“Wayward Pines” is a trilogy by Blake Crouch consisting of the books “Pines”, “Wayward” and “The Last Town”.

In the preface to the first book Crouch reveals that Twin Peaks was an inspiration for Wayward Pines. Similarly to Twin Peaks, Wayward Pines is a town where strange unexplained things happen.

Secret Service agent Ethan Burke wakes up in a hospital in Wayward Pines. At first he doesn’t know where he is and why. But after some time he remembers being on a mission to find two colleagues who disappeared in Wayward Pines. He got into hospital because he had a car accident just as he drove into Wayward Pines.

He now tries to contact his boss and his wife and then also to leave the town. All this is prevented by other people and it’s very unclear why.

At the end of the book all those mysteries are solved. Writing about that here would be like telling someone still planning to watch Twin Peaks who killed Laura Palmer. So I won’t do that.

I’ve read “Dark Matter” some time ago and liked that. “Pines” is similar in the way how it combines a mainstream story with science fictional elements. As with “Dark Matter” I also enjoyed the inventiveness of the author here. While in “Dark Matter” you know early on what the situation is and you follow the protagonist on his way to get out of it, in “Pines” you don’t know what’s going on and follow the protagonist on his way to find out. I enjoyed “Pines” very much.

“Pines” works as a stand-alone novel. The other two books in the trilogy are the answer to “What happens afterwards?” and they give some more background to the solved mysteries. In my opinion they are worthwhile additions to the story of “Pines”.

“Children of Time” is the first of the “Children of Time Novels” by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s a mind-blowing science fiction novel.

It starts in the orbit of a planet that was terraformed. Now the people having overseen that process are about to start the next phase of the development of the planet. They want to send a container full of monkeys down to the planet and then also throw a virus at the planet. The virus is meant to transform the monkeys into a human like intelligent species that can then be used as servants by the humans arriving later to live on that planet.

But there is some rivalry on Earth between the progressives, who do such terraforming missions, and a naturalist faction that opposes it all. Human life on Earth is destroyed and the monkeys don’t make it down to the planet. But the virus does and changes a kind of spiders into sentient beings.

Much later — after an ice age on Earth — a new generation of humans somehow succeed to use some of the technology of their forefathers and build a space ship and arrive at that terraformed planet in the hope to find a new clean home. Naturally they are surprised to find intelligent spiders on that planet that won’t give up their home planet for some humans.

The evolution of the spiders and the conflict between them, the new humans and a partly mad artificial intelligence together make up an interesting and engaging story I enjoyed very much.

The second book — “Children of Ruin” — feels a bit repetitive at first and as if it’s just a “let’s do the same but with octopuses”, but there are some new nuances and after the introduction of a really alien intelligence it takes a different path. So it’s actually nearly as much a page-turner as the first book.

The third and — at least currently — last book “Children of Memory” introduces a species of birds that humans have meddled with and exalted to intelligent beings. But it’s quite a different tale than the first two books. It’s much more mysterious. While the first two books are more straightforward, here the last quarter of the book reveals what’s actually going on. Writing anything more about it would probably spoil it. So I won’t do that. This third book is better than the second one. It’s again as surprising as the first. It’s also the most philosophical of the three books.

Adrian Tchaikovsky writes many books and the back catalogue is already impressive. I surely will return to reading more of his books in the future.

“White Noise” by Don DeLillo reminded me of Woody Allen movies from the start. This novel is mainly dialogue driven and the dialogues are absurd and strange and often philosophical.

The main theme of the book — fear of death and how people succeed or fail to cope with it — emerges later in the book but then really dominates it. There is a drug that’s supposed to obliterate the fear of death, but actually fails. A married couple argues about who of them wants to die first, because they fear to be left alone while also fearing to die. And a teenager plans to spend a long time with snakes in a box. His goal is to make it into the Guinness book of records. Or maybe it’s also to defy death?

As with a Woody Allen movie, when I sometimes don’t know exactly what it actually was about, I enjoyed this novel for the fun action and dialogues and was inspired by its philosophical discourses on the fear of death.

“Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel is a novel about the time before and after a swine flu pandemic that kills 99% of the world population.

Even though it’s from 2014 — long before we actually got Covid —, I was amazed about how contemporary it felt. Before the pandemic people use iPhones, the internet and generally do the same things we do now. It seems like not much has changed since the introduction of the internet and smartphones. After the pandemic — which is a lot more devastating than Covid was — all is different. The lights go out and people need to adapt to the new situation.

I won’t dwell on the overarching topic of the novel, though, as it’s not really that important. I’m not really that much interested in novels about pandemics. What made me read this one until the end was the storytelling. The novel keeps switching between the times before and after the pandemic while gradually creating a mesh of relationships between the main protagonists and their actions. It’s interesting to watch it unfold and the pandemic is just a backdrop that adds interesting aspects to the already great story.

