I have just completed my 2022.1 update for Readable; an app that I made a few years ago to solve a very specific problem.

I’m really pleased with the way it has turned out and I’m happy to charge for it now. I hope all those who have purchased or downloaded the free TestFlight version can also see the improvements.

As a Twitter addict, I spend a lot of my time doom-scrolling as I drink my morning coffee. I wear glasses and as my eyes deteriorate I found that even wearing glasses didn’t help with some things posted on Twitter. I’m of course talking about the cheat of posting screenshots of text in order to overcome Twitter’s character limit. This is all well and good but is not very readable. You have to fuss with pinch to zoom and pan gestures just to read a bit of text.

One morning, enough was enough and I wondered what I need to do to fix it. I came up with a clever way of processing images that could basically cut out letter glyphs, turn them into sprites that I would then use to reconstruct the words with. With the added facility of being able to “word wrap”. This worked well for many screenshots but was not completely fault-free. But it worked well enough for my personal use.

Apple have since introduced LiveText scanning that runs an OCR machine learning model on images and does an amazing job of pulling out the text. But the interface is clunky to use if you are just on Twitter wanting to quickly read some posted screenshot of text.

I got a new iPhone this month for the first time since the 11 and was inspired to refresh Readable. It now uses the ImageAnalyzer Apple uses for LiveText and it works a treat.

Please give it a try and download it today.

Don’t track bugs, fix them by Allen Holub caused a stir recently when Holub tweeted about not tracking bugs. What a great idea. In my personal projects I always take the time to clear bugs as I find them. I just don’t want to track a bug list for a hobby!

But why not at work too?

It reminded me of the early days of Relentless when we were a small rag tag bunch of game developers who wanted to do things differently. We needed a system to track bugs but we also had a no known bugs policy. I hacked together a Bugzilla server to hold the data. We printed out bugs on a daily basis and fixed them before moving on to features. The novel thing we did was to also keep all the features in the same “bug” database. Essentially, a feature became a bug (as it was unimplemented and was therefore untestable).

I discovered that if you think of it like this, the app starts as a bug description - app does not exist - so you fix that by creating an executable and move on from there.

By maintaining a “bug” list in the same system as the feature list, we were able to treat them in exactly the same way. Work was done in priority order and we frequently reviewed the entire database (by printing it out no less) to reprioritise. Bugs were not tolerated and incomplete features were always flagged off when the game was sent to the publisher.