I’m working on an iOS app and I’m getting so close to releasing the 1.0. I was looking at App Store Connect and noticed that I needed screenshots and I remembered that Fastlane has the ability to automate screenshot creation.

Pretty cool I think. So I go through the process of setting up and starting to work on the UI Tests that need to run in order to trigger the screens I want to show and then it hits me.

The app I’m working on uses MusicKit and unfortunately the Xcode Simulators aren’t able to really do anything with MusicKit i.e. they can’t search or play music which is kind of a big deal. This hadn’t been much an issue during development because I could just run the app on my phone.

From what I can tell I will not be able to use Fastlane to automate this screenshot creation because it relies on using simulators for running the UI Tests that would then capture screenshots. What a bummer (though I sure hope I’m wrong!).

Fortunately I found another resource from Benoit Pasquier that might make it possible for me to use UI Tests to automate screenshots to some degree. It won’t be quite as extensive, but my wife has a regular sized iPhone and I have a big one so at least I’ll have two sets of screenshots. No luck on the iPhone SE size. Hopefully that isn’t a dealbreaker, but we’ll see. This is all very new to me.

This is my first time writing (re: rambling) about this app and if you’d like to hear more or be invited to the TestFlight, feel free to comment on this post or shoot me an email at nick_kaczmarek@icloud.com.

Cheers 🥂

First day of the fall feast. I love eating this food so much. Tried crockpot mashed potatoes today and boy was it a lot easier.

👨‍👩‍👧 + 👶🏽 = 👨‍👨‍👧‍👧

Pushing my daughter in her car around the neighborhood.

Picture from my garage this morning. The sky was particularly pretty.

Vegan buffalo chicken wrap with homemade ranch. I’ll share the recipe if anyone is interested. Very tasty. 🤤

The sun says hello.

Purple beautyberry (Callicarpa dichotoma)

Went to a park with a prairie this morning. Amazing to think that this used to be what much of the midwestern United States looked like.

Taken at 12 pm CT in Eastern Missouri, USA.

I took this while taking my daily walk around our neighborhood with my daughter. The sky is very clear and it was quite windy so this vulture was just gliding around.

It seems in the UK (and perhaps other UK influenced places) they say “a person called Nick”, but in the US we say “a person named Nick”. I wonder why that is. Do you know?

I’ll make it easy on you, this is the word: smalm

I was playing Wordle with my brother and dad the other day and my dad sent me a word he tried, but he was confused because autocomplete kept correcting it. He had never heard of it. Neither had I.

I looked in the dictionary for the word and I couldn’t find it. I did a web search and couldn’t find it. Then I checked in the unix word list to see if I could find it there.

I found it!

But then I still couldn’t find a definition.

I did eventually find a couple links to it on the web for scrabble word lists.

My guess is that like map makers, dictionary makes must create fake words as a sort of copyright mechanism to check if people are copying their work. And because word game makers can’t check every word to see if they’re real, they include a word from a common list of words.

Don’t believe me that it doesn’t exist?

References

Video talking about locations that don’t exist

DuckDuckGo search for smalm

Google search for smalm

P.S. both searches think I’ve mistyped smalm and meant small but in any case you still won’t find anything.

It’s chrysanthemum season! Shot with my iPhone 14 Pro Max’s 48 megapixel camera. Curious how this will look on the web. (And also the file size)

I am a web developer by day and was working on a feature that was supposed to create an input field that could only accept numbers. Super easy right?!

<input type="number" />

I’m demoing said feature to the client (after having tested this) and I’m bashing on the home row and nothing is printing. I type some numbers and they print. Then I grab some text and paste it in an bam, a single letter e. That’s weird. I try another word. Another letter e. Hmm. I tell the client we’ll look into it.

I shared this with a coworker and they were able to produce the same behavior. I then decided to look up the issue on the internet and of course this is a well known thing. I dig a little deeper and realize that the HTML spec allows for this behavior because of floating point numbers. For instance 2e5.

Anyways, that was a fun little journey.

Link to the HTML spec for input type=number

Burrito with refried pinto beans, Mexican rice, roasted potatoes, grilled on a comal, smothered in vegan cheese sauce, vegan sour cream, and herdez salsa chipotle cremosa. Outstanding. 🌯

Some sort of gray tree frog was on my patio umbrella. 🐸 ☂

Another burger. This time half beyond meat, half impossible, field roast chao cheese, pretzilla bun, bens spicy mustard, sir kensington ketchup, home made salsa verde, and Whole Foods “tater puffs”. Delicious!!!

Wow I really like this idea. Sharing code in SwiftUI has always felt weird to me.

Sharing code in SwiftUI apps on www.jessesquires.com

I got off a little early this past Friday and we decided to take a trip to Bombay Food Junkies. It’s a vegan indian restaurant in Creve Coeur, MO that has an amazing selection of food. We had taken a trip there a few weeks ago for an ice cream social and had the chance to try their wings, milkshakes, and sundaes. Everything was amazing we couldn’t wait to go back!

Last time we tried the buffalo wings, the chocolate milkshake, and the brownie sundae. This time we tried the mango habanero wings, the butter chicken with naan, the buffalo chicken sandwich with masala fries, and of course the brownie sundae. All I can say is wow. I can’t wait to go back. This weekend. 👀

mango habanero wings

butter chicken with naan

buffalo chicken sandwich with masala fries

brownie sundae

Finally made my own salsa verde. For about $7 I made 32 oz of salsa. Comparing this to the 16 oz jars of salsa I buy for $4 it’s a huge win. Less waste, better taste. I’ll fine tune this as I go, but I’m happy with the results.

I was listening to the FunFact (@funfactfm) podcast recently and they mentioned this website. I finally got around to looking at it and it’s so cool! Here is the site by Neal Agarwal (@nealagarwal) about the deep sea. He also has a bunch of other cool sites at his website. Enjoy!

Delicious bowl of lentil chili that my wife made. She also made cashew sour cream and cornbread to go with it. Absolutely amazing! Picture is a little messy, but I added more cayenne and chili powder, violife cheddar, nutritional yeast, and the cashew sour cream. I also ended up crumbling a little bit of corn tortilla chips in, but didn’t take a picture of that or the cornbread. 🌶🌽🫘

I often want to do this while doing a demo or filming my screen so I’m writing this down so I remember. I found this on osxdaily.com and have amended it slightly. Maybe this is a mac app I could make…

To hide:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false && killall Finder

To show:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true && killall Finder

I’m so curious about who views my site (as some may have noticed from previous posts) I was confused why my views dropped to zero this week. Was it because I hadn’t posted? No, it was because I accidentally deleted the script that captures views and sends them to GoatCounter. 🤦🏽‍♂️

Pictured are spring rolls, yellow curry with tofu, and pad thai with tofu. All delicious, all vegan. The server was even kind enough to realize we were vegan (just by the way we were ordering) and mentioned that something we had planned to get was not vegan. I love when that happens.