Both my kids fell in love with the book, song, and music video (!) for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom this month. It’s cute, but a little weird.

Fall

🎵 I do not listen to nearly enough Neko Case. For the first time in forever, I just spun up her 2002 album, Blacklisted, with its electric lead track: “Things that Scare Me”.

🎵 I’m trying to listen to the Original Broadway Cast recording of “Pretty Woman: the Musical” and it is hard to get through. So boring, so trite. The cast is good, though. Andy Karl, in particular, needs to find a role in a show not based on a movie for a change.

Now that the World Series is over, maybe I can watch less TV and do more exercise again in the evenings.

⚾️ What a Series! I’m really going to miss baseball this winter.

I really enjoyed reading John Gruber’s iPhone XR review this morning. I am thinking of waiting for the initial buying rush to wear off, and taking my wife to the store to buy her one.

I just ordered a new Chromebook for my daughter, based on Wirecutter’s recommendation. It was a lot more expensive than I thought Chromebooks sold for, but I bought a decently-speced one for the battery life, screen, and RAM.

I’m not sure what to expect when I have to set it up. I am not even sure what a Chromebook is anymore, now that ChromeOS runs Android apps. I was an owner/user of the original Cr-48 (the prototype Chromebook from Google). I loved CromeOS when it was just a browser, but Google started to loose me when they adding windowing. Now that the Play Store is available, it just feels like another Windows-type platform. I would prefer the “just a browser” version I had before. Perhaps I will soon learn, once the Chromebook arrives, that it still can be run that way. I have been away from it for too long at this point to know.

🎵 Norah Jones has a new single out, which she wrote with Jeff Tweedy (who plays guitar on the track): A Song with No Name. It is bare, stark, and simple, like an old, sad country ballad.

“How is The Good Place so Good?" This is relevant to my interests.

I’m debating whether I should pay for AnyList Pro again, just to use the Apple Watch app. I paid for a year a while back, and the Apple Watch app did not work very well. It kept crashing or getting killed, and would not stay in sync with my iPhone. None of the other paid features are interesting to me. I like the rest of the app’s features, though, and I’m getting the new Apple Watch in about a month, so maybe it will work this time. 🤷🏼‍♂️

⚾️ 106 wins for the Red Sox! That’s a franchise record. I can’t believe it, at least compared to how they ended last season.

⚾️ The last two Red Sox/Indians games felt like playoff baseball: close games, extra innings, nail-biting situations at the mound, etc. As a Red Sox fan, I hope my team can win a series against a team as good as the Indians (or, more importantly, the Yankees). Over the past week, I have been reminded of their actual playoff appearances the past two years, in which they lost in the divisional series.

Files integration

In late August I released a version of SwiftoDo that added sync support for any cloud data provider, via integration with the Files app. I think that this integration can be improved in the future. For example, right now, you cannot create a todo.txt file in the Files app using SwiftoDo, and you cannot open an existing todo.txt from the Files app.

If I add those features, I may as well rewrite the app’s UI, so that you have to create or open a file upon SwiftoDo’s launch. I would also have to rewrite how preferences are stored, so users could define different preferences for different files they open.

Those changes would, I think, necessitate dropping the offline support features that currently exist—namely manual sync mode, and the failsafes in place for when automatic sync fails (typically due to network unavailability). I am actually not sure how other document-based apps on iOS handle things when network connectivity is lost or unavailable. I would assume they simply cannot work without a constant network connection, because they cannot access their file, but I am not sure.

