I’ve had my Apple Watch series 6 for a little over a month now, and I can honestly say it’s the best Apple Watch that I’ve ever owned (well, besides the White Ceramic model that I adored, but Apple skipped that material in this years version).

This year, I decided to go with the Apple Watch Edition in Space Black Titanium after spending two years with the Apple Watch Series 4 Stainless. While I like the stainless, it doesn’t hold up well to scratches, dings, and abrasions over time and can look rather beat up after two years of daily usage.

I really upgraded my watch for three main reasons: Blood oxygen tracking, sleep tracking, and the speed of the new versions of the Apple Watch. Let’s check in on each of these and see how I feel about them a month later.

Blood Oxygen Tracking

I was really stoked about Apple adding this feature, which couldn’t have come at a better time with the COVID-19 pandemic raging here in the US. When I first got my watch, I was manually checking my O2 levels a few times a day, but then the newness of this feature faded. Now I’m just letting my watch monitor my O2 levels in the background as I work, as I exercise, and when I wear my watch sometimes when I sleep (we’ll get into this more in the next section). Then, when I’m feeling curious, I’ll check my levels in the Health app on my iPhone, which lets me instantly see high and low O2 levels for any given day, or delve into the day view and see the exact times it checked and what the levels were.

I really like this feature, and think that is has great usefulness, especially when paired with workout or sleep tracking; however, I think it could be improved in two ways. The first is that I’d like to see my O2 levels when I finish a workout activity in the summary screen and then be able to also see those levels when I pull up my activity history in the Fitness app. The second is that whenever I wake up in the morning and get the summary screen, I should also be able to see my overnight O2 levels at a glance. I feel like surfacing this information and making it extremely glanceable would be an improvement over what we currently have in watchOS.

Sleep Tracking

Before Apple announced the sleep tracking features of the Apple Watch, I had been using an Oura Ring to track sleeping activity since the start of 2020. This small device gives a lot of information about your sleep activity, including the time spent in the different phases of sleep and can even track your temperature as you sleep, which can indicate issues with sleep quality in the Oura app.

Going into using the Apple Watch as a sleep tracker, I was expecting some great data points like what Oura can provide; however, I was a bit disappointed with the metrics that the Apple Watch tracks. It gets the basics correct, but I would like to see improved tracking abilities, such as the phases of sleep, movement tracking, quality of sleep, and detailed heart rate tracking during sleep.

The current iteration of Apple’s sleep tracking on Watch is good, but not great, and doesn’t provide insightful data that I can use to adjust lifestyle changes that can affect my sleep. I really hope that either a future watchOS update or another Apple Watch model with better sensors geared towards sleep tracking will be able to provide additional information.

Speed

My previous Apple Watch (a Series 4) was beginning to get a little slow with watchOS 6, so I was looking forward to seeing how fast the Apple Watch Series 6 can handle the new updates with watchOS 7.

The Apple Watch Series 6 is more than capable of keeping up with everything that I’ve thrown at it and the new animation times in watchOS 7 makes it feel even snappier on all of the Apple Watch models that support the new OS. Siri activates faster, apps launch faster, and notifications appear faster. Overall, this is a huge improvement since upgrading from a Series 4 Watch.

In conclusion, I am really enjoying the new Apple Watch and all of the features, and cannot wait to see how the features of O2 tracking and sleep improve in the future. I know that it will, it’s just a matter of time.

Being stuck at home most of 2020, I’ve been finding different ways to occupy my listening time, especially while working or exercising. I typically listen to music while exercising or working, but I’ve found with the lack of a lot of new music, most of my playlists and radio stations would simply repeat the same songs — which was rather annoying.

Instead, I’ve been turning to podcasts more and more as a way to get new content that I can occupy my listening time with. Some have become shows that I anticipate each week and cannot wait to listen to.

The podcasts

In alphabetical order, here’s my favorite podcasts that I’m listening to at this moment in time. The list doesn’t really change that much, and I started with a handful, but that’s quickly blossomed into more and more.

