Where’s Santa?

December 10, 2024 | Comment

I had an unusual request from my friend John recently – could I help him map the location of Santa as he goes about his deliveries? Ok, it wasn’t quite like that. He is a member of the Lions, and every December they take out a sleigh with Santa on the back through the streets to the delight of lots of excitable children. The issue was that parents didn’t know exactly when he was going to appear in their streets and were constantly looking and waiting for his arrival. If there was a map of the live position, this would … Read the rest

Sending messages to Pushover from PHP

July 24, 2023 | Comment

One of the things that I regularly bake into my own applications is notifications of when things go really bad and need my immediate attention. For this, I use the excellent and simple Pushover service which allows me to send a push notification to my mobile device. In this post, I run through how to set up your application in Pushover and then send a notification via PHP.

Setup Pushover

I am assuming that you have already created your Pushover account. You get a 30-day trial and after that, it is just $5 as a one-off purchase.

From your dashboard … Read the rest

Querying the Day One Database

June 14, 2023 | Comment

WARNING! Make a copy of your database before trying any of this!

Why do it?

I have been using the Day One journaling app to keep a daily personal diary for many years now. I have been recording my mundane thoughts there for over seven years and have transcribed five paper diaries too giving me a total of 14 year held there.

That’s currently 4,267 entries and counting of which I know very little about other than the text itself. I wanted more detail than Day One offered and had ideas of how I could mine my entries in … Read the rest

How to Restore Twitter to Something Useful

January 16, 2023 | Comment

Since the takover of Twitter by Elon Musk changes have been coming thick and fast. Some, such as Twitter Blue, have been well reported and endlessly debated. Others, such as the change to the timeline, less so. It is the latter that I am going to concentrate on today.

Twitter has long tried to encourage behaviour that it wants rather than what the consumer might want. This means pushing tweets from people that you might not follow but others you follow do, in the hope that you will build your own followers. The problem with this is that you end … Read the rest

Here’s a Question that Pains me… Is Evernote Dying?

July 26, 2018 | Comment

It really pains me to say this but I am worried about the longevity of Evernote, a tool that I have been using for many, many years. So long in fact that I now have well over 30,000 notes stored in it.

Evernote co-founder Phil Libin always said that his aim was to create a “100-year startup” meaning that it’s “a company that’s around in 100 years, which means Evernote’s product needs to be durable.” Right now I cannot see them achieving that aim. Of course that aim could have been ditched when Libin left in 2016.

Why have … Read the rest

Why I Dropped Drafts for Edit on iOS

July 9, 2018 | 1 comment

I have been a happy Drafts user on both my iPhone and iPad for many years. When version 5 of Drafts was launch it moved from being a one-off payment to a subscription model which made me stop and think about whether I wanted to signing up to yet another app subscription. I knew I didn’t.

For me there wasn’t a real reason to upgrade as Greg, the developer behind the app, had said that he would continue to support the old version, but it did make me stop and think whether I was getting the most out of Drafts. … Read the rest

iOS (finally) supports QR codes!

September 20, 2017 | Comment

QR codes are a more modern equivalent of the ubiquitous bar code but hold both more data and more intelligent information – if you can read them. Until this week, if you had an iPhone and wanted to “read” a QR code you needed a third party app but with the introduction of iOS11 the camera now, finally, supports them natively.

The animated gif below shows this in action and how easy it is to use:

Of course you might wonder why this is important given that you don’t see QR codes that often. Well I would counter that you … Read the rest

The Hidden Cost of App Downloads

June 25, 2017 | Comment

I’m always amazed at just how quickly app updates mount up (ok so I have 291 apps on my iPhone so that doesn’t help). Even taking that into account there are some that are updated very regularly (Facebook seems to be a serial offender) and the cost in data to keep up to date must be considerable.

Now Jon Darke has taken a closer look and calculated that cost:

Let us assume LinkedIn is installed on 100 million devices (it states 50-100m on Android App Store alone), it updates every week with an average app update size of 261MB. Over

… Read the rest

Google’s Motion Stills

July 26, 2016 | Comment

Google have a good track record of bringing to iOS unique apps that aren’t available on Android. They recently released a simple little app called Motion Stills which takes Apple live photos and turns them into forever looping gifs. And it works really well.

On opening the app you are shown your photostream with a looping preview of each image. Tapping on the image allows you to make some very small changes such as turning on/off the sound and, crucially, the image stabilisation. It is the latter option that is most impressive. Live Photos actually last longer than you might … Read the rest