I couldn't handle the heat of the battle and missed three Sundays, I'll be working on myself.
The past few weeks have been all about bug fixing. There are currently 150 users in TF, about 60 of whom regularly use the app and, as a result, find problems. Overall, I want to say that releasing a build on TF and publicly announcing it was the best decision. We would never have found so many issues on our own as the beta testers did. And it's not just about the volume of usage, although that plays a part too. macOS is not iOS, and each user's device is different from the next. Some have little space, others have usual stuff located in non-standard paths—there are numerous variations.
Testing, or even just describing all these conditions ourselves would have been impossible. The product would definitely have gone to release under-tested. So, my advice— if you can release a beta build earlier, do it, it's worth it.
One of the testers, for example, noticed that when switching from light to dark theme and vice versa, the app doesn't change the entire UI, just parts of it. After a restart, everything goes back to normal. It would have been unpleasant to release with such a bug.
Taking rest...
As programmers are known to do, when they rest—they program. To distract myself from the cleaner and various tricky bugs, I spent a couple of days writing a tool that I've long wanted but couldn't find anywhere.
Since I decided not to take it too seriously, I wasn't too concerned about performance and code optimization. At one point, the app crashed after using nearly 7GB of memory in just a couple of minutes :) An autoreleasepool in the right place somewhat mitigated the situation. Despite the power of modern computers (the app is for Mac), it's very easy to write something that's not just slow, but completely non-functional due to resource limitations. So, if you thought with an M1/2/3 and tons of memory you don't need to learn algorithms—I've got a surprise for you :)
It's too early to show what I've actually achieved, so let's keep the suspense :)
Since the weather has radically improved and it's gotten warm, I decided to spend most of the day working outdoors. Right away, I encountered a problem forgotten over the winter—on the sun, nothing can be seen on the MacBook's monitor. At all. Light mode and brightness turned up to the max only allow for some visibility when sitting facing the sun. I have to sit in a cap and wait for Apple to finally make a monitor with sufficient brightness...
I thought it would be good to ask on Twitter what I should write about since I'm having doubts whether to write anything besides these Sunday notes. Immediately, I received a request to write about animations, likely due to a few that I posted earlier from the cleaner. I'm considering this, perhaps along with the blog, it would indeed be worthwhile to write thematic notes occasionally.
Keyboards
I once heard that "When boys grow up, their toys just get more expensive." This is how I justify buying a Porsche a bunch of new switches and keycaps for one of my mechanical keyboards. For those out of the loop, there's this affliction—instead of buying a regular keyboard, buying a mechanical one. It's heavy, noisy, and usually lights up like a Christmas tree. I'm not very good at explaining why it's necessary, so just take a look at a few: Pinterest
This week, I found a store with keyboards where you can order a few switch and keycap options for testing, and then buy what you need once you decide. Yesterday, I received 16 switch options and 4 keycap variants :) It feels like childhood when you go to the tree to pick up gifts in the morning :) I feel like it's going to be hard for my family to get my attention this weekend…
That's it until next time, hopefully next Sunday :)