I'm going to have to stop listening at any time and that I might not come back to listen again for quite awhile. I might be using any number of other apps in the meantime, or I might have to reboot my phone.

If my audio book app cannot keep track of where I was when I was last listening, even though I'm still on the same device, I'm going to get quite irate. I am exactly the sort of freak who will happily listen to a book in five or ten minute chunks with hours between listening sessions. Because your app can't seem to keep track, I either have to remember to set a book mark every time I pause, or else I have to fast forward through to try to find where I was when I last stopped. If you only have five minutes to listen and you spend half of it searching for a place to start... you get irate.

And really, although I can be an odd duck in many ways, I don't believe that my listening habits are all that weird. Yes, this is an app for library provided audio books. Should I really be complaining? Well, yes. I love libraries and I am an enthusiastic user. I could afford to buy all the books I read (and listen to), but I believe our libraries are an important resource and should provide a good experience for everyone.

Ok, that's enough fussing for now.

1. What I'm Reading

The Rise of Io by Wesley Chu
I still haven't finished reading his Tao books, but they're on my list. In the meantime, this one is keeping my interest. And now I kind of really want to read a review of the use of the idea of two minds in one brain in SFF and all it's variations. 

This Census-Taker by China Miéville
I probably shouldn't be reading this one right before bed; it's weirding me out enough that it's proving slow going. 


2. What I'm Making

Back to socks. Plain jane vanilla, toe up socks. I've decided to rebuild my sock collection, and by sticking with a plain knitting pattern I am free to pick crazy sock yarn to knit with. I've also limited myself to knitting no more than 12 pairs of socks this year, mostly because knitting at this gauge is hard on my hands. Plus, too much knitting makes it too easy for me to be sedentary. I finished pair number two this weekend, and also a mini version to add to my collection of tiny socks. 

I also made a Dutch Baby pancake for the first time in ages, but I was out of AP flour so had to use bread flour. Drenched in fresh lemon juice and sprinkled with sugar it was quite tasty, but more like a muscular pancake than a popover. 

I still have two small paintings in progress but didn't touch either one of them this weekend.

I still have an app in the works, but spent the weekend getting development tools installed and updated instead of writing code. 


3. What's Making Me Happy

Friday night we had a former club mate take time out of a brief trip back to the area to come fence with us again, five years after moving away to the east coast. It made for an excellent practice and it as great fun to see him again. It was also touching to find out just how much of a difference our little fencing family made in his life, newly arrived from Mexico. 

I still have the windows open, and when a thunderstorm rolls in on a Saturday evening, I can lay in bed in the dark with my kindle listening to the rain and thunder. 

I'm looking forward to having an out-of-town visitor this week. It'll be a short visit, but it makes me ridiculously happy.


4. What I'm Doing

Aside from having a visitor, this weekend I'm helping a friend celebrate her graduation, going to a Science Fiction and Fantasy art show, and participating in Tabletop Game day. Which is sort of a ridiculous social schedule for me, but it should be fun. Other than that, I'll be working on my current coding project.


5. What I'm Looking Forward To

Next week I have a ticket to Pirates of Penzance, and an invitation to soak in a hot tub to raise money for Planned Parenthood. I'm also looking forward to making progress on this coding project.

I'm still looking for an acceptable implementation of a dynamically categorized list view in Android. The good news is that I have a much better handle now on how Android wants to deal with the darned things, but I'm frustrated by the lack of built-in support for such a useful feature. Or maybe my google-fu is not yet properly attuned to finding Android things. All the stuff I'm finding with section headers is in the context of static list content and I hate to go the route of using a third party implementation for something that feels this basic.

Maybe my design sense is just too tuned to iOS? Are Android users more accustomed to scrolling through long lists? Is it more usual to provide explicit filtering of the list instead of doing grouping? I suspect I'm going to end up finding a way to use structured filtering to meet my needs. I keep reminding myself that breaking out of my usual patterns is a good thing. It's also a good reminder that I need to review more good Android apps to see how other folks are solving interface problems in that context. Which means I probably ought to budget for the purchase of an unlocked Android phone to play with, even if it is more work than play.

Small amounts of progress this evening, but it's two steps forward, one step back. I am well and thoroughly tired of the Android debugger. And looking at the code to support sectioned list views... ugh. I think I'm just tired and need to do something completely different. Got date formatting today and handled some sequencing issues. The list views (aside from grouping) have gone fairly painlessly but there is something amiss in my detail view and I need to dig into the details of the debugger a little further to figure out what's going on there.

I've found using the debugger with Android Studio to feel inconsistent. Not sure if it's the debugger or a side effect of the way I'm using/abusing Firebase. Sometimes, in order to debug, I have to start the app and then attach the debugger to the running process instead of starting the debug directly.

Ok, I found a different description of how to accomplish the sectioned list view and it looks well written. I've bookmarked it to look at later, maybe after I've had some dinner.

Ug, I just remembered that I really need to upgrade my personal machine to Sierra. Maybe I can make that happen tonight. Tune in later for the further adventures.

Social media is such a strange thing to manage. My LJ will be going away soon, so I figured I might as well get settled in here. And no, I am not moving all my LJ content over here, but I will be posting here on a semi-regular basis.

While doing some cleaning this week (and what a week it's been, I cannot recommend cleaning highly enough as means of keeping the spirits up after being laid off) I came across a copy of Spevack's "The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare" that had been languishing in a back room. It is a rather large book. The spine is three inches thick and the cover is roughly fifteen by twelve inches. It's 1600 pages of everything in Shakespeare, more or less. As a reference work, it is a thing of beauty. If I had had this book in my teen years, I would have been delighted. (Oh, look. Five references to weasels.)

This week, I was ready to donate it to the local library book sale, until I opened the front cover and found that it had been a gift to my stepson from one of his high school teachers. Said child has since run away to Argentina to get married and won't be wanting it any time soon. But still, I can't quite just get rid of it. It still has a dust jacket and is in good condition. I can't tell if it's a first edition or from the second printing. Either one puts it at north of hundred dollars in value, and a first edition could fetch considerably more. And if he'd known that, he probably would have sold it rather than leave it behind. For now, it has found a shelf to live on until its owner retrieves it or a new owner is found.

But for all it's loveliness, I can't help thinking that this is exactly the sort of book that ought to be printed electronically. It practically begs for it. A properly formatted edition would be a great improvement over the paper in almost every way.