Creating this site was a challenge I set for myself. As you may have seen from a previous post, I built this site from scratch using nothing but Google, the Mac OSX Terminal, and TextWrangler (For you non-techie folks, that means I wrote the code for this site by hand, without any fancy programs or plugins like Wordpress). I did it as a learning exercise, as a way to learn how websites work internally, and as a way to prove that I could do it.

I had a website before this one. It was a terrible site that I won't even link to, but I had one. It ran on a free Wordpress account and I could customize it to my heart's content, but my heart wasn't content. After a few, admittedly terrible, posts, I abandoned that site and started building this one. The first build of the site was black text on a white background (completely different from now). It read, "You have reached BiteOfAnApple.com," a humble start. From there, I learned how to style things with CSS, and how to use Javascript (well, sorta). I learned all kinds of things about how the web works, and I loved every minute. These are things you just can't learn from a plugin.

The Learning, Oh the Learning

The idea of building a website from scratch may sound stupid. People tell me, "There are a ton of really good website builder programs out there, why do it yourself?" Professional web developers even laughed at me, saying I was, "doing it the Old School/Hard way," and this is a good point. What's more, there are thousands of templates you can customize to make a site your own, but the thing is, I didn't want to use them. I wanted to build it from scratch, and having done so, I wholly recommend it. I learned so much about CSS, PHP, Javascript, Python, XML, RSS, and HTML, much more than I would have learned otherwise; plus I really enjoyed doing it. The experience has given me insight into database workings, organizational schemes, and so much more that I would never had been able to grasp by reading a book, or playing with Wordpress. Sometimes you have to build it, and break yourself, in order to understand it, and know how to fix it.

The one thing you will learn, over almost anything else, is that "past-you" was an idiot. You will spend more time cleaning up mistakes you made the day before when you didn't know some crucial bit of information. From personal experience, I can say that I have rewritten the backend of this site more times than I care to think about, but every time making it faster, easier, and more efficient for the computer and for me.

ProTip: Learn how to use "PHP Includes". It makes life so much better.

All of this was a learning experience. All of this taught me to think through what I was going to do before doing it. All of this taught me to be patient, and attentive. In the end, it was all for the better.

The Problem

The thing is, and please read this part before starting up Notepad/TextEdit and doing what I did, I recommend this practice only for test websites, as a learning tool. As I am very quickly finding that keeping this website working properly across all browsers, and keeping it updated manually is quite a pain. Every additional blog post makes it exponentially harder to keep everything working properly. PHP scripts have made the upkeep easier, but there is only so much they can help. At the end of the day, Im still updating XML files manually and FTP-ing into the server to post anything.Now granted, I am working on a CMS (Content Management System) to do most of that for me, but it's not easy (mostly because I have to write the CMS myself). The bottom line for this kind of exercise is: If you do it yourself, you have to be willing to do it ALL yourself. If you want a new feature, you have to make it. This being said, I love the complete customization control that I have. I can change anything anytime, and at levels Wordpress users can only dream of. That being said, I have a lot of days when I go to my site on a friend's computer (or more recently my work computer) and see that the site is broken beyond recognition simply because they use a different browser. I then have to go home, download that browser, or browser version, and figure out why its not working. This is extraordinarily time consuming, and I spend more time fixing the CSS than writing articles, but I do not have a single thing I didn't fix where I didn't learn something.

The Takeaway

I guess the message is, if you are interested in learning how the web works, what makes a website, or you are just absolutely crazy and have a lot of time to waste, then open up Notepad, TextWrangler, or TextEdit, go to Stack Overflow and get working. I promise you'll learn so much after just a few days with it. You may want to stab yourself after the first few hours, but thats expected behavior. Get past that, and a sea of knowledge is in your hands. You'll appreciate the websites you go to a lot more, and you'll be a better person in the end. Just remember, please don't use that site as your main site, there exist professional tools for a reason (I speak from experience).

For now, this site will continue to be 100% hand made. Its too much work now for me to migrate over to something else, and I'm almost over the last big hump (the CMS). If you do choose to build a site yourself, feel free to reach out for help. Stack Overflow is your closest friend, let me tell you that. I'm also available for questions on my about page.

Check it out, whether you succeed or not, it'll be an experience you'll not soon forget (for better or worse), and who knows, you might like it.

Browsing of Reddit the other day, I stumbled across a thread called "It's 2013!". The OP (Original Poster) asked for the Reddit community to share their "It's 2013, we should have fixed [this] by now," moments. Among them were topics like self-repairing enamel, zip-lock cereal bags, more integration with the internet in everyday life. Although he hasn't posted on this thread, I think I can tell you what Rene Richie, of iMore, would say.

Here's a link to his recent post about his wants for iOS 7 and the "Age of Push." He talks about Google Now, Siri, and Actionable Notifications in iOS. The concept art is awesome for this one. Link below.

All the yearly hype before WWDC has gotten me thinking. What do we want from iOS this year? What do we want Apple to fix? There's been a lot of interesting talk about this topic already. Marco Arment talked about it on his show Accidental Tech Podcast and iMore has talked about the "iOS 7 Wish List" already too, but I wanted to give my take on the whole thing, specifically in regards to PhotoStream.

