A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff.
There is a new version of my recipe app in the App Store today and with it a new icon.
As well a dark mode version:
There have been a lot of new features since the app was first released and I’m very pleased with how things have progressed. If you give Mercury a try and I hope you will (the first 5 recipes are free) please give it a 5-star rating in the App Store. There’s a link to “rate the app” right in the settings menu.
This morning I woke up to news that Apple has approved my new recipe app, Mercury. The special thing about Mercury is that it harnesses on-device A.I.1 to import recipes from your favourite recipe sites. The app also sports an achievement reward system that tracks user actions in app and provides 35 different awards. There is a grocery list page for any given recipe as well as a deletion back-up system that holds deleted recipes for 30 days in case you change your mind.
Download it now at the App Store and if you’re so inclined, I would appreciate your positive ratings to help get the word out on this labor of love.
I’ve been having some major problems with the site over the past few days. Three nights ago I discovered that all the posts newer than January 15th from the last week were being wiped each day1.
The errors started after I updated the Jetpack plugin and while that doesn’t prove anything, I was never happy with Jetpack anyway so I decided to see if Claude.ai was up to the task of rolling a fresh stats plugin and to my surprise and delight: I can now present WP-Milner-Stats, a lightweight post view tracking plugin with day, week, month, year, and multi-year breakdowns. No external services; no bloat; and after disabling Jetpack: no more missing posts.
I’ve been busy making updates to my app Five O’Clock Somewhere and today the newest version 1.0.4 has been approved and is available on the US and Canadian app stores. This new version includes maps of the various locations where it is currently happy hour!
If you enjoy the app, please consider adding a review.
The newest version of my cocktail recipe app, Five O’Clock Somewhere, is available on the App Store. This version has some minor bug fixes and capitalization standardization throughout the ingredients.
I know him from his podcast Under the Radar and this story has been shared on air but David “Underscore” Smith’s tale of how building an iOS app changed his life is a fantastic story you shouldn’t miss. It even made me want to be an indie developer.
David Smith on what it feels like to win the App Store lottery:
The initial response to the app was warm but nothing out of the ordinary. Widgetsmith was the 59th app I had launched so I’d been through this process a lot over the preceding twelve years of indie app development. Typically you see a little swell of interest in the first few days. Then things settle down into a stable level and you move onto the maintenance and gradual improvement of the app.
This was what I thought would happen with Widgetsmith and the indications for the first few days were that this was exactly what would happen.
[…]
It wasn’t until we got back from our walk that I had my first indication that something was up. Someone reached out to me on Twitter saying they’d seen Widgetsmith getting mentioned on TikTok. I click through to the video they linked to and discovered that there was a walkthrough video by Katarina Mogus which was going viral at the moment.
Widgetsmith now has around 131 million downloads.
I loved this article by Professor Piers Gelly on “what happened when I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT”:
“Like many teachers at every level of education, I have spent the past two years trying to wrap my head around the question of generative AI in my English classroom. To my thinking, this is a question that ought to concern all people who like to read and write, not just teachers and their students. Today’s English students are tomorrow’s writers and readers of literature. If you enjoy thoughtful, consequential, human-generated writing—or hope for your own human writing to be read by a wide human audience—you should want young people to learn to read and write.
[…]
At the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether AI could replace me.”
I’ve upgraded the N-dashes in the blockquote above to M-dashes. I’m told this has become a tell-tale sign of the use of large language models. I take it as a sign that even if my writing isn’t the greatest, at least I’m doing something right.
See also Why Did a $10 Billion Startup Let Me Vibe-Code for Them—and Why Did I Love It?1
I just finished Day 100 of the #100DaysOfSwiftUI at https://www.hackingwithswift.com/100/swiftui/100
I’m pleased that I got through it and while it’s true I didn’t complete every point on all of the challenge days, I learned a ton and have been putting together some neat little apps which I’m thinking would be fun to get on the App Store soon.
I wanted to create a home for my new Random Posts Widget — and so I guess this post is it. I created it with the help of AI and I’m pleased with the result. There are some other WordPress plugins that do the same thing but this one uses modern code1.
It’s pretty straightforward, it just picks between one and 10 random posts and displays them on your WordPress site. That’s it.
Download the List of Random Posts plugin, unzip it, upload it to your wp-content/plugins/ directory and then activate it from your WordPress admin -> plugins page. After it’s live, you’ll find it in your collection of widgets which can be added on your site anywhere widgets are supported.
See the sidebar for the plugin in action.
PHP code after the jump: Continue reading “List of Random Posts Widget”
Last Thursday I officially joined Apple’s App Developer Program so although I’m anxious to start rolling out some of the apps that I’ve started putting together for now I’m still developing my skills.
I’ve been learning iOS app development through Paul Hudson’s wonderful 100 Days of SwiftUI and I just finished the Day 60 Challenge — Friend Face. I’m posting my work here in order to share my process and solidify my thinking.
Continue reading “Solving “FriendFace” – 100 Days of SwiftUI Day 60 Challenge”