Okay, just for fun, this dude put all his modern tools in an old-school macOS 9 style.
How would have the same workflow looked like with the tools of today and the limitations of yesterday. Unreliable internet, little disk storage, macOS 9 and much more.
I have published a post or two about the powers of brevity. But we programmers sometimes take it too far.
Can someone tell me what these integers represent?
case upc(Int, Int, Int, Int)
No? Me either.
This is how associated values are pretty much always done in Swift. But thanks to this post by Marco Eidinger via iOS Dev Weekly, I discovered something new and clarifying: it turns out that you can actually label your enum’s associated values too. People just don’t do it for some reason. π€·π»ββοΈ
Can you tell me what the integers represent now?
case upc(numberSystem: Int, manufacturer: Int, product: Int, check: Int)
Isn’t that a little easier to understand?
I run into the assumption sometimes where people mistake brevity for efficiency. Brevity shouldn’t mean sacrificing valuable context for slightly fewer words. Thanks to the Marco Eidinger post for pointing this out explicitly. π
I always found the “favorites” feature in Apple Maps to be too general and dissatisfying. I quit using that feature once I had 48 places saved all across the world. π€·π»ββοΈ
Before that, I saved specific lists of places in Google Maps, but found their mobile app to be cluttered and confusing. π So I gave up and started using Trello.
Trello is cool for some things like trip planning and small projects, but it did not scale well and didn’t handle lists of places well. So I gave up on that. π’
ο£Ώ Maps guides
I’m happy to have just discovered that you can save your favorite places as “guides” in Apple Maps. Finally, this is genuinely useful!
Of course this guide automatically syncs to my iPad and Mac as well. β
Rechecking Goole Maps
Forgive me if I sound like an ο£Ώ fanboy, but out of genuine curiosity I went back and I did the same thing in the latest Google maps. It was a bit painful. π’
Notice how the “main” screen is oddly not a map but more of a picture of a cup of coffee and therefore not useful to me.
And even when I drilled into an actual map view, the places I care about are unlabeled in favor of (1) a notification that HEB has an offer and (2) the Texas Capitol and Congress Ave. Bridge exist. Again, not useful.
I just want to know where a coffee shop is open at 7am! Now that would be useful. π
But where are all the coffee shops and their hours?But which ones are the actual coffee shops?
I’ve learned a lot making apps for big companies, mostly about process: how a good continuous integration process works, how code reviews can be productive (or not productive), how to break a big app into smaller components so lots of people work on related things at the same time.
But the most fun part of all is developing the idea of your app. What does your app do? How exactly does it work from a user perspective? And what do the screens look like in detail?
πThis time around, I’m prototyping my new app idea on my phone so that I can get a feel for how it works in my hands before writing all that code. ^
patmcg.com 