Author: Andy Affleck

A Smattering of Short Takes

Published on by Andy Affleck

I am trying to get better about blogging and I’ll have more to say about why I’ve been reluctant to blog a lot in the last few years soon. But suffice it to say that I’m over it and want to get back to this.

Geeks Who Drink Pub Quiz

On October 1st, the company I worked for laid off somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the company, myself included. So my life has largely been consumed with the parallel paths of finding full-time work and finding clients to keep money coming in during this period. We’re still alive so that’s something.

Because I needed some fun in my life amid the understandable stress of the current situation, I decided that after three years of playing Geeks Who Drink Pub Quizzes at local restaurants every week, it was time to try my hand at hosting the quizzes instead. So, I threw my hat in the ring, did my training and have been QuizMaster a few times already. It’s a lot of fun and if you like public speaking, it’s worth trying out. (And if you are local and want to check it out, I am hosting the next two Wednesdays at Pizza J in Providence at 7PM both nights!)

The less amusing part is that the RI Unemployment people got notified that I had become employed by Geeks Who Drink and sent me a letter telling me that I was done with collecting unemployment. Oops. I need to explain to them this is a part-time job and an inconsistent one at that (as I am a sub for the local regular hosts, not a regular host myself).

TV Recommendations (that you didn’t ask me for but get anyway)

I got curious one night and checked out the first episode of Broadchurch (the British original) and got hooked. I’m now two episodes into the third season. It’s a dark show, to say the least, and it sets up some serious cognitive dissonance if you are a Doctor Who fan with Jodie Whittaker, David Tennant, and Arthur Darvill as regulars and a smattering of other actors who have passed through Doctor Who here and there (David Bradley, for example). If you really want to blow your mind, watch any current Doctor Who episode with Jodie Whittaker and then watch the Season 2 episode of Broadchurch where her character gives birth immediately afterwards. I did that. I’m still haunted.

Last night the third of four “Short Treks” “aired” on the CBS App. These 15-minute episodes are little short stories set in and around Star Trek Discovery. (The second one, Calypso, was brilliant and a beautiful bit of story-telling, highly recommended). The most recent one, The Brightest Star, was also very good and featured Saru, played by the wonderful Doug Jones, and how he ended up getting mixed up with Starfleet despite coming from a pre-warp civilization. I need to watch it again because there is something I think I must have missed. They are a pre-warp civilization but there’s clearly some high tech there and it is doing something… weird. I don’t want to spoil anything and since I am pretty sure I must have missed some critical detail, I will stop here lest I spoil something or make a complete fool out of myself.

Swamp Meadow Community Theater

A ways back a colleague of mine in Swamp Meadow Community Theater (based in Foster, RI), which I have been involved with for 9 years, died. Kail Rubin was one of the really good ones. She was kind and generous and an all around wonderful person. We have performed on stage together and we have also worked the tech booth together. And I got to direct her in MASH back in 2016 when she played one of the nurses.

Her passing opened up her position as Executive Director of Swamp Meadow and I went and got myself elected to fill out the remaining six-seven months of her term. I hope I do right by Kaila and by Swamp Meadow.

Working from Home

If you work from home, you will appreciate Things I Learned by Working from Home.

Siri Shortcuts and Workflow

Published on by Andy Affleck

Siri Shortcuts & Workflow

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) kicked off today and most of what was announced is interesting but nothing felt terribly revolutionary. Except for Siri Shortcuts. Siri Shortcuts is clearly what Apple has done with Workflow, which they purchased last year. I’ve used Workflow for iOS for some time now, but only recently have I started doing more and more with it. It has the ability to speak to various apps using URL schemes supported by the various apps (and using the x-callback scheme to get data back from them). It’s amazingly powerful and I have workflows that replicate an iTunes Playlist to my Spotify account or vice verse, alert my wife when I am on my way home complete with map and an ETA, to move items between Things, Trello, and Ulysses (it’s complicated), and so forth. (For the best collection of cool workflows and excellent descriptions of same, see the writings of Frederico Vittici at MacStories.net especially in their weekly newsletter, Club MacStories.

A workflow to set a slack reminder for myself
A workflow to set a slack reminder for myself

Sometime in the last while they also added the ability for Workflow to be able to talk to APIs using GET or POST. This is especially interesting to me as I work with a number of APIs in my day job, both external services we talk to and our own web applications. I use Paw on my Mac to test these APIs out but in my ever-ongoing quest to do more and more on my iPad Pro, having a tool that can do this there is gold to me. I haven’t started playing with it yet but I did push off the reminder in Slack all day today (hopefully I’ll get time to check it out tomorrow).

My great fear is that Apple’s reimagining of Workflow into Siri Suggestions, while adding all the power of Siri to control the shortcuts themselves, will also include a significant reduction in capabilities. Apple has had a track record of taking complex solutions and paring them down to, presumably, make them simpler, easier, and more elegant for their end users. But Workflow is a power tool and I would hate to lose any of the amazing functionality it currently offers.

Unfortunately, the new Siri Shortcuts app is not included in the initial beta 1 release of iOS 12 (and before my developer friends give me crap for installing it while not actually developing anything currently let me point out that I am using a work iPad Mini 4 that I have mostly stopped using in favor of my own personal iPad Pro. So it can be safely destroyed by a beta operating system and rebuilt from scratch with no ill effects to me or my current workflow). Since it is not included, I cannot test it out or see whether it is missing the features I consider essential.

That’s the only feature of iOS that jumped out at me as it is something that pertains to my own work. Most of the rest of the features look fun and I am looking forward to playing with them.

Update: Apple didn’t nerf it!