I do know that a task list is not a typical document-based app, like a text editor. Users typically want it to be always available, rather than dependent on a constantly-available network connection. Because I would rather not remove offline features from my app, and because I currently have very little time for app development, I do not plan any big changes to the app related to Files integration in the near future. When they do happen, I would expect that the UI of the app would be changed pretty significantly.

iOS 12 Support for SwiftoDo

The current version of SwiftoDo runs on iOS 12 without incident. I have, however, compiled a new version of SwiftoDo on the iOS 12 SDK. It has no new features, but the SDK is newer, so it inherits upstream bug fixes from Apple, and I updated my codebase to Swift 4.2. I am dropping support for iOS 10.x, too, because iOS 12 will be released imminently, and it honestly makes no sense for anyone with an iOS device from the past four years or so not to upgrade to it (iOS 12 performance is that good). Because of the under-the-hood changes, and the dropped compatibility with iOS 10, I am bumping the version number to 3.0.0. (Don’t get too excited!)

macOS Mojave Support for SwiftoDo Desktop

I am running the MacOS Mojave beta, and have been testing out its new dark mode. I love dark mode, and it took me about two seconds to realize that dark mode support is not a nice-to-have—it is an absolute necessity. Therefore, have coded support for it in a new build of SwiftoDo Desktop. I will submit it to the App Store soon.

The next version of SwiftoDo Desktop will be compiled on the macOS 10.4 SDK, and will no longer support macOS versions lower than that. (If you are not going to upgrade to Mojave, you can continue to use the version of SwiftDo Desktop you are currently using, of course.)

Other than dark mode support, there are no new features. (Sorry!) Because of the under-the-hood changes, and the change in minimum system requirements, I am bumping the version number to 3.0.0, though. (Again, don’t get too excited, but be happy your app is being supported.)

The future of SwiftoDo Desktop

It is a weird coincidence that SwiftoDo and SwiftoDo Desktop will be on the same version number for a while, but it is only a coincidence. At present, they do not share any underlying code.

My long term plan is for SwiftoDo to resemble, and share tons of code with, the iPad version of SwiftoDo. The approach I would prefer to take would be to use the joint iOS/macOS framework that Apple said is coming next year. I will probably continue work on improving the iOS version’s codebase in preparation for eventual macOS support as well.

I am not sure if every user will want the iOS version on the desktop, but I know that I would. I have considered releasing the next-generation version, whenever it is ready, under a new name (SwiftoDo Desktop 2, maybe) and SKU, so owners of the current SwiftoDo Desktop could continue to use it until it no longer functions on macOS. I have not decided exactly what I will do just yet.

I do not expect that anyone outside Apple will learn anything about Apple’s new framework until WWDC 2019, which will be held in June. What I learn at that time will have significant impact on the direction in which I take SwiftoDo Desktop.

📺 I think I need to re-watch “The Good Place”. (It’s available on Netflix.) And, hey, there’s a behind-the-scenes podcast for the show, too!

🎵 Today’s listen: Fine Young Cannibals' The Raw and the Cooked on my V-Moda Crossfade 2 🎧.

🎵 I don’t always listen to “Josie and the Pussycats” but when I do, it’s Kay Hanley singing.

A sunflower in the backyard. My daughter loves these, but we don’t admire them often enough.

I finished the game Transistor last night. I played it on my iPad Pro with a MFi controller.

It was a fun game with a great atmosphere (setting, sound design, visual design, etc.) but the story was a bit too opaque for my taste. You had to dig into the user interface and read a bunch of optional stuff to get a better idea of what is going on ints its disintegrating cyberpunk world.

It ended kind of abruptly and had a tragic ending, which is unusual, but maybe not for the game studio. Their prior game, Bastion, also had kind of a downer ending.

I’m not sure if I will do a replay of Transister, but I’m happy that I played it.

Today felt like a good day to listen to a long vocal jazz playlist through my V Moda Crossfade Wireless 2. Their warm, somewhat bass-y sound signature works surprisingly well for that genre. I mostly think of them as great for rock and pop music, but they handled sparse arrangements of vocals (male and female), piano, bass, and drums (mostly brushwork) surprisingly well.

I had to use wired mode because the Bluetooth connection is too loud for me, even at the lowest volume setting, on my iOS devices. The Bluetooth volume level appears to be more sane when I use them with my Apple TV or Mac.

