Rob Fahrni

I love road trips. Last Saturday our youngest daughter and I started a cross country trip to move her back to California, from Virginia. It’s the second trip we’ve made across the country in less than a year.

Today I’m resting up, visiting with some family, properly distanced of course, then I’m back on the road tomorrow.

The time alone, without social media, is really good for me, especially now.

It makes me think of a simpler time. A time we didn’t have the internet or smartphones. A time when it took a while to get the news.

For four days I was mostly detached from the world. It made me want to find a remote place on some land and forget technology. Of course that feeling was fleeting. I’m obviously on my phone now, typing out this post.

We made it to our destination, Visalia, California, around 3PM.

I rest tonight and tomorrow. Back on the road Thursday for the return trip home.

Welcome to California.

We’re in the homestretch today: Kingman, Arizona to Visalia, California.

Stopping for gas and some chow in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I love the desert.

Amarillo, Texas, bound for Kingman, Arizona today.

We’ve arrived in Amarillo, Texas.

Today’s journey started in Memphis, Tennessee.

Time for some much needed sleep.

Stopped in Ozark, Arkansas, for lunch. Getting really fancy chow. Taco Bell!

Just west of Little Rock. Moving our youngest daughter back to California.

Welcome to the modern definition of a “mobile developer.”

If you know JavaScript you’re golden. It’s no longer about native apps, it’s about leveraging web tech, and getting the most bang for your buck.

Learn the JavaScript if you want to have a job moving forward. Personally, if I were to use a cross platform development platform I’d probably choose Flutter.

Scripting News: “MLB should shut down, as should the NBA and NFL.”

I agree with Dave. This virus is just too dangerous to flirt with.

We should also shut down schools until this this mess is over. All that’s ever mentioned is how resilient kids are to the virus. What about their parents and teachers? Think of the wild fire that would turn into? We’d have to shut down schools anyway.

I bet a lot of modern day developers would look at my code and say “You should find another like of work.”

“We have great agreements where when Biden and Obama used to bring killers out, they would say don’t bring them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well, we have to, we don’t want them. They wouldn’t take them. Now with us, they take them. Someday, I’ll tell you why. Someday, I’ll tell you why. But they take them and they take them very gladly. They used to bring them out and they wouldn’t even let the airplanes land if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t let the buses into their country. They said we don’t want them. Said no, but they entered our country illegally and they’re murderers, they’re killers in some cases.” – Donald J. Trump, July 14, 2020

That is a direct quote from the sitting President of the United States.

He opened his mouth and words came out. I recognized all the words as English words but there is no structure. Can anyone follow along? I certainly can’t.

Republicans, you’ve had your stooge in office for three plus years. You got your tax cuts for the rich. You didn’t convict in the Senate. A virus is raging across our wonderful country killing thousands every day.

How much death and destruction is enough?

Get it while you can, chredge.xyz (short for Chromium Edge) is expiring.

Perfect for a blog that tracks privacy violations of the two browsers.

Just riffing here, random thoughts.

Thin, think iPad Pro 12.9in in a 13in form. Full keyboard, similar to today’s. The new design reminiscent of the iPad Pro designs. Edge to edge crisp display. It’s a convertible, which means you can flip the display over the back of the computer and it becomes a tablet. It’ll be about as thick as and weigh as much as the 12in MacBook.

Completely touch aware. Support for Apple Pencil. FaceID will be supported. No fan. As fast as, if not faster than, a modern 16in MacBook Pro. A battery life of 15-hours (10 under heavy load.)

The Mac Mini is an obvious place to make a huge difference in price performance. The question is, will Apple make a screaming fast Mac Mini for a good price? My guess is no. It will continue to be a low end option. It will get a new design and be about the size of the Apple TV. Fast. Quiet.

The iMac and iMac Pro – if the pro continues to be a thing – will not have touch support but will get a new design. Edge to edge display. FaceID. Fast. Quiet.

The Mac Pro design will remain as is for a while. A long while. It was designed to take us into the future. My big question here is, is the design going to work for replacing the CPU with a new Apple Silicon SoC?

The new lineup, with the modern design, will be Apple Silicon only. The price for the 16in and new 13in (14?) will increase. All devices with Apple Silicon will increase in price. Anyone believing Apple will drop the price because they’re in charge of everything, thus costing less to make, is dreaming. Apple only increases prices for new items.

The Intel based lineup will continue for a period of time as the inexpensive option in the lineup and will eventually fade out.

I feel like the Apple Silicon announcement really solidified my thoughts around the lines between iPad and MacBook. I had predicted the announcement of a 12in iOS laptop I’d dubbed iBook. That didn’t happen. But Apple Silicon Macs are so much better than my mythical iBook. True Pro developer hardware and OS. Full access to the computer. Everything we need to make excellent Mac and iOS applications.

Oh, and I really believe we’ll get a version of Windows that runs really well on Apple Silicon. It’s just a matter of time. The NT kernel, and all of Windows for that matter, are very portable and already run on ARM chips.

I wish a movie studio was brave enough to stream a blockbuster movie.

It’s a beautiful day here in Charlottesville. The birds are chirping, the squirrels are foraging and jumping around in the trees, and I’m sitting on our porch with the dogs sipping coffee trying to take it all in, but my brain has other ideas.

I’m thinking about the cross platform application I’ve wanted to write for, geez, 20-years. I’d estimated, based on my skill set and how slowly I code, it would take at least 10-years to complete. (Why am I so obsessed with this idea?)

