The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but for projects

Recently, this urban legend was posted on Hacker News. It’s one of those stories where a grunt on the factory floor came up with a better, cheaper solution than a large bureaucracy.

Surprisingly, my comment there got a lot of upvotes:

I think another take-away from the story is that the domain you work in will dictate the solution you come up with.

If you are a high-level exec, the domain you have, the levers and pulleys available to you, are asking your direct reports to investigate the issue and come up with a report on the problem and generate potential solutions, which will then be discussed and evaluated in meetings–at a very high level. To somebody on the ground level, the domain of the problem is “what do I have around me to save time? oh, I have a fan, let me use that. Done.”

I think your point about incentivizing workers is part of it. This story reminds me of the This American Life piece about the NUMMI plant where Toyota worked with GM to teach them the Toyota way of assembling cars. [1] Part of the Toyota Way is to empower the individuals at the ground level to own the process and to improve it. The interviews are surprisingly emotional for something that’s “just work”, but I think it shows how empowering people to own and improve their everyday gives them agency.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

Similar to Conway’s Law, the solution you come up with is dictated by the process or tools used to come up with it. Taking this further, it’s like the idea in linguistics that the structure of the language you use shapes your world view.

To me, what this all tells me is if you want to come up with better solutions, or see the world in new ways, or just be more creative, you really do need to expose yourself to new ideas and modes of thinking. If anything, modes of thinking that are completely foreign to you, or are hard for your brain to grok, are the very ones you should be focusing on if you wish to expand your thinking.

iCloud Storage gotcha: Apple inserts a UUID into the filename when storing

My new flash cards app, Fresh Cards, uses iCloud for syncing data between macOS and iOS devices. I’m learning a lot about how to use iCloud Storage, and there are quite a few gotchas and documentation is kind of sparse online, so I figured I’d go through something that I just learned about it here.

Apple recommends using an NSMetadataQuery to keep track of any changes to the iCloud storage folder. Whenever files change in the cloud, any query notification handlers you’ve set up will be called. This gives you an opportunity to go through the list of remote files and see if there’s anything that changed of interest to your app.

The way I handle changes in the cloud is to enumerate the results in the NSMetadataQuery object. I call query.result(at: index) to get each item. Each item is just a NSMetadataItem and you can call value(forAttribute:) on each item to get a whole bunch of info:

  • NSMetadataItemFSNameKey to get the filename
  • NSMetadataItemFSContentChangeDateKey to get the last modified date
  • NSMetadataItemURLKey to get the file URL on disk
  • NSMetadataItemPathKey to get the path to the file on disk (same as file URL but in path form)
  • NSMetadataItemFSSizeKey to get the file size

In my code, one thing I was doing that was bad was using the file URL to determine the filename. This isn’t necessary since NSMetadataItemFSNameKey already gives you the filename. I didn’t realize this at the time.

Anyway, you’d think that the filename in the file URL would be the same as the NSMetadataItemFSNameKey value, but it’s not! Apple actually inserts a UUID into the filename here. I understand why they’d do this. Whenever you upload a file to the iCloud storage, they probably do this to avoid collisions if more than one device is uploading the same file. At some point, they have some conflict resolution and they essentially just “point” to the winner.

For my purposes, I was uploading files that looked like “B565B1E0-B5B8-420D-9792-0CE51911697C.journal”. I had my own scheme where I would use a UUID to make filenames unique as well. But, since Apple was also inserting a UUID into the filename, I started noticing the file paths and file URLs provided by NSMetadataQuery as looking like “B565B1E0-B5B8-420D-9792-0CE51911697C 20CE63AC-AECF-43B9-B5B0-382DD1C8C49B.journal” instead. This threw me off since I thought my app was uploading these errant files. Once I figured out that Apple was doing this, I was able to correct my app behavior to just use the filename from the NSMetadataItemFSNameKey attribute, which is always what you expect it to be (i.e. without the additional UUID inserted).

tl;dr – Apple inserts a UUID into your filenames when storing iCloud Storage, so “foo.txt” becomes “foo 2445A03E-15B0-4DB8-ACC4-62A29B8DE9C5.txt”. Make sure you use NSMetadataItemFSNameKey as the actual filename and not the lastPathComponent of the fileURL or path you get from the metadata item.

Beta testing continues for Fresh Cards!

Work continues on Fresh Cards! Fresh Cards is a new flash card app I’m developing for macOS and iOS.

I’ve been refining the lesson UI, trying to make it easier and easier to use. At the moment, the app has three tabs per deck, one for the next lesson info, one for the list of cards, and one for the stats. After using this app for several weeks now, I’ve realized that I’m always switching between the lesson info and the stats screen. It dawned on me that it makes sense to combine them for a one-stop shop.