• All Consuming
• AppStories
• Automators
• Connected Pro (Subscription)
• Core Intuition
• Mac Power Users
• MacStories Unplugged (Subscription)
• MacStories Unwind
• The Rebound
• Rocket
• Same Brain
• The Talk Show with John Gruber
• To The Best Of Our Knowledge
• Under the Radar
• Ungeniused
• Upgrade
• The Vergecast

You’ll notice that there’s quite a few from the [Relay.fm] network, and I’ve liked the majority of their shows and continue to listen to them time and time again. I definitely have to give them a shoutout for their episode quality, content, and amazing hosts.

How do I listen?

I was using Apple Podcasts, which was my podcast player of choice a few years back, but has honestly gotten very lackluster with the syncing capabilities and playback capabilities with the latest releases.

A few years ago, I remembered trying [Castro] and really liked it, so I decided to give it another go and have really liked it as I’ve gotten back into listening to podcasts. It’s a little on the pricey side as far as subscription apps go, but it’s a great podcast player with a great watchOS app, customizations, and great playback controls and notes features.

Halloween is one of my favorite fall holidays, and one of my favorite holidays second only to Christmas. I always enjoy giving out candy and just the general spirit of celebrating the beginning of fall and all that it brings: Cooler weather, and of course, family gatherings. This year is a bit different though.

In lieu of celebrating Halloween in person with family and trick-or-treaters (don’t worry, I’m still leaving pre-packaged candy lined on the sidewalk for trick-or-treaters to take in a socially distanced fashion), I’m instead celebrating by watching some of my favorite Halloween movies.

Here’s my list of movies that I’m watching this year leading up to Halloween:

1. The Nightmare Before Christmas
2. Hocus Pocus
3. The Haunted Mansion
4. It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown (now on Apple TV+ for free)
5. The last 10 years of “Treehouse of Horrors” from the Simpsons

A few years ago, my friend and graphic designer co-worker, Cat Lo created a set of stickers for iOS of her Scottish Fold cat named “Blu.” Those stickers turned out to be a hit, and last year, I helped her develop a new set of animated stickers for iOS 13 dubbed Blu Animated Stickers, which received an update this year for the pandemic sticker pack, featuring re-creations of favorite Giphy moments and inside jokes that everyone has enjoyed.

This month, Cat created a fancy Lo-Fi video on YouTube complete with a soundtrack that was custom made for the video. It’s a great relaxing video to watch while you’re coding, working, or just chilling at home.

I loved the video so much, that I ended up creating a macOS Screen Saver based on it. That was a fun experience of working with Apple’s new notarization framework to get the screen saver file notarized so it would run without issues on modern versions of macOS.

The screen saver has quickly become one of my favorites, so I decided to share it with everyone with the blessing of Cat. You can download it here and install it on your own Mac.

If you enjoy the screen saver and the iOS sticker pack, be sure to give @CatLo a shout on Twitter.

2020 has certainly been a challenging year for many due to the COVID-19 pandemic that’s swept the world. Many companies are enforcing working from home as its main strategy now, and even more (rightfully so) aren’t requiring any travel. I, myself, haven’t traveled anywhere except to get essentials since at least early March, and the company that I work for has suspended all travel for the foreseeable future. We certainly don’t know when this pandemic will stop, but life has to begin to operate again at some capacity. 

WWDC 

The first sign that we saw of some normalcy in the tech community was Apple continuing their WWDC conference, which kicked off the week of June 22, 2020. This year the conference was entirely online and pre-recorded. To me, this made the conference even better, and dare I say: This was the best version of WWDC that I’ve ever witnessed in the 15 years that I’ve been watching them. The fact that the keynote was pre-recorded left Apple with an enormous creative pool from which to draw from to make the nearly 2 hour video engaging and entertaining.

The session videos also had amazing production value and were able to be shorter and more concise, even though they contained the same information as would’ve been presented on stage. A lot of this was due to the fact that they didn’t have to shuffle people in and out of a physical space, or deal with the dreded live demo bugs that crop up in seemingly every live demo at WWDC. The recorded videos were also available immediately due to the fact that Apple didn’t have to send them to post production to iron out any issues. I was able to glean information a lot quicker and begin implementing the new technology sooner thanks to the shorter sessions that had an almost “live code-along” feel.