PhotoStream has been with us now since iOS 5 (2011) and I think I'm right when I say that everyone was thrilled when they heard Steve announce the feature, but once it arrived, it kind of fell out with a lot of users. Why? Because its confusing. The consumer has a very difficult time grasping PhotoStream, and, since iOS 6, Apple confused people even more with the whole "Shared PhotoStream" thing. This whole mess has spiraled into chaos as Apple added features to a core that wasn't finished yet.

What's Wrong?

The goal of PhotoStream is simple. Take a picture and PhotoStream will put that picture on all of your other devices. It's beautiful really. Majestically simplistic. If only it were presented that way. Instead, anyone opening up Photos.app on their iPhone see's the PhotoStream tab at the bottom, and the Albums tab right next to it. This is a nightmare for most users. What is the difference between the tabs? Why are some of my pictures there and some aren't? What are Shared PhotoStreams? Why are those different from Albums? Don't both of these tabs do the same thing? This whole mess could be eliminated if the PhotoStream and Albums tabs were combined, not just in a mash up, but in a little more elegant of a way. We all know how PhotoStream looks, so I won't take any more time explaining it, let's just leave it at "confusing", and "not elegant".

Another great feature of PhotoStream is the "Shared PhotoStream" feature. This lets you organize your photos in "Streams" and share them with other people, or publish them to a private website. I personally love this feature and my family uses it all the time to share photos. My biggest complaint is that if I have this awesome shared stream, why do I still need the "Albums" tab? (I know that this is mostly for iTunes sync reasons, as pictures synced from iTunes go there, but there is no reason for this anymore). Shared Photo Streams and Albums do the same thing: Organize photos! Why can't they just be on the same tab?

A Truly Elegant Solution

Let's boil PhotoStream down to its essence, what does it do? It syncs camera roll photos between devices. Ok, so why not integrate PhotoStream with the Camera Roll? Lets look at an ideal Photos experience.

PhotoStream in iOS 7
Instead of a confusing second tab, that for some reason is out of sync with the first one, lets look at a concept like the one here. Instead of two tabs, we have the plain camera roll but with a little cloud, similar to what iTunes does with music. The pictures with a cloud are in the cloud (simple enough)! Photos would be uploaded to the cloud just like they are now and until they are fully uploaded, they would remain cloud-less. These photos would be organizable in shared photo streams and be instantly sharable with others.

Also, since this is our idealized version, we changed the main tabs too! Gone are the old Photostream, and Albums tabs. Now they are combined into on beautiful Photos tab. Shared Photostreams are treated just like albums and can be shared just as they can be now. Pictures taken in the Camera Roll are uploaded to the cloud and can be organized into these streams. Gone is the old 3 different screen malarky, and in its place is one screen, one simple screen with all the previous information bundled up nicely. Albums are PhotoStreams and PhotoStreams are Albums.

The Wrap Up

Apple announced PhotoStream in the same manor as they did iCloud, as a background service that you knew was there, but didn't have to worry about. It just worked. I think they pulled it off well in certain aspects like iCloud Backup which runs every night and you'll never need to worry about. PhotoStream was supposed to be the same way, instead though, we got an addition to the Photos app that only confused the majority of users. In our concept though, we have removed the additional tabs, and replaced it with a simple UI tweak that lets the user know whats going on without confusing them. We have eliminated the confusion between Albums and PhotoStreams, we have done what Apple prizes most; we made it simpler.

It looks like the ideal Photos.app experience is already present in iOS. Its part of the photo picker for 3rd party apps. Hopefully, they can expand on this to make the whole photos experience a lot smoother.

TL;DR: PhotoStream looks bad, I thought of how to fix it. Go look at the pictures to see how.

I don't know how I got here. I don't know where here is.

When I emerged, all I could see was water. An endless ocean, as far as the eye can see. How I hadn't already drowned was a miracle in itself, I guess it was too much to ask for another.

I'm going to drown out here.

The sea breeze was blowing a spray of salt into my eyes and throat. My nose burned, and I could hardly breath. Off in the distance, I saw something out of the reflection in the waves.

What's that? It didn't matter what it was, all that mattered was that it was a spit of somethingness, jutting out from the great sea of nothingness. I swam towards it

Land! I gave it all my energy to get to that land as quickly as possible. I was running out of strength.

I got to the small island out of breath and out of strength. That swim took everything it had from me. After catching my breath, I looked around at the island that had saved me from drowning. It was small; not 20 meters in diameter. a small hill was at the center. On it, the lone source of shade in the entire vast ocean, an oak tree. I sat down beneath it and looked around some more. There were a couple other islands, like mine, in a small archipelago. This one was special though. It had the only tree. The sun was beginning to set. I was all alone, and cold, and tired. Oh, and hungry.

I set out to make myself a little shelter from the cold. I dug myself a little hole and curled up inside it.

Hopefully, I'll stay warm tonight. What I didn't know, was that of all the things to have happen at night, I was not prepared for monsters.

All night, I could hear the sounds of thumping and clawing and snarling around me. I couldn't see where they came from, but they were the most terrifying sounds that I've ever heard. I closed my eyes, desperately trying to fall asleep, or wake up, that would be better. Hopefully the nightmare would be over soon.