I’m really not sure what else there is to say about Bully. The game, when it was originally released, scored an impressive 87 on Metacritic, and it’s only gotten better over the years with the various visual improvements and minor gameplay additions. If you missed Bully when it was first released on the PlayStation 2, then skipped it again when it was re-released on other platforms, don’t miss this new re-remastered iteration. Hell, I’d say the entirety of the Rockstar iOS catalog is worth owning, and Bully: Anniversary Edition is no different.

Continuing with their tradition of releasing past console classics on mobile around Christmas, usually on the 10 year anniversary of the games, Rockstar are now releasing “Bully” on iOS and Android. I loved this game when I first played it on PS2 (it was known as “Canis Canem Edit” in PAL regions), so I’m expecting much of the same on mobile.

To date, Rockstar have ported:

• Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, 2010
• Grand Theft Auto III, 2011
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, 2012
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 2013
• Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, 2015

I watched the first episode of Top Gear The Grand Tour a few days ago. I’m not going to write a full review of the episode - I’ll leave that to others - but I will summarize my thoughts below:

The intro showed just how big the budget is for the show

Seriously, just watch the opening sequence.

The “Star in a reasonably priced car” segment looks like it’s gone

Adios, you won’t be missed.

The studio segments need work

I thought some sketches went on for far too long, and the presenters themselves seemed nervous. First episode nerves are to be expected though.

The ‘tour’ is a great idea

New episode, new location, new audience, new tracks, new cars. This almost guarantees that each epiosde will be unique and have it’s own distict feel to it.

Chemistry is everything

I watch the show not for the car reviews, but for the presenters themselves. That is something that Top Gear now has a major challenge in replicating.

David Sparks:

Here’s a new one. The last week I’ve started getting occasional spam-based calendar invites. Be careful out there.

This vulnerability will surely be fixed by Apple pretty soon. It’s crazy to think about the amount of devices that got these notifications.

What a ridiculously successful four years Volkwagen had in the World Rally Championship.

The highlights:

• 43 wins in 52 rallies
• Topped the Drivers’ and Co-Drivers’ Championship for an uninterrupted 986 days
• Topped Manufacturers’ standings for 1346 days in a row
• Won 12 rallies in a row on two seperate occasions

It’s a shame to see a team that are so dominant leave the WRC based on other issues with the company. It will be a real test for Sébastien Ogier next season to retain his title with a different car and team behind him for the first time.

Matt Gemmell:

But there’s also another way. And don’t pretend that you can’t see the writing on the wall. The Mac, and the traditional desktop computing paradigm, is dying. I think Apple wants it to die, rightly so. And most normal people don’t even care. In a generation, they’ll barely remember. That’s a sobering thought.

I have a strong feeling about which way the wind is blowing, figuratively speaking, and I’m not going to wait until my hand is forced; I’m jumping now. Because I have the luxury of being able to, and because I think this is what I’ve wanted since before I was a writer, and before I was a software engineer previously, and before I knew how to use a pointing device despite already having ten of them. Since before anyone ever told me I should.

Probably the best justification of a tablet over a PC that I have read. Matts theory on the fate of PCs over the next few years is a bit depressing, but hard to argue with.

When I created this website last year, I decided that I wanted to have more control over how the content gets generated and how the site looked. I went with a blogging engine called ‘Camel’, developed by Casey Liss¹. This allowed me to get my hands dirty with some web development without having to dive in completely at the deep end. Eleven months on, and a few enhancements later however - I wanted something different.

Problems with Camel

Camel is a small, open source project that was developed to fit the needs of it’s developer. It’s fine to use as long as your needs remain the same as Caseys, but if you want to stray away from the master branch of that project you are accepting a responsibility to keeping the engine running smoothly if any of its (many) dependencies change or are discontinued.

And there lies the problem I had with it. A relatively simple task like adding tag support to posts can soon become a tricky task in a custom JavaScript engine like Camel. It also adds a level of complexity which I don’t really want to deal with. If I wanted that kind of control over my site I would write an engine myself.

Another issue (although not directly related to Camel) is using Heroku to host the website. Heroku is very easy to set up and is also very functional, but it has two problems. One issue I had was with Dropbox sync. Several times, Dropbox sync stopped working when attempting deployments on Heroku. This meant that each time this happened I had to re-link my whole project which often meant I was left with a whole duplicate project. Another issue is the limitations with free usage of Heroku. Because I wasn’t prepared to pay for the service ² , for periods during the app on which the website runs was going into a sleep mode. During these periods it would take longer than expected to load web pages - and that’s annoying when it happens literally every other hour.

Benefits of Jekyll

Jekyll is really simple. It generates a static website with each build, so there is no need for a database or any sort of querying to view posts. At any given time the whole website is contained in HTML files within the ‘_site’ folder. The pages are generated using templating which is similar to Camel, and posts are written in Markdown. Jekyll uses Liquid templating which allows easy support of tagging and categories, which is something which would have been a pain to to add in Camel.

Another benefit of using Jekyll is it’s close link to GitHub Pages ³. With Pages, I can host the website in its own public repository. Any code changes or new blog posts are commited to GitHub just like any other project which makes tracking changes easy. GitHub Pages doesn’t suffer from the pricing model limitations that Heroku does which I mentioned above. So far I’ve had zero issues with it.