Here’s a sneak peek at a design mockup I put together last night in Inkscape:

If you’re in the app to view a lesson, you’ll see it right away. However, if you’ve already done your lesson and just want to see info on your next lesson or other trends, you’ll see them right away too.

Simultaneously (yes, I’m doing all of these tasks at the same time), I’m getting the iPhone version of the app up and running. There’s a lot of shared code, so the majority of this work is building up the UI for iOS. Nearly a year ago I was working on an iPhone flash card app (sort of v1 of this project), and thankfully I’m able to reuse a lot of the UI here to save time.

I need your help to make the best flash card app ever

tl;dr I’ve built a new flash card app for macOS (with iOS coming soon) and need your help to make it the best ever. I will send you a free copy to help beta test it. Just email me at ussherpress at gmail.com.

Just want screenshots? Scroll down here.

[animated GIF removed later]

Okay, some background: I’ve tried existing flash card app options and found them sorely lacking. The big ones I’ve tried are Anki and Tinycards. I’ve also tried some flash card apps by smaller developers and still can’t find anything that I think is good.

Anki
This is the most popular flash card solution out there. The big thing that it’s got going for it is that it’s free. (Well, not so much for mobile.) It uses spaced repetition (awesome) and there are tons of existing decks available for it via ankiweb.

I get that it’s open source, has an open file format, and is extensible, but damn is it hard to use. For non-tech savvy users, what are you to make of this UI? It looks like it’s like something out of Windows XP era.

The lesson UI is also non-intuitive and requires you to make a judgment about how well you were able to recall a card’s contents using a 5-point scale. I understand that this helps make the spaced repetition schedule “more accurate”, but in my opinion, the schedule is just a model of your memory’s “forgetting curve” and if the scheduling is off a few days, I don’t think it matters in the long term.

That said, I think just having a “I remember” or “I’ve forgotten” input is good enough for creating a decent SRS schedule. For most people, a daunting UI is going to put them off studying, so if they give up early, it doesn’t matter how accurate the system is.

In my opinion, Anki is geared more towards users who are happy to install the latest Linux distro, but for the average user, it’s not a great solution.

Tinycards
This is a great online solution. However, Duolingo is shutting it down on September 1, 2020.

What makes Tinycards shine is it’s very easy to use UI and catalog of user-created cards. It’s hard not to like this app because it’s fun and creating new decks and cards is so simple.

The one huge drawback to me is that this is an online service. There is a devoted fanbase, but now that the service is going down, what will you do?

Various app solutions
I won’t name any specific solutions here because I respect that being an independent developer is hard work. I found several macOS and iOS flash card apps and they are functional, but the one thing they always get wrong is the user experience! Folks who create flash card solutions are often very technically savvy and end up creating solutions that work for them, but not the average user.

You can see this by how many settings they’ll throw at you. This is great if you “get” how spaced repetition works and are a power user who doesn’t mind getting your hands dirty, but again, for the average user, something like Tinycards’ UI is “good enough”.

I just tried an iPhone app earlier today that had two screens of settings when creating a new deck. Why throw so many options at the user when they are creating their first deck? Make it possible to customize the deck, but don’t bombard the user with those options upfront.

Fresh Cards
So where does this lead us? Naturally, it leads us to my own home-grown flash card app: Fresh Cards.

I wanted to take the best elements of Tinycards and Anki and create a new app that is easy to use and powerful.

It’s currently in beta testing and if you want to help out, I will gladly send you a free copy of the app to help make it the best solution out there. I need input on what works and what doesn’t work!

If you want to learn more, visit https://www.freshcardsapp.com.

Some things that are very important to me, and that I hope I’ve achieved with Fresh Cards are the following:

– The app should be absolutely easy to use. It should take as few clicks as possible to create a new deck, add cards, and do a lesson.

– It must employ a spaced repetition algorithm. If the app doesn’t use SRS, what’s the point? Ideally the app should have a plugin system so you can define your own SRS algorithm, but for the initial release, it’ll use SM-2.

– It should be possible to export and import decks from other users. The file format should be “hackable”. People should be able to open the file format up and create tools to automate creating decks, if they want.

– There should be an abundance of stats. You should be able to see how many cards you’ve learned. It should be possible to see how many cards are due in the week ahead.

– The app should not require a subscription service. I do not want to have something that requires you to pay a few dollars a month to use. Yes, I will charge a few dollars for the app, but once you have it, you don’t need to pay to use it.

Reach out to me if you want to beta test. I want this to be the “default” go-to flash card app for the average person. I have a macOS version ready to test and an iOS version coming soon. Contact ussherpress at gmail.com for more info.

Finally, here are some screenshots.