Well, I’m now in quaratine all because I called in sick on Wednesday with a cold but it is now required that because of the recent ballsup courtesy of a compassionate entry that now employers are being extra cautious. So today (Thursday) I went to the local testing centre – it was uncomfortable having a swab put up my nose but no worse than the STD test where you have to swab the back of your throat. I’ve been given my marching orders and told that I need to self isolate so as I write this blog I ordered for delivery my groceries for this week from Countdown to get delivered.

Next week will be a big week regarding Apple and the WWDC – with the biggest rumour being the announcement of Apple moving to ARM along with their ‘Platforms state of the Union” which will a high level but technical overview of where macOS will be going in the world of ARM – what will be jettisoned as part of the migration, what will remain and what frameworks are being the basis of the future direction of macOS. My speculation, as noted on my prior email is that the long term aim is to replace UI Kit, AppKit in favour of SwiftUI which is the new native UI API that was introduced with watchOS 6 – yes you can have C, C++, Objective-C, Swift etc. backend code and have the nice sleek modern SwiftUI for the front end.

I had a quiet day at home so I cleaned all my Apple devices – erase and then reinstall their respective operating systems as to remove all the tweaking and experimenting as I was working from home. It appears that with some software it doesn’t matter how hard you try, you can never fully uninstall all the various bits and pieces not only copied over when installed but also created when running – the various setting files, cache not to mention system tweaks for integration etc.

I downloaded a fresh most up to date version of macOS 10.15.5 (which has included in it the most recent security update) – clean install on my iMac and MacBook Pro, on my iPhone I did a DFU restore, and on my AppleTV I did a ”reset and reinstall’ where everything is cleared off it and tvOS is downloaded then reinstalled. Everything is back to being snappy although one application I haven’t installed is MarsEdit. Don’t get me wrong, I love the application but the problem is that increasingly it isn’t keeping up with the level of customisation that WordPress offers through their web based application. For example, if I drag and drop photos I am given the opportunity to format it in a particular way in terms of laying out the photos where as if I use something like MarsEdit I’m limited in terms of what I can do or more correctly I have to do a lot more by hand vs. WordPress web application where IN drag and drop the photos then kick from some layout templates.