Many may know that I’ve not been to WWDC since 2015 due to the cost and the seemingly increasing difficulty rate of actually getting a ticket to the conference. In fact, I’ve never won the ticket lottery for WWDC, and the whole exclusiveness of it is a bit off-putting — even when I was just starting out in iOS development, the sheer cost of a ticket was unimaginable for a high school and then college student. The fact that the conference was available exclusively online and free to everyone this year has surely helped keep more people from feeling excluded from this amazing developer community.

360 iDev 2020

One of the conferences that I love, but have never been able to attend in person due to schedule/travel conflicts is 360 iDev. I’ve attended their 360 iDev [min] conferences before, but not the main conference. 360 iDev is a community-driven Apple developer conference held in Denver, Colorado, that focuses on a lot more than just the technical details of how to implement a List view in SwiftUI. It delves into the impacts of tech in our world, and touches on topics that are much needed to make developers better people as well as better developers. For example, this year’s Keynote touched on the social impacts currently ongoing in the US; another session touched on how to make user interfaces more accessible for users of all types. Sessions like these set 360 iDev apart from many other developer conferences.

This year, the conference was forced to move online due to social distancing guidelines. Depsite having to accomodate this new format, the conference moved on with all 3 days filled with great content, great speakers, and lively Slack rooms filled with chatter.

The conference utilized hopin.to to handle the video streams, and even had a Chat Roulette style feature that let you meet face-to-face with conference attendees and sponsors to swap contact information, or just catch up. This was definitely a next-level virtual conference experience that left me fully engaged with the speakers and their presented content.

Wrapping up

This year has been anything but normal, but I’ve loved being able to continue to connect with the developer community, to continue to learn about exciting new tech, and grow as a community in our changing (and challenging) world. Both of these conferences have helped me to do that, and I’m extremely grateful to both Apple and 360 iDev for continuing to go ahead with their conferences this year.

I hope that if WWDC is fully virtual again next year, they follow a similar path as 360 iDev did with the ability to chat with attendees, or even have face-to-face enagement. I feel that really the only aspect I missed from WWDC was bumping into developers and being able to talk about things or catch up.

Last year I started setting some reading goals in GoodReads because I wanted to begin taking technology breaks and focusing on reading more. I’ve been reading off and on this year, but it’s been difficult to fully devote time to reading with everything that has been going on in our world. In July I started back my reading schedule in an attempt to still read 10 books this year, and I figured I’d give an update on where I’m at.

Here’s what I’m currently reading this month:

• (Completed) A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green — A second book in a great SciFi series by Hank Green that completes (or does it?) the series staring April May and The Carls. I read the first book last year and immediately pre-ordered the second one as soon as it was announced.
• (In Progress) The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien — I was never much of a LOTR (Lord of the Rings) fan growing up. For me, it was all about Harry Potter. So, I’m going back and giving this series a try (as well as watching the movies that match the book I’m reading). So far, the Hobbit is an excellent story and I cannot wait to get into the LOTR series proper.
• (Upcoming) Matilda by Roald Dahl — I’ve only ever read “James and the Giant Peach” as well as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by Roald Dahl, and it’s been a very long time. Both were good stories, and I was recently perusing the Kindle book store and stumbled upon this author again. I feel that I’ve done a disservice to myself by not reading more of his books, so I think I’m going to read each of the books that have a movie to go along with it and read the book, then watch the accompanying movie. I cannot wait to start this.

If you’d like to, you can follow my progress on GoodReads. I’m also open to any recommendations for what to read.

I’ve had a Micro.blog account since the very beginning. I was a Kickstarter backer, but never quite found a use for it when it launched. I could never determine if I wanted to use it to blog with, or use it as a Twitter replacement, or both.

When I was searching for a blogging platform to run my new website off of, I quickly rediscovered Micro.blog and decided to give it a go for my personal website.

We’ll see how this experiment goes, especially as I attempt to start writing a bit more (both long and short posts) on my personal website. The posts may be a bit infrequent in the beginning, but I’m hoping to start getting on a schedule that will let me post more frequently about topics that I love: technology, Apple, software development, and some hobbies that I’ve taken up over the past year like learning to play piano.

Looking forward to starting this new journey and seeing where it goes…