Videos of Tesla's Ludicrous Mode →

Tesla announced Ludicrous mode back in July, but videos of it in action have only recently started to make the rounds.

The first one I saw was this drag race with a P85D rocking the ("meager") Insane mode. Insane mode will get you from 0-60 miles per hour in 3.1 seconds which is really really fast, but (spoiler alert) the P90D leaves it in the dust.

This next one is reaction videos of people on P90D ride alongs getting hit with Ludicrous mode without expecting it. After watching this video I immediately went and signed up for a Tesla test drive.

Why is Guinness Making an IPA →

Esquire:

Guinness' new IPA came about via The Brewer's Project, an incubator for international Guinness brewers. To play up how crafty the beer is, the 11.2 ounce can reads, "Created with passion by Luis Ortega," the company's pilot brewery manager. This is all well and fine, except that Guinness is releasing an almost unheard of "nitro" IPA, which means, it, too, will have the frothy, cascading head that made Guinness stout famous. Which is absurd! Or is it...

Mike Love - Permanent Holiday →

Incredibly Impressive. The whole song is worth listening to, but skip to 4:20 (of course) if you really want to have your socks blown off.

My Brother and I Built an iOS App in One Day

It's hard for me to believe, but my younger brother Alexander started college this year. He's studying computer programming, which is something that I know a little bit about. I thought that it might be fun for us to do a mini-hackathon together as learning experience for him, and a fun personal challenge for me. We would try our hardest to go from "nothing" to "app" over the course of a single day.

He loved the idea.

Alexander suggested that we could build a Simon clone game, which sounded perfect to me. Just enough complexity to be challenging while still being realistic for our timeframe. He arrived early on a Sunday, and we got right to work.

First we discussed what we'd like the app's features to be:

That's English, we promise

Then we put together a rough technical outline idea of what classes, methods, and properties we'd need:

A hackathon affords no time for writing neatly

And by the end of the day, I think that we were both really happy with the result:

Our game scales properly for all screen sizes from an iPhone 4s to an iPad Air, works in portrait or landscape, has sound effects, stat tracking, and is genuinely a blast to play. And by the end of the day, Alexander was writing code in Swift like he had been doing it his whole life, and pushing and pulling from git like an old pro.

Not bad for a day's work.

Simon Grid by Alexander Kaump is available now for free on the iOS App Store. Go check it out!

Let's Play: Refactor the Mega Controller! →

Killer talk by Andy Matuschak in a format that I've never seen before. It's not easy to code on your feet like this, but Andy does a great job of solving problems that we've all experienced, explaining his thought process, and providing colorful commentary on iOS frameworks all at the same time.

NSScreencast: Swift 2 Basics →

I highly recommend getting an NSScreencast subscription if you don't have one already. There's not a lot that's specific to Swift 2 in this particular video, but if you're new to Swift then it's a very good overview of the basics. It's also a nice (free!) representation of the type of video that Ben Schierman does every week for his subscribers.

Validating Your Version of Xcode →

Apple:

Whether you downloaded Xcode from Apple or received Xcode from another source, such as a USB or Thunderbolt disk, or over a local network, you can easily verify the integrity of your copy of Xcode.
To verify the identity of your copy of Xcode run the following command in Terminal on a system with Gatekeeper enabled: spctl --assess --verbose /Applications/Xcode.app

This is good to know, but shouldn't Apple be able to run on similar check on their side to make sure that an app was compiled with a verified version of Xcode?

My First Impressions of watchOS 2

I never got around to installing a beta of watchOS 2, so these are legitimately my "first impressions" of the update.

  • The update process took entirely too long, which is probably the reason that the update required the Watch to be plugged in while things were downloading and installing. This wasn't too annoying for me, but I work from home and have easy access to my charging cable.
  • New passcode entry is really nice. Buttons seem much easier to hit, and are more responsive.
  • Siri has been incredibly unreliable. Even after a restart.
  • Capturing screen shots does not work. (edit: No wait, I guess they work, but they just take forever to sync initially)
  • Everything first party feels really snappy.
  • The app that I was most looking forward to being updated, Strava, did not receive a watchOS 2 update and in fact does not launch on the new OS.
  • I plan on using the hell out of the new Nightstand mode.
  • I'm starting to really like the capitalization on "watchOS". Phil Schiller was right.

Overall, lots of good improvements, but I'm surprised that people are saying that things feel more reliable with watchOS 2. I look forward to seeing some of these bugs get ironed out and some of my favorite apps getting updated.

Apple Refunding All Purchases of Peace →

Looks like everybody who purchased the content blocker Peace will be getting a refund whether they want one or not.

This is so unprecedented that I wonder if internally Apple is really pissed at Marco. Safari content blocking extensions are a big feature in iOS 9, and for one of the most prominent iOS developers to pull a top grossing app because it "didn't feel good" doesn't really paint the new feature in the most positive light.

It will also be interesting to see if Marco posts another App Figures screenshot once all these refunds go through.