Turtles at Marlu Lake
🎵 Texas 25 is a great pop (ahem, blue-eyed soul) album. The band reworked eight of their hits, and added four new songs, to celebrate their 25th anniversary.
My MacBook Pro came back to me with a brand new top case and all its data intact. It looks great. I hope it gives me a couple more years of service.
My Apple Support Laptop Limbo Is Ending (I Hope) Today
FedEx just sent me a text saying I have a delivery scheduled today, which can only mean that my MacBook Pro is coming back to me from Apple’s repair center. Apple never gave me a case number, sent me an email, put a record of the repair on its support website, or gave me any idea that it knew that it had my laptop. It seems weird to me to get no type of receipt after handing over my laptop, but if it comes back today, all is well in the end, I guess.
🎵 “What’s Up Danger?” by Blackway and Black Caviar. (I’m starting my day in the Spider-Verse.)
I took my 2013 MacBook Pro to the Apple Store yesterday to get a new battery. It’s quite an extensive repair (whole case-top replacement), so I will be without it for about a week. I have multiple backups, but hope that its SSD does not get wiped.🤞
Answers to the most common questions about SwiftUI
Answers to the most common questions about SwiftUI:
SwiftUI is not compatible with earlier versions of iOS, macOS, or any of Apple’s other operating systems. So, to start adopting it, you either need to decide that it’s acceptable for the app in which you’ll use SwiftUI to only work on the latest operating systems — or you’ll need to ”gate off” the features written in Swift UI from older versions, using Swift’s @available syntax.
I found this post by @johnsundell to be a very useful, concise explanation of what I need to know right now about Swift UI.
Right off the bat, it tells me that I can wait a little while to adopt it. My time this year would be better served refactoring my codebase to prepare for a SwiftUI transition next year. For example, I can already start work on getting rid of storyboards in SwiftoDo for iOS, and that will prepare me for the storyboard-free future with SwiftUI.
🎧 Listening to ATP’s WWDC live show at the top of my work day.
iOS 13 Sherlocks Simple Call Blocker
My Simple Call Blocker app won’t be that useful once iOS natively allows users to block all unknown callers. I still would use my app, because I need to answer certain unknown callers for work reasons, but most people wouldn’t need it anymore. That doesn’t bother me, however, because I released my app for free, and I get a lot of support email related to it.
It looks like the iPad Air 2 is not supported by iOS 13, at least based on the beta downloads available on Apple’s developer site. It may be time for me to trade it in and upgrade.
I’m looking forward to watching the WWDC keynote and state of the union later today. I am curious what kinds of changes are in store for iOS, both on iPads and on iPhones. If a iOS 13 beta drops later today, I will immediately install it on my older iPad Air 2.
As I feared, my 2013 Macbook Pro has a swollen battery. Cycle count is low, but battery life has diminished somewhat over time. The trackpad doesn’t click anymore, though, which is bad. I’m weighing whether the $129 replacement cost is worth it for such an old computer.