As I sit here I’m asking myself, why bother? By the time I finish folks probably won’t care about native, high performance, native desktop and mobile applications.

Apple is still pushing native and this app would target iPad and Mac but it will also target Windows. At least that is what I’m thinking. Microsoft gave up on native desktop apps a long time ago. Sure, they’ve introduced WinUI 3 recently but they’re pushing Electron apps fairly hard. Heck, why not, VSCode is Electron and it’s amazing. I couldn’t do that.

I really do not care to be a web developer but at some point I’m going to either become one or do something completely different to earn a living. Owning a coffee shop is something I’ve often considered.

I’m tired. Aging. Tired of working for other people. That, I think, is my biggest frustration. I’d always imagined myself as a successful indie software developer. Just a one person shop, a lifestyle job. Make something, sell something, repeat.

If I happen to find a truckload of cash laying around it could change my math. Until then I’ll continue to fight with my brain.

Here’s hoping I win. 😀

(Please forgive my brain dump. This is but a small taste of what’s going on in my head, daily.)

Wow, my first iOS App was available in the App Store 11 years ago today.

Happy birthday RxCalc. 🎂

I’ve kicked out a beta of Stream with Import/Export and extra icons supported. I’ve already received some very useful feedback and need to make a decision about implementing those requests.

As it stands I understand the feedback I’ve received but I desperately want to ship Stream. The items that seem most requested are bookmarking last position in the timeline and marking an item as read.

I get it. Most feed readers have those features and some folks consider it table stakes. I may skip that for now just to get 1.0 on the store, because I really want to share it.

I can always add these two features as a 1.1 release.

I haven’t decided if that’s what I’m going to do. My beta testers have been downright amazing and I really want folks to be happy with this super simple reader.

If I don’t add these features the only thing left is to add In-App Purchase ( a tip jar) and fix a few bugs, then it’s done.

Here’s to shipping.

Wow, just wow!

As I was watching the Keynote I couldn’t help but get really excited about developing for the Mac. I’ve had plans off and on to get Stream running on the Mac - it actually does run on the Mac but it’s just a shell of app. The current Mac implementation is using AppKit. I really wanted to learn AppKit because it’s how all the lovely apps we use today are built. Think of Safari (the UI at least), Photoshop (the UI), and my favorites like Twitterrific, Day One, Tot (I’m writing this post with it), NetNewsWire, and BBEdit all use AppKit and the list goes on and on and on. It’s the Mac equivalent of Win32 (A.K.A. Windows API.) It’s tried and true. And until now it was the obvious choice for building an app for the Mac.

The Grizzled Veteran

What I heard: “If you have an AppKit app keep on plugging away but consider mixing in SwiftUI.”

AppKit is going to live on. Makes complete sense to me. You can’t just drop a framework serving, I’d imagine, thousands of apps in the wild. Some of the most popular applications on the Mac use this framework, like I mentioned in my opening paragraph. I failed to mention Microsoft’s Office apps. They’re really popular.

Something else to consider. Large portions of the operating system use AppKit. It seems a waste of time to go through the entire operating system and replace all that working code with SwiftUI, doesn’t it?

Remember that old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” A lot of folks will adopt that saying and Apple can’t just drop AppKit on the floor. At least for now.

AppKit will be around for the foreseeable future. When Apple shows that slide with a hint you should start moving your app to SwiftUI, then you know time is short. Until then keep on keeping on and make sure that new code is written in SwiftUI.

The Utility Player

UIKit is the the most popular framework Apple has ever created. Today’s iOS App Store is full of apps built entirely on UIKit. You can’t make an app without using it - directly or indirectly.

When Apple announces they used Catalyst to bring Messages - which has to be one of the most used UIKit applications on iOS - to the Mac you have to listen.

What I heard: “If you have a great iPad App today and want to get it on the Mac, use Catalyst.”

Indeed. Use Catalyst. Seems pretty obvious.

Again, this technology should be good until AppKit is no longer a thing on the Mac. That’ll take years and years, if it happens at all.

The Rookie

SwiftUI has a lot of promise. It’s definitely Apple’s preferred way of creating applications moving forward. The abstract nature of it means you get most of the work you need for each platform by coding it once. We’re not talking Java’s promise of write once run anywhere. That obviously didn’t work. We’ve come a long way since then and Apple is definitely pushing the boundaries. Will you have #if’s in your Swift code? Absolutely. Is that a horrible thing? No, it is not. It’s a small price to pay to get your application on all of Apple’s platforms.

What I heard: “If you’re building a new application, use SwiftUI. It’s the way forward.”

This changes my calculation for bringing Stream to the Mac. Since it’s in its infancy on the Mac I’m switching to SwiftUI. Once it is completed on the Mac I’ll bring that code back to the iOS version and it’ll stay that way.

The project I’ve always wanted to build will be built from the ground up using SwiftUI for the user experience. That’s just how it has to be to keep it viable for years to come.

Until I’m retired - read as dead - I’m going to invest in SwiftUI.

I’m genuinely surprised Trump hasn’t contracted COVID-19.

I wonder how many tests he’s had? Is that documented anywhere?

I’m very happy with the new Stream icons.

I finally kicked a new BETA of Stream out the door this evening.

It includes the final release icons. Yes, icons, plural. You can pick your favorite under Settings.

Thanks for testing!

Finished hauling the dirt down the hill a bit ago. Sweaty and pooped but it feels great to be physically tired.