“The Warlord Chronicles” by Bernard Cornwell is a retelling of the King Arthur saga consisting of the three books “The Winter King”, “Enemy of God” and “Excalibur”.

Cornwell’s version is — in contrast to other retellings being full of magic — more down to earth. A priestess belatedly realizes that she needs to act as if she’s in a trance to make her prophecies believable. And a girl is painted with some phosphorous stuff to convince people that she is a ghost. There are some convenient coincidences and especially in the last book also some magic like when clay figures are pierced to cause illness and pain in some remote persons. But generally people like Merlin are some early kind of scientists wandering around in the search of knowledge and producing effects that look like magic.

Arthur, who is a war strategist and not a king, lives in a Britain abandoned by the Romans. The old Druidic religion competes with some imported Roman gods and with the spreading Christian religion. The Britons don’t understand the cities, armor and other stuff left behind by the Romans, but they use it and revere it as something from another world. And they fight. The British kingdoms fight each other and the invading Saxons.

Many protagonists known from other retellings of the saga are also present in Cornwell’s version, but they have slightly different personalities. Like Lancelot who is a treacherous scheming coward.

I liked the sober look at magic and mysticism. And while informing me about that particular era in Britain around 500 A.C., the story kept me entertained and invested.

This year’s updates of Chronodget and WeightGlance have been released simultaneously. Chronodget is now at version 4.0.0 and WeigthGlance at 5.0.0.

As every year the main reason for those new updates is keeping up with the current development of the OS, the language — swift — and the used SDKs.

This years updates have only marginally visible changes. Most work was done to make them compatible with the new swift 6 language mode. It was actually easier than I initially thought. Maybe that’s because neither app calls any remote web services and therefore has no need for complex concurrency stuff. There’s a bit of it in WeightGlance in the interaction with health kit and Chronodget does some file handling stuff, but generally fixing the swift 6 problems was straight forward.

In WeightGlance I fixed a bug that probably was there since it’s initial release in 2015. Users with no weight data at all in health kit would still see the tutorial data in the weekly rows after closing the tutorial. Not really a critical bug, but annoying nonetheless.

If you’ve already installed Chronodget, you should have gotten the update by now. Otherwise you can always get it in the App Store. The same is also true for WeightGlance which is available here in the App Store

Chronodget 3.0.0 has landed in the app store. As every year I’ve raised the minimum required iOS to the current one — 17 — and updated the code accordingly.

The usage of the Observable macro that was introduced at WWDC 2023 enabled me to change the code to work as it was originally intended. When I started developing Chronodget in October 2020 I had some expectations regarding how the declarative UI would react to changes in the data model. I was somewhat disappointed that it did not react to changes in nested objects and had to add workarounds and restructure the code to match the capabilities of SwiftUI at that time. With the Observable macro I could get rid of most of those workarounds and make the code much cleaner.

This update comes with two new templates one of which is named “Abstract Timepiece”. It’s not really meant to show an exactly readable time. It just conveys an impression of how time flows. The background changes from morning to evening and also from the start of the year to its end. And the rounded rectangles show the progress of the month, week, day and current hour.

While working on it I noticed that the percentage calculation for monthly time frames was buggy and fixed that.

Also while working on this widget, I noticed not for the first time that when using background objects filling the whole widget, neither the selected cell background nor the crosshairs are visible. Therefore there is now an additional button in the navigation bar to add translucency to every component in the widget making everything behind them also visible.

If you’ve already installed Chronodget, you should have gotten the update by now. Otherwise you can always get it in the App Store.

Last week I released an update of my weight tracking app WeightGlance.

It’s now at version 4.0.0. The major version jump from 3.0.0 to 4.0.0 is due to the fact that it now requires at least iOS 17 which is somehow a breaking change from version 3.0.0 requiring only iOS 15 and later. As with each such update I modernized the code to be up to date with swift 5.9 and iOS 17.

But there are also two new things in version 4.0.0.

The biggest new change is that with iPadOS 17 the Health app and with that HealthKit comes to the iPad. And WeightGlance now also runs on iPads. It looks like it does on iPhones but on a bigger screen. But it also supports split view and slide over. Getting it on iPads wasn’t just adding that device type and checking all boxes on portrait and landscape modes, though. On the iPhone the app only supports portrait mode, but on an iPad all those possible size changes that occur as you rotate your iPad and use split view or slide over need to be handled, and even though the app uses auto layout, that alone does not suffice here. Also strange was that I had to remove HealthKit from the required device capabilities. Apparently that device capability is now used to constrain HealthKit using apps to only run on iPhones.

The second change adds a bit more information to the overlay that appears when you put and move your finger on the screen. Before it only showed a vertical line and the weight at that length. This is useful to find out what your weight was on a day or during a week in the past. But to find out for which week exactly a bar displayed the average weight was a bit complicated. You had to count the weeks yourself. Now the overlay also displays the start and end date of the week your finger is currently on.

