Tag Archive for ios

Maybe Dreamwidth is as Good as it Gets

July 6, 2019 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

Like so many others, I keep getting depressed by the state of social media. I keep hoping that there’s gonna be a good platform with:

  1. A non-trivial number of people I’m interested in following;
  2. With a non-sucky UI; and
  3. A reasonable stance on Nazis (for me, “reasonable” = “we don’t allow them here”).

Facebook blows, but it has all the people.

Tumblr was my second-favourite platform, but it clearly isn’t surviving the Verizoning.

Google+ is dead. Not many people, but good communities.

MeWe is all Freezed Peach!

I tried Minds the other day and it immediately recommended that I follow Jordan Peterson.

Twitter doesn’t lend itself to the kinds of conversations I want to have. I think it’d need some privacy controls and much better search.

Dreamwidth is great. Except that:

  1. It has a really clunky UI; and
  2. It’s a bit of a ghost town.

So, I’ve resuscitated my interest in building an iOS app so that I can access my reading list more easily. Dreamwidth is making it hard, ’cause their APIs are pretty-much non-existent. I’ve finally solved all of the hardest of problems. Maybe I’ll be able to love it more if I have better access.

Are you an iOS person? Would you be interested in giving an iOS app a whirl as a beta tester?

Dreamwidth for iOS

December 31, 2016 BC Holmes Uncategorized No comments

Shortly after WisCon, I decided that I wanted to be able to work with my Dreamwidth journal on my iPhone. An iOS app seemed like a natural thing that should exist in the world and, conveniently, I know how to make one.

Sadly, I was quickly impeded by the state of the existing API. The API was designed in another age: back before Rest/JSON, and at a time when people expected “LJ/DW clients” to be desktop apps that’d download all your entries for off-line reading. There are some glaring omissions from the API (and it’s certainly… old-timey).

But, hey, it’s open source, no? I mean, I suppose I could send them a pull request. True, I don’t really know Perl and find that LAMP development is about five times harder than it should be. But, hey, minor stuff.

Over the summer, I started talking to some of the folks at Dreamwidth about this, and that started me into conversations about a new Rest/JSON API and whatnot. But progress on that front has been slow. Which I get. They have their own priorities, and some weirdo from the Internet is pestering them with, “hey, if you added an X I could make you a Y.” I just think it’s a Y that’s interesting.

A few days ago, I was hit with another urge to work on the Dreamwidth iOS app, and I built out a quick app that implements some of the basic functions. I can login, see my recent entries, view some basic profile information, and post a simple entry. That’s not nothing.

But I’m still stuck with those API limitations that seem to prevent me from really making this thing useful. Le sigh.

WisSched on iPad

November 6, 2012 BC Holmes Geek One comment

Yesterday, I submitted a new binary to Apple: there’s no WisCon 37 content, but I don’t want to wait until the last minute to get functional changes in place. There are a few new features, but the primary changes relate to iPhone 5 support and iPad functionality.

Here’s my favourite new piece, specific to the iPad:

The layout is dynamic: that is to say, that given all the panels, rooms, and timeslots, I’m able to lay it all out programmatically. There are tricky elements: multiple rooms that act as one room for certain events. The Gathering is sometimes considered to be multiple events that all take place in one room. And I want to do a second pass on my algorithm for time labels (what do you show when multiple time slots overlap?) But I’m mostly happy with the final result.

It’ll probably take 2 weeks before Apple approves it.