Chris Hannah

I’ve been getting annoyed recently with the amount of simulators I had installed in Xcode at work. But I’ve come across a really simple command that will fix this automatically.

I had 10.1, 10.2, 11.0. 11.1, and 11.2 installed, which I then reduced to just two of them. Then instead of painfully selecting and deleting each generated simulator, I just typed this:

fastlane snapshot reset_simulators

It uses Fastlane’s Snapshot tool, and what it does is delete all of your current simulators, and generate a set of new ones depening on the current SDKs you have installed.

The avatar images “work”!

I have them displaying properly, downloading properly, and also using placeholders when it hasn’t been downloaded yet.

Images also cache up to a predefined limit, and are stored with the URL as a key.

The only thing left, is to then update whatever is presenting the placeholder image, when the real one has finished downloading.

A few months ago, I started working on my own analytics service for my blog. I did this for many reasons, but ultimately for control and user privacy.

I only actually ever store four pieces of data:

• Website Title
• URL
• Referral URL (Only if it’s been given)
• Date Accessed

So while there’s not much data there, I can track everything I need, so like visits per day, per post, and I can get an idea of where traffic is coming from.

There have been occasions where the service, which I named “Minilytics”, has gone down though, so I can’t say I’ve tracked all the visits. But I’ve got a few things to share.

Performance

I made nice SQL query that shows me the performance of the site for each day. I use the view count for that day, and run it through a few conditions that will then output a string that I’ve manually set up. It’s not as exact as viewing the view count, but much easier to visualise.

Monthly View Count

Again, this isn’t totally accurate as these numbers may be higher and it hasn’t tracked them. But this simple count of views from each month, is a good way to check the general increase/decrease in visits over time.

I’m going to try writing some more queries soon, and see what other insights I can pull from the data. But overall I think the site has been getting a lot more traffic recently! Especially since I moved the blog over to WordPress a few days ago. My guess is that the WordPress installation has better meta tags, descriptions, and stuff that search engines like.

Matthew Panzarino writing for TechCrunch:

Because of a Reddit post and the loose interpretation of subsequent benchmark tests posted by Primate Labs’ John Poole, the “Apple throttles old iPhones” meme has reared its ugly head again.

The gist, as it always is, is that Apple is being super petty and trying to force customers to upgrade their phones by making their old phones run slower.

As always, the answer is no. It would be beyond stupid and incredibly short-sighted for Apple to do this and, if it was actually true, would likely lead to tangles of a governmental and legal nature that no company like Apple would ever want to happen.

Instead, Apple is focusing attention on smoothing out the very high and quick peaks of power draw that can cause problems with older batteries.

Here is the statement Apple gave them:

Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.

Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.

I understand the transparency was probably the biggest issue here, especially as knowing hardware manufacturer will eventually slow down your devices without you knowing isn’t a good thing.

However, what Apple actually did, with slowing down performance in certain peaks to ensure the battery lasted longer, and in some cases didn’t unexpectedly turn off, is a good thing.

One solution would be to alert the users that had a bad performing battery, and then offered them to switch on a power management feature, and maybe even have a link to the iPhone section of the Apple Store!