As always you can get WeightGlance on the AppStore.

The last update to Epigraver in 2021 added support for running on Apple Silicon and there was no need to update it since then.

This year I updated early to the new macOS release macOS 14 Sonoma. At first Epigraver seemed to run just fine on Sonoma as it did on Ventura earlier, but after some time I noticed that the screen went blank showing only the background or that the animations looked odd and broken. Trying to investigate whether it was just broken on one kind of animation, I changed the settings to only use that one animation. But the settings change did not have any effect. It still ran all animation kinds that had been selected before. Now I knew that something was really amiss.

I found this post by a developer of another macOS screensaver who vented about Apple breaking the screensaver framework to be able to run their own screensavers as desktop backgrounds. That post also presents the fix I needed.

With version 3.0.0 Epigraver now also runs on macOS Sonoma. That release increases the minimum requirement to Sonoma, but you won’t miss much if you run 2.0.0 on earlier macOS releases. There is only one additional change which randomizes the animation timing function to add a bit of variation to the animations.

Chronodget 2.0.0 has landed in the app store. The reason for the major version increase from 1.2.0 to 2.0.0 is that 2.0.0 requires iOS 16. That enabled me to remove some hacks and workarounds and make the code cleaner.

But there are also some visible changes here. The first one is a link to a usage manual on the main screen of the app. You’ll notice a question mark icon in the navigation bar when opening the app after the update. Depending on the localization used by the app this opens your browser on the English or German usage manual for Chronodget. At the start of 2022 I decided to write a step by step documentation after some relatives of mine downloaded the app and told me they had no idea how to actually use it. Having worked on it for a half year and knowing the reasons for all the design decisions that shaped the app, I had hoped that how to use it would be evident, but the feedback spoke for the opposite. I first wrote the German manual and then translated it into English. Both variants have their own localized screenshots and both sets of screenshots are available in a light and dark mode version. So when you open the manual while having dark mode switched on, the website switches to dark mode as it does for any other page and the screenshots shown are from the dark mode variant of the app. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to tweak the code of the website to add dark mode images.

This version of Chronodget also brings two bugfixes. The first one fixes color handling. It has been a known bug since the beginning that sometimes the displayed colors were somewhat different than what was chosen in the color picker. This was most annoying when trying to fake a transparent widget. One way to do it is to make a screenshot and use the right part of it as the background of the widget. A better way for backgrounds that use one color without any gradients or any other effects is to just use the color picker to pick the background color of the screen and use that as the background color of the widget. Doing that isn’t easy but manageable. You open the picker, tap and hold the eyedropper icon, close Chronodget by swiping up from the home indicator and then release the eyedropper while over the background. Back in Chronodget the background color will be selected in the color picker. But now the background of the widget would look slightly different from the background of the screen. It turned out that mixing up color spaces was the problem. The color picker uses display P3 by default and the widgets used sRGB. Now colors are always converted to display P3 and interpreted as display P3 and colors look as expected.

Another bug that existed since the first release of Chronodget was a somewhat broken font handling on some devices. While working on Chronodget I created several widgets with it. One purpose of this was to afterwards have some templates to ship with the app. The other was to test the app and to improve it based on the insights I got from creating more complex widgets with it. At the time as I worked on the binary clock that is included as a template, the app had no copy&paste feature. That widget contains 11 components that look very similar. Recreating it again and again became boring. So that’s how the app got its copy&paste features. Then after adding the text component type I started to implement a clock I had seen somewhere. You have 4 rows of digits for the hour part and 4 rows of digits for the minute part. The digits for the current time light up while the others remain visible and seem to be switched off. It worked out pretty well and I liked that widget. I had to rework it several times because the first version was too complex and would stop working or not even load on the home screen. But in the end I succeeded to create a version that worked fine. It looked good on my iPhone and my iPad. The app was ready to be put in the app store. As I started to make screenshots of the required sizes I noticed that on the simulators for some device types that last widget looked totally broken. I had not idea why. It looked just fine in the app on those simulators but on the home screens it looked horrible. I retained it as a template because it worked on at least some devices, but I had to remove it from the screenshots. With version 2.0.0 I found a fix. The way I used to set the font is affected by dynamic type adjustments. Why that affected the widget on some devices and not on others and why only on the home screen I have no idea. But finally that bug is gone.

Chronodget 2.0.0 does not have lock screen widgets and currently I have no plans to add lock screen widgets. There is literally not much space for customization there. If the standard clock could be replaced with a widget, I would add that to Chronodget.

iOS 17 will be unveiled next month. Let’s see what changes it will bring for widgets. Even without any exciting changes there, I have some ideas for Chronodget. So maybe version 3.0.0 won’t take as long as 2.0.0.