Ramble

This has to be one of the best ads I’ve seen in a long time: Introducing Vector Networks. Playing with vectors a lot at home and at work recently, it’s interesting looking at another approach to composing vector images. The things which really kill the interest for me (when looking at the Figma site, not the nicely crafted ad on Medium) is the fact that it’s just another SaaS product. No mention of final pricing of course (“Free during the Preview Release”), just a big fat sign up button for a spot in the release queue. ...

As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been working on an iOS app over the holidays. A topic for another post is all of the hassle with getting to the point where I can actually release it for sale, but while I’ve been sorting all that out I’ve been noodling around with new features to keep myself interested (although going back to work has gotten in the way ever so slightly). ...

Wired made a post in which the publication outlines what it is going to do about the ad-blocking situation. They acknowledge that readers either want to view content without all the cruft, or are concerned about the fact that advertising is as much about tracking as about actually putting ads in front of your eyeballs. They are moving to restrict articles from those who use ad blockers, with the promise to visitors that if they whitelist the site in their ad blockers they will only see “standard display advertising”. Of course they don’t say what “standard display advertising” actually means to them. I suspect it just means that they will choose to serve ads that are not visually intrusive (e.g. Popovers, popunders, interstitials etc), and fine, that can appeal to their first group of readers who only care about not having lots of rubbish shoved in their face while they are trying to read. The issue is that they specifically point out that some people are very uncomfortable with the amount of tracking that goes on by advertisers, nothing is said about choosing advertisers based on their privacy policies. ...

As usual to keep myself sane during the Summer holidays I’ve been doing some coding on project ideas that have come up over the year. After over a year or so of tinkering I’m starting to feel like I’m getting the hang of the way that iOS does things with MVC (although I still have trouble reading Apple’s documentation), and these holidays I think I finally got something useful finished which I might get around to publishing. ...

I started writing the draft for this post back in December after attending a conference called Switching Tracks, which seemed to focus a lot on gamification and flipped learning approaches to education. As is usual at conferences these days part of the keynote introduction was what Twitter hashtag to use for the back channel conversation. I’m not sure what this sort of conversation is like at other events, since I mostly attend education-themed stuff, but it usually runs something like this: ...

There has been a bunch of fuming about the web recently about the rumor of Apple removing the 3.5mm headphone jack from the next iteration of the iPhone (and presumably everything else). All of the complaints that I’ve seen so far have been of the “isn’t it thin enough already?!” variety, which I feel misses a broader issue. There seems to be an assumption that everything that Apple does to the iPhone these days is in service to making it thinner and lighter, and I guess when you look at it, the 3.5mm port and associated internal hardware is the (very small) elephant in the room. ...

I forgot to put this into the previous post about content blocking. I was at a teacher networking meeting a couple of months ago and we had some Apple folks down to talk about education. They were looking at some of the stuff coming up in iOS 9, and mentioned content blocking. Through reading and listening to followup from WWDC this year, most people had put this squarely into an ad-blocking context, but the way they were talking about it sounded a lot more like it would be usful in an instututional setting where acceptable use policies would dictate that some content be inaccessible (e.g. the myriad of stuff which educational organisations block because they are “thinking of the children!”). ...

First of all, content blocking in iOS has a ways to go. It works in Safari and Safari View Controllers, and since as far as I know these new view controllers only got added this year, most apps which use web content won’t be using them and thus won’t be filtered by blockers. Since most of the web content I consume comes via RSS readers and social media apps like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ the content isn’t filtered until they decide they want to adopt the new controllers (if they ever do). I don’t really want to push every web link out to Safari because of the overhead of then having to deal with tab management instead of just reading and swiping backwards or tapping the close button to return to a feed. ...

“This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down.” “The Hobbit”, J. R. R. Tolkien This is going to be one of the rare times I write about education, but also technology. As a teacher, it can be quite difficult to get out of the rut of doing the same old thing. Pressures from trying to cover everything in the curriculum, making lessons accessible to a variety of types of learners, looking for new ideas from behind a bunch of marking, the need to keep parity with other classes so that assessments are relatively manageable to organize and consistent; basically planning for new things can be a struggle. ...

Since I got one of the original Pebbles which came out as a Kickstarter project I’ve been interested in the smart watch movement. Pebble did a lot of things really well (which I’ll look at shortly) despite the limitations placed upon them by the platform I was interested in (iOS). Since then (and probably prior to as well) there have been a slew of different devices which integrate with your phone. Broadly I think these fit into a couple of categories: fitness tracking, and phone interaction. ...