Weeknotes 41

Well, I bought one – an Apple Studio Display. And it turned up (early) yesterday. I was pretty anxious about this purchase. They’re not cheap, and I was also concerned about wobble and reflection.

I mounted it on my monitor arm and I’d say the wobble is a little bit better than my current display, probably because it weighs less. I think I can deal with it for now, but ultimately I want to stop it, which I think is going to mean either a new desk or monitor arm, or both.

The reflection is about as much as I was expecting given my experience with the Apple LED Cinema Display. I decided to go with the normal glass because I was worried about cleaning the Nano-texture glass, and reports of slightly poorer image quality. The day I set it up was a particularly sunny day, so hopefully it’s the most it will be.

The webcam does look a bit crap, it’s true. I will see if a software update with fix it, but I think I’ve made peace with the idea that it’s actually quite nice that my current (better quality) webcam can be positioned much more easily – something I’ve realised I do more often than I thought. I bought this monitor knowing nothing of the webcam, so I’m not too worried.

Now, the good.

The speakers sound really good. Like, really good. I will probably never use them. I’m a headphones at my desk kind of guy.

I have yet to test the built-in microphone, so I’m unsure if I’ll end up using that.

It looks lovely, both physically, and image-wise – it looks as good as I’d hoped. This is ultimately what I care about the most so I’m very happy with that. Read about why this matters to me and others in Mac external displays for designers and developers, part 2.

Some days I feel like giving up on Safari – this is one reason 👇

Lately I’ve noticed several websites being really slow or not loading at all in Safari but working fine in Chrome. Unchecking this fixed it.

Sam Soffes has been suffering from this too, and proffers a potential solution. I have turned the option off for now, but it’s too soon to tell whether it has fixed anything.

Cloudflare have an interesting feature – Cloudflare IP Geolocation – to capture a user’s ISO 3166-1 country code and pass it on via a CF-IpCountry header that you can grab and use in your app. Useful for basic geolocating.

Cloudflare can include the country code of the visitor’s IP (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format) with each request between Cloudflare and the upstream origin web server. This allows site administrators to capture their visitor’s IP location in server logging and/or application logic.

I started working with a new client this week. So far, so good. It has been really nice to have some good collaboration via code reviews. Something I’ve missed. I really should have taken a week off first though – I am tired. Luckily there is a long weekend coming up, which I’ve elongated by a day each side and we’ll be going away for a break 😎

I was surprised/delighted to see that the new client I’m working with keep meeting notes. Yes, notes. Of a meeting. For each meeting. You know, so the attendees have some idea of what the point was later. What a novel idea!

“Wait…what?" – my thoughts exactly. I had no idea a form attribute existed for inputs. The original Smashing Magazine article explains it best.

In most cases, you’re going to nest your form inputs and controls inside a <form> element. But if your app or layout requires something a little different, you have the option to put a form input anywhere you want and associate it with any

element — even one that’s not the element’s parent.

Using feature flags to rewrite every view in our Rails app – Nice post about how wrapbook rewrote a lot of their UI behind a feature flag. I particularly like their idea of running the test suite using a GitHub Action matrix in the before and after states.

I wonder whether they could have used Rails variants as I wrote about recently.

Be nice. Treat people well. Or this is what you’ll get.