The use of YAML front matter and variables make it easy to add features like pagination, recent posts, archive pages and more. With all of this built in, there is almost no limitations to what you can add to a website, and most importantly - it’s all documented. Right now it ticks all the boxes for me. I’ll revisit this in another year and see if that’s still the case.

Instapaper:

Before, some of our greatest features were limited to Instapaper Premium subscribers. Now that we’re better resourced, we’re able to offer everyone the best version of Instapaper. Starting today, all users will have access to:

• An ad-free Instapaper website
• Full-text search for all articles
• Unlimited Notes
• Text-to-speech playlists
• Unlimited speed reading
• “Send to Kindle” via bookmarklet and mobile apps
• Kindle Digests of up to 50 articles

Makes a great service even better.

As expected, Apple announced their latest updates to the Mac line in yesterdays “Hello Again” event. I didn’t watch the event myself, but I caught up with people’s opinions on the announcements this morning. Some of the highlights:

Michael Tsai was dissapointed with the announcments:

The new MacBook Pro has a premium price for a Mac that’s still limited to 16 GB of RAM, has CPU performance that is likely lackluster because Apple didn’t talk about it in the keynote, and apparently doesn’t have such a great GPU, either. Apple prioritized thinness and lightness, which I care about hardly at all. I would rather have better performance, a good keyboard, more storage, a larger display, more ports so I don’t have to carry dongles, an SD card slot, etc. Double the weight and half the battery life would be fine with me. I’m not saying Apple shouldn’t make thin and light notebooks, but why do they all have to be that way?

Stephen Hackett liked the new Touch Bar, but pointed out that Apple still haven’t addressed their full lineup - most notably their desktops:

The notebook line is pretty confusing right now. There are several machines — ahem, MacBook Air — that seem to exist to hit a price point. I understand and respect that, but I am already dreading offering buying advice over the next year.

But there’s a bigger problem. Apple may have fixed what was wrong with its notebook line, but the Mac is still broken. Just look at the MacRumors Buyer’s Guide:

Marco Arment mentioned the elephant in the room - price:

The substantial price increases are putting a big damper on these announcements for a lot of people.

— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) October 27, 2016

Genarally speaking, these are some good updates to the MacBook line. The new Touch Bar looks like a great way to add an extra user input option in a less clumsy way than a touch screen, and they are thinner, lighter and faster than ever before.

But all that aside, there’s no getting away from the price. The cheapest MacBook Pro with the new Touch Bar is €2099. TWO THOUSAND AND NINETY NINE EURO ¹.

Macs were never cheap, but I think at this price point, Apple has raised the bar to a price point that just can’t be justified by many people, myself included. This is the exact opposite of what the Mac needs right now, and obviously won’t help their struggling mac sales.

The Mac already seems like it’s a bit of an afterthought at Apple. Spending that sort of money on a product that most likely won’t see a meaningful update for a long time seems like a bad move. I won’t be abandoning my ‘101’ any time soon.

I’m terrible when it comes to design and fashion, or anything even remotely related to them. So when it comes to making changes around those areas, I am a little…uneasy.

I recently made slight changes to the appearance of the blog. This is something I imagine I will do fairly regularly as it evolves, until I’m happy with a particular design ¹. The main change I wanted to try out was a darker background. I’m a big fan of dark themes in software applications. They are easier on the eye, and in my opinion they just look better. For that reason, I wanted to try out a dark background. It may not be to everyones taste but I wanted to see if it holds up after a couple of weeks of use.

I recently came across an article by Matt Gemmell from a few years back entitled “Designing blogs for readers”. In it, he details how the design of his own blog has evolved through the previous decade(!), starting out with a cluttered design full of every possible widget known to man, and eventually working it’s way to a simple design with the reader in mind. He then goes on to document his own set of guidlelines for blog readibility. Of those, I violate:

• Date-based index pages
• A feed button
• Background textures or colours

These are relatively minor things, and I’m not too bothered about them. I like date indices. I’m in the (presumable) minority in the fact that I regularly use date indexes when visiting blogs that have them. The RSS button on my header is hardly neccesary, but again is pretty useful to have available on each page ². As discussed above, I like darker themes, so having a background colour to me is often seen as a good thing.

Matt definitely has some great points in his post, but it’s ok to put your own stamp on what is essentially your website.

There is still plenty of things that I would like to try out on the site, such as footers, linked lists, recent posts, a logo, more experimentation with blogging engines and publishing with Apple News. That’s more than enough to keep me busy. I may end up linking this post sometime in the future to show how right or wrong I was, or how lazy I am for not following up.

David Smith:

Four years ago today I introduced a weather app called Check the Weather. I was really proud of how it turned out. It was my first app where I was able to do everything ‘right’ from the beginning. It was localized, had solid VoiceOver support and had an actual marketing plan to get it off the ground.

Sadly, however, the time has come to discontinue support for the app. The cost of providing weather data to it has grown too large to sustain. It has been operating at a slight loss for the last 2 years, which I didn’t mind providing as I used the app myself. However, a recent change in the pricing for my radar data provider has made it infeasible to continue providing weather data for the app.

Check the Weather has been my go to weather app for the past few years. It’s a shame to see it go.