Today I was planning to submit to the App Store the current build of SwiftoDo, which I have been testing without incident for about three weeks. Unfortunately, out of nowhere, it started crashing on launch late this morning. Fortunately, I never finished submitting this build to the App Store for review, so it will never reach users. It does mean, however, that I have to debug a tricky treading-related crash before I can release the cool new feature I have been working on.

After enjoying the Philips Revolution speaker dock for a while, I started to look for a better sounding iPod dock. I found that in the Altec Lansing M650, which is a 2.1 channel system (yes, stereo speakers plus a tiny, down-firing subwoofer!) in a compact, triangular case, with a 30-pin iPod/iPhone dock on a ledge in front.

I thought, and still think, that it sounds great. Its sound is warm, rich, and natural. While I wouldn’t consider the bass response to be very tight, or there to be any stereo separation at all, it does sound really nice, and can fill a small bedroom or a home office with a pleasant sound that I could listen to for hours on end.

I used one as my main desktop stereo system for a couple years while I worked from home. It replaced my Harmon Kardon Soundsticks, which sounded better for music, but were not as easy to connect to my iPhone. It sounds great for music, podcasts, and for TV—thanks to its line-in jack, I often plugged an iPad into it for better audio when watching baseball or Netflix. I liked this speaker so much that I bought another one for the kitchen, where it was a great base station for phone charging and playing internet radio for several years.

Unfortunately, while this speaker sounds great, its 30-pin dock is poorly implemented. After several months, both speakers emit annoying static from the 30-pin connector unless the iPhone is seated just right. I think I’m the only one in my house who knows how to fiddle with it until the sound clears up. Plus, of course, the 30-pin connector was made obsolete by Apple’s change to the Lightning standard.

I still use both of my M650s in my children’s rooms to play white noise while they sleep, and occasional music while they are awake, through our old iPhone 4 and 4S. It has gotten increasingly difficult to seat an iPhone on them without getting static through the 30-pin connection, but it is still possible. However, because the 30-pin iPhones that drive them are old and barely work at this point (software-wise), these speakers’ days as iPhone docks are numbered. They have a line-in jack in the back, however, and are prime candidates to pair with an Amazon Echo Dot (or something similar) sometime in the future.

The iPod had a monumental impact on how people listened to music. Not only did it turn people onto digital music downloads, rather than CDs, better than any preceding product; it also made listening to playlists and to shuffled music simple and extremely popular. The iPod’s 30-pin connector had a huge impact on home speaker systems as well. Suddenly, it became the default connection option for a bevy of home speakers. In stores, many speaker systems were repealed by iPod speaker docks.

While I had iPods since the first iPod Mini was released, shortly after I got married, I got an iPod Touch. It came for for free with my wife’s first MacBook Pro, and she had no interest in it. Of course, as a non-iPhone-owner, I found the iPod Touch to be an incredible upgrade from my iPod Nano. Around the same time, I got my first iPod speaker dock for free as well, in exchange for writing a review. It was a Philips Revolution speaker dock that looked somewhat like a boombox, could be driven by a bunch of D-cells or a power cord, and had a rotating dock that could accommodate (in portrait or in landscape mode) every iPod created to date and the first generation iPhone.

For sound, it was perfectly adequate. I liked it a lot at the time, but I thought of it like a boombox rather than a room-filling speaker system. It lacked a subwoofer, and thus had lackluster bass, but it was small, battery powered, and brought music into places in our apartment that it previously didn’t reach. My wife and I enjoyed using it with the iPod Touch for streaming music—mainly Pandora or streaming radio from WNYC—in the dining room while we ate dinner. I really enjoyed using it for background music during meals or for news radio, for which having the richest and best audio quality was not terribly important.

In the same way that my computer, once I got a CD-ROM drive, supplanted the stereo system as my main music player, this speaker system solidified the iPod’s (and later the iPhone’s) prime position as the source for music in my house. It also got me into the habit of streaming audio into the house, rather than only playing previously downloaded (or ripped) music. My wife and I used it in our kitchen for years to stream WNYC news and music. When the iPhone changed from the 30-pin connector to the Lightning connector however, this speaker dock’s days were numbered. And when that original iPod Touch’s software support was dropped by Apple, this speaker dock’s days were done.

