Author: Greg

Driving Fixes

Do Not Disturb While Driving is a relatively new feature in iOS. I turned it on as soon as it was available for my phone, but today I turned it off for a very big reason.

I love the idea of the feature, and overall the implementation just works. I feel like there are some missed feature though. Namely notifications around received iMessages. If I am driving while the feature is turned on, and someone messages me, there is a reply to them letting them know I will get back to them soon. Unfortunately when I am no longer driving, I don’t get a notification about any messages received, so I don’t know to read my messages. A big pain really.

This has bitten me enough times to sour me on DND While Driving (at least until Apple fixes this).

Frustrated Devices

I’m getting increasingly frustrated with gaming on iOS. I am a casual gamer and do not enjoy epic games that involves hours of time. I much prefer games I can play for a few minutes, then walk away from.

For a while it was a pain when a game forced me to choose between an iPad version and an iPhone version. More often than not there is a universal iOS app now that supports both platforms.

However, my frustration kicks in when game state cannot be synchronized between iPhone and iPad. I am still in the scenario where I have to pick which platform I want to play the game on, and not be able to switch between devices.

Not all games are like this though. In fact I have a couple games that work between iOS devices, including our Apple TV.

My wish for game developers, when creating a universal app, would be to put some time and effort into supporting iCloud based data so that players can switch between devices seemlessly.

Family Rocks

Family day 2018 was partially spent out at French Beach today. It was a glorious blue sky day and the waves at the beach were pretty good. Sue, the kids, myself and my mom all explored the beach with the dogs. We launched sticks and wood for later rock targets, we looked for interesting rocks, and played on the logs. Great fun today. We even watched a sea lion frolicking just off shore.

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Tacky Compare

Back to back riding days is pretty awesome. I am in between jobs right now so I can get out mid week for some rides. For these two rides I lucked out in the weather department, but also on the trail conditions. Super tacky right now, and with the rocks drying out, there seems to be traction everywhere. Well, almost everywhere.

 

I still notice how much fitness I have lost since the BCBR though. I was looking back through Strava though and realized I was doing some long rides by this point in 2017, but they weren’t as big as I recall.

In Feb, I see the above rides, and that is it. I really shouldn’t compare myself to last year’s self since I was in a very different place a year ago. I need to look back at last years riding with fondness, and not try to outdo last year.