Webmann

Hello again! After 5 years of intermittently updating this blog (and more years than that maintaining this site), I've come to the decision to officially retire it from active maintenance.

What does this mean for the future of this site? I won't be adding blog posts for the forseable future, and I won't be keeping any of the other pages up to date. For now I'll be leaving everything as-is, as I believe the content has historic value and I'm investing my time elsewhere. There are already some broken links on the project page due to changing Google Play policies leading to the removal of a couple of my apps from the play store.

A major influence for my decision to stop maintaining this site is that I started another site, schlachter.xyz, for my mobile apps (and to have somewhere to put the privacy policies and legal information for them), and I've found maintaining two extremely similar sites to be a bit much considering the amount of free time I have.

I have plans to migrate more of my projects page to schlachter.xyz, as well as perhaps writing a couple articles (details of my exploits into baking my MacBook seems like it would be interesting). I haven't figured out the best way to integrate these into the new site yet, but I'll probably end up expanding the apps page into a more generic project page. Regardless, I don't have any plans of returning to a blog format.

Check out my new site if Android apps and legal documents interest you (I'll understand if they don't), and if I don't end up picking this site back up down the road then adieu.

Ahoy!

I have a job now! That's exciting! I also live in Montreal now and am just finishing up a french class. Life is busy.

RSS Fetch has been unpublished for the time being since I haven't had time to keep up maintenance for it (Android has outgrown it, I'm afraid), and STO Bus Finder has been placed on the back burner since I no longer use the STO Buses so it's lost its relevance to me. If anyone wants to take up maintenance on it, I'd be happy to pass it along. I do, however, have a new app called Tell Me I'm Pretty which also has a free version that will happily give you compliments.

I have a new laptop now! My Macbook Pro, which has served me faithfully since 2011, finally succumbed to a common issue with its kind where it overheats and breaks its logic board. I brought it back to life for a few months after it completely died by putting it in the oven, but the display gave out again so I've had to move on. For the first time in my life since the Mac Tower of old first entered our home, I have an Apple-free existence (my 1996 iMac is at my parents' house and my iPad is sorely under-used).

That's all for now :)

I'm back!

Also, merry half-Christmas!

After two years in Albera, I've returned to the East and am enjoying being home. I didn't do an excessive amount of programming while I was gone, although I was a pretty big influence in bringing uniformity to our mission's reporting system. I was tasked with creating the new reports to be used in the leaders' monthly meetings; this also involved introducing automation to the reports, which made gathering and presenting the information much more simple and efficient. As our resources were limited, this was all done in Google Sheets, which brought many challenges but also some nifty opportunities.

Right now I'm in the process of discovering changes that happened while I was gone. I've discovered a few things that broke in my absence as well; notably, my laptop is having some serious issues so I'm trying to see if it can be fixed, and also my RSS Fetch app doesn't seem to be working on my phone at the moment. I'm still trying to figure out if it's an issue with the phone or an issue with the app, but either way I hope to have it fixed soon. (UPDATE: It turns out the issue was with an outdated build configuration. This has been fixed and pushed to the Google Play Store.)

Otherwise, life continues and I've begun my search for a job, which I hope to find by September.

I recently left to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As such, I shan't be continuing any of my programming endeavours or updating my blog for the next two years. If you're interested in what I'm currently up to, you can follow my travels through my weekly letters on my Facebook page.

Also, since the STO Bus Finder won't be updated and will probably become obsolete, I've made it free! When I get home I'll update it to fit the new system if it's changed.

That's all for now, see you in two years!

My previously mentioned RSS Fetch app is finally finished and on the Play Store!

RSS Fetch is a simple RSS feed reader that helps people keep up-to-date with their favourite news sites and blogs. I have it translated such that it's available in English, French, and Spanish (although the French translation's mildly sketchy).

As promised, here's a feature list of what the app can do:

• Feeds are added by specifying the URL of either the feed itself or a website that references it.
• Feeds can be automatically updated
• Notifications (with optional vibration) can be shown when new posts are found after an automatic updates
• Users can have multiple RSS feeds at a time
• Posts can be shown either in their own view with swiping between them, or split beside the list of posts (in landscape)
• JavaScript can be enabled in the post display (disabled by default)
• 'Tis free (at the small cost of small ads across the bottom)

I'll be updating it very soon, since the title of the show post page is currently "Show Post" instead of the name of the feed (a completely accidental feature that appeared when I implemented swiping between posts). That fix will have to wait until after the exam I have tomorrow and my presentation the day after, but hopefully I'll find other things to fix with it.