In my mid 20s, I decided to move from boring (but nice) suburban Connecticut back to the Boston area where I went to college. It was a chance to reinvent myself, which is something I really needed to do at the time.

In the process, I replaced a lot of my belongings—cheap things or hand-me-downs that I had since my college days—with newer, better versions. I replaced nearly everything I cooked with and ate with: dishes, pots and pans, and small appliances. I bought a new wardrobe and got rid of my ratty old T-shirts and jeans. I traded up from a slow and struggling Dell tower PC to a sleek, fast, white MacBook (my first Mac!). I also traded up from my old, busted Altec Lansing computer speakers to the cool, futuristic Harman Kardon Soundsticks II that I saw in the Apple Store.

The Soundsticks’ clear plastic construction made them almost invisible. Their clear, light-up subwoofer looked like a bioluminescent jellyfish floating atop the tangle of wires under my desk. Their capacitive touch volume control was futuristic, too, but really hard to control; I mainly relied on my MacBook’s volume control instead.

In my cool, urban apartment, I played music through these cool, stylish speakers for hours and hours each day as I worked on my new MacBook (and on my work laptop, side-by-side). They sounded much better than my prior Altec Lansing computer speakers, but mostly they just looked better. I found that, at loud volumes, they didn’t really fill the room how I would have liked them, but I rarely played them that loud anyway, considering they were sitting on the desk I was working at.

During this time, I stopped buying CDs and started buying music online. I got into indie rock very heavily, mainly because I could get their tracks at great prices (25 cents per track) though eMusic. I first heard Okkervil River, Spoon, The Avett Brothers, The Apples in Stereo, Bright Eyes, Rilo Kily, Rainer Maria, and many, many other artists through these speakers.

I happily used these speakers for five years or so—even after moving from my hip, urban apartment to the suburban house I live in now—but I eventually tired of the mess their wires made atop and beneath my desk, and moved them into basement storage. Someday I hope to find another use for them, perhaps as a bookshelf system driven by a Raspberry Pi, but I would need to figure out a way to hide all the wires, so the great looks of these speakers shine through.

Over winter break, during my sophomore year in college, I bought my first new computer: a beige Dell tower with an Intel 486 processor. When pricing out systems—and this was done over the phone back then, rather than over the internet, because my parents did not have internet access in 1997—I configured nearly identical systems from Gateway and Dell at the same price. The only difference between them was in the peripherals: the Gateway came with a 19-inch monitor, rather than a 17-inch monitor, and the Dell came with a USB-connected, 2.1 channel Altec Lansing speaker setup. I bought the Dell, to get the better speakers.

At the time, I thought the trade-off was completely worth it. The speakers were tiny, stylish, had some fancy USB connectivity (USB was brand new then!), and came with a subwoofer, which I had never had before. The subwoofer added a new dimension to my music that I had never experienced before. It could shake the room if I wanted that, or just add some sub-bass dimension to the music. Its presence inspired me to pair this speaker set with my old, 2-channel Altec Lansing computer speakers, to create a 4.1 channel setup that I used to watch DVDs in my dorm room in 1999 and 2000. I had to upgrade my sound card to a Sound Blaster Audigy to get that to work. (I think that is the last dedicated sound card I ever bought!)

Their USB connection was not all I had hoped for, however. It did not carry the audio signal; it only allowed you to control the volume and EQ from a Windows menu bar application. It was pretty sophisticated for the time, but it was superfluous, and, I discovered after a year or so, the drivers that made it work caused Windows to crash all the time. So I disabled the USB feature and continued to use them for about 10 years, through college, grad school, and beyond. Eventually they wore out so badly they could no longer play at a proper volume. By that point, though, I had moved onto using an iPod for most of my music playback.