36 Hours…

I bought my current iPhone on 30 September 2013—over 7 years ago. My iPhone 5S has served me well throughout the years but for the last fourteen months or so, I have been chafing over the inability to upgrade my phone to the latest Operating System. I knew then that, despite preferring the finger login, it was time for an upgrade or the massive, up-front cost.

However, I wasn’t ready just yet. Then SARS-CoV-2 happened, I had to quit my job for more money. Then COVIDWISE was released, and yet totally incompatible with my phone! This wan’t even the first app I was unable to download requiring Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. I was becoming more and more distressed over my inability to install the apps I so desperately wanted—even more so having forgotten some of them with no way to bookmark or remember. And, as an App Developer, I really should have the latest gear to test out the latest technologies.

iPhone 12 Pro Max ½TB, Blue
iPhone 12 Pro Max ½TB, Blue

On 10 July, with my final vacation payout, I decided it was time to upgrade. I knew a new Phone was coming soon—and hoped it would add 5G support. I waited. The September Apple event came with no update. The October Apple event came with an announcement but you still couldn’t buy the iPhone 12 Pro. The date on the order page said I had to wait until 23 October for that. So I waited so more. I got up early on that Friday and, yes, the iPhone 12 Pro was available, but not the 12 Pro Max! I had to wait until 6 November for that!

And I did.

The phone is on its way. 36 hours and counting…

iPhone 12 Pro Max in Transit
iPhone 12 Pro Max in Transit

Keep coding my friends and write great software. I hope you will be as gainfully employed as me, soon!

I’m Running Late Setback: Can’t Send Texts in the Background

Originally, I wanted to implement an texting in the background for the I’m Running Late iOS app. After all, the whole idea of the app is that you may be stuck in traffic and not really in any position to send the I’m Running Late while you’re driving or otherwise indisposed in transit. If you in the car, for instance, sending that text, even if it just means clicking the Send Button, is dangerous. It totally defeats the purpose.

The idea of I’m Running Late is it’s a background process like cron for the iPhone. It just programs events based on the clock and your calendar, then, when the grace period begins, if your Sat Nav notices you’re not within a prescribed number of meters from your event location, it automatically informs the host—or your boss—that you’re running late.

How is this not a thing?

It’s not a thing because Apple‘s philosophy is, if you can send one text without consent, you will be able to spam infinite texts without consent. But, the thing is, the App Review team should be able to detect of an app was abusing the option to text without consent, so why prevent this safety feature when you could just stop it from being abused?

For the record, texting without consent is a safety feature. When you’re driving to an Event, it’s dangerous to have to look at your phone and hit a consent button. Forcing the user to do so may even violate some state laws. Yet, you want to send the text because you are running late, yet you can’t because you’re stuck in traffic.

Sadly, you need a user interaction to send an email too.

With both options stupidly closed by Apple, making this very important use case at first impossible to solve, the only option left is to send the text via a GET Query, for example, to a web service, and rely on the web service to send the text.

One such service is Twilio. Twilio seems to be the leader in Web to SMS transactions. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Twilio is a paid service and I’m still trying to figure out how this service works. I created an account and want to test it, but if all users of I’m Running Late are going to be using the service, I’m sure I will have to set it up as a business account.

One possibility I’m considering is having a monthly fee to use I’m Running Late, that I can use to pay Twilio for the use of their service. However, I want the fee to be small, like 15¢ per user per month. And then, say if Twilio costs $15 per month for one hundred users, then one hundred I’m Running Late users would completely cover the cost and I won’t need to let TimeHorse, LLC go further into debt.

The question is, though, what if I have less than one hundred users. In that case, I may have to disable the service or come up with some poor-man version on this very server. Initially, all text message requests could come here, and when the numbers crack one hundred, I can tell I’m Running Late to switch to the Twilio server.

On the other hand, maybe I’m going about this all wrong. IIRC, all Teslas are running Linux. And if the Tesla is connected to the driver’s Phone, and it knows the time, and it has the Phone’s calendar, then surely it could have an app that texts the Event organizer when the driver is running late.

And I could write that code!

Hear that Tesla? You could be bidding on me, because I’m still available for hire but my rates are going up with all the offers!

You can have any star you want, as long it is gold

One huge flaw with Google‘s iPhone app for Gmail is that it doesn’t support multiple star types. You are only allowed a gold star, while with the computer-based web interface, you can have many different colour stars, warning, and other alerts.

This is a huge oversight in the GMail app compounded by the fact that the applications like Safari, which allow the user to simulate Desktop browsing crash when you activate the standard web interface and try to select a star colour other than gold.

It used to be you could just open up a desktop browser session to manually set the star level but now even that doesn’t work and still the app can’t handle it.

Stars are a very useful aspect to GMail. With stars you can denote more than just that an email is important, but why it is important. For instance, I like to use the blue stars for coupons. I don’t want to mix coupons in with stars to indicate a SpamGourmet email address is about to expire.

This, in my opinion, is a major flaw to the Apple iOS GMail app and I hope someday they add an option to modify star type because I had to spend two hours today unable get my coveted blue star and ended up having to get out of bed and go to the computer just for this very simple action.

As a software, I know they could do better. As a software engineer, I may just end up doing better. Thanks to the Python interface to Google, I likely will do better.

So unless they want to hire me, bugger you, Google!