Ryan Grier

This past weekend, I finished Pokémon Sword. It was a good game. I bought the game at launch and haven’t really gotten into it until a few weeks ago.

The storyline was interesting and being able to take another Pokémon trainer from nothing to champion is always fun. Plus collecting all of those Pokémon along the way is a nice challenge. I’m glad that I finally played through the game. If you’ve played a Pokémon game before, you’ve got the general idea of what this game is about.

I have purchased both of the DLC expansion packs (The Isle of Armor & The Crown Tundra). The Isle of Armor is out now, but I haven’t started the content yet. The Crown Tundra doesn’t come out until later this year.

The game has had quite a bit of backlash against it because the developers did not include all of the prior Pokémon in the game (like other games have done). This wasn’t a huge issue for me. I’ve only ever tried to complete a Pokédex once and it just wasn’t worth it to me. It would be nice for them to have included all of the prior Pokémon, only so that I can transfer them to the game from Pokémon Home/Bank.

I’m relatively new to Pokemon games. I’ve only been playing them the last few years. I’m not some diehard fan who’s been playing since the first game. I do enjoy playing them. Besides this game, other Pokémon games I’ve played through include: Pokémon Black, Pokémon Black 2, Pokémon X, and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire. It’s really not a lot.

I skipped both Pokémon Moon and Pokémon Ultra Moon. I own them both, but for some reason, I never played through them. I do need to go back and play them. I think I need a short break from Pokémon games before I do so.

I’m not sure if I’ll play the first Pokémon Sword expansion or Moon/Ultra Moon next. Like I said, I think I need a short break before diving back in.

![Photo by Ryan Quintal](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1566577134624-6f6cc4bb272b?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjEyMDd9&auto=format&fit=crop&w=2100&q=80"Photo by Ryan Quintal")

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was the game to get when the Nintendo Switch launched. It was the first game I bought when I got my Switch. People love this game. It appears on so many “best games on Switch” lists that I see online.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. I just don’t like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I’ve tried playing it on three separate occasions. Each time, I’ve tried and failed to get into it.

This (above) was as far as I got in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

I’ve gotten as far as freeing two of the four Divine Beasts. But I’ve never gotten further. Something just stops me from continuing it. I think my main problem with Breath of the Wild is that the weapons can break. I don’t like the idea of breaking my favorite weapon(s) and not having a backup, or any weapon at all. I don’t know why this bothers me so much. Probably because it’s just such a departure from other Zelda games. But I hate this mechanic where weapons can break.

There are parts of the games that I really enjoy. The world is huge and you can explore anywhere. The differing temperatures throughout the world are a neat addition. The crafting was also interesting. The puzzles and dungeons are fantastic.

It’s not that I don’t like The Legend of Zelda games. I recently played through The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening on the Switch and absolutely loved it. In fact, I enjoy most of the The Legend of Zelda games available. I wish they would remake more of them for the Switch, like they remade Link’s Awakening.

I’ve got so many other games that I want to play, that I just can’t justify spending any more time on it. Life is too short to play games you don’t like.

Currently I am playing through both Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order & Pokémon Sword. They are both a lot of fun in different ways. I’ll have to write about them once I’ve finished them.

I’ve spent about six months in a technical rut. Not really learning anything new iOS/tvOS/Swift-wise. I got a little complacent with the skills that I had.

Recently, I’ve started breaking out of that rut. At least I hope.

Over the past week and a half, I’ve made my way through Core Data by Tutorials from the Ray Wenderlich team. The Core Data book is currently on sale (50% off). It’s a really good book.

I’ve used Core Data quite a bit over the years, but I haven’t used it heavily since 2016. Since 2016, most of my professional work has been using Realm which is an alternative to Core Data.

Core Data by Tutorials was a really nice refresher on Core Data. I also learned a few new tidbits here. Most interesting chapters to me were “Unit Testing” & “Core Data & CloudKit”.

The unit testing chapter gave me some great ideas on how to improve my unit testing in various areas. I’ve been trying to get better with unit testing in both professional and personal projects. This chapter sparked some interest in that area that I’ve been able to progress with, so far.

The Core Data and CloudKit chapter was entirely new to me. I’ve had multiple false starts on getting cloud syncing working in projects. These attempts include a failed blog series called Data Sync Series. I had also made multiple attempts to get syncing into my retired app MyCntdwn.

This book has got me thinking about data syncing again. I’ve even thought about doing a few things. First, adding sync to MyCntdwn (finally) and shipping it again. Second, revamping my data sync series and actually finishing it. I’m not sure if any of this will happen. But this book has got me started down that path mentally. Who knows, maybe it will be a nice Summer project.

I’ve got my next book lined up. It’s Combine: Asynchronous Programming with Swift also from the Ray Wenderlich team. I’ve been dabbling in Combine here and there since it was announced by Apple at least year’s WWDC. It’s not something I can really use professionally, yet. Combine requires iOS 13+ to work and we support iOS 11+ at work. But Combine is something that I can use in personal projects.

My latest release of Beer Style Guidelines has just gone out.

This version of Beer Style Guidelines (finally) includes a new beer style guideline. I’ve just added the Brewers Association 2020 Beer Style Guidelines. This is the first guide update I’ve done since the 2017 version of this same guide.

The other (included) guides from the Brewers Association are so old (2016 & 2017), I’ve removed them from the app. I’m not aware of many people who like to compare the guidelines from year to year. To me, it only makes sense to have the latest version included in the app.

I’ve also fixed a few bugs within the app. But the largest change is the new guide being added.

Full list of release notes: https://beerstyleguidelines.app/release-notes/2020.5.txt

Please enjoy the update.

This is another post about Hearthstone and beating another Solo Adventure. I’ve done these sort of posts before for various solo adventures (One Night in Karazhan, Blackrock Mountain, The League of Explorers & Curse of Naxxramas). This isn’t the most recent adventure, I’m really behind on completing these.

Knights of the Frozen Throne was a little different than other adventures. Instead of beating the entire adventure on Heroic, you need to beat the final boss (The Lich King) with every class in the game.

It took me a while to find the right decks for all of these classes. All of the guides out there, are very outdated and I’m more of a netdecker (finding capable decks online) than able to create my own. Some of these decks may also be outdated now. I’ve been sitting on this list for about 3 months now. I believe some of the cards in these decks have been nerfed by Blizzard since I used them. I’ve been generally lazy about blogging, otherwise I would have posted this sooner.

My reward for beating this adventure is a Prince Arthas hero skin for the Paladin class (seen below).

Below are the decks that I used to beat the Lich King with each class in the game (except Demon Hunter).

The Lich King

• Druid: Easy First Try Lich King Druid (substituted Kel’Thuzad for Arfus, Sub Feral Rage for The Lich King)
• Hunter: [budget] Rexxar vs. The Lich King (substituted Molten Giant for Arcane Shot)
• Mage: The Lich King Echo Giants Mage Deck
• Paladin: FTP Paladin - Lich King Solo Mission
• Priest: Lich king (one shot)(Big Priest)
• Rogue: Standard|Lich King|Mecha’thun without Doomsayer…
• Shaman: Lich King Shaman Mecha’thun Deck
• Warlock: Lich King Warlock Mecha’thun Deck
• Warrior: Lich King - Warrior Mecha’thun Deck

I went through these classes in order above. You can see from this list (specifically near the bottom) where I started to lean heavily on the Mecha’thun card and mechanic.

The Mecha’thun mechanic states that when this card dies “If you have no cards in your deck, hand, and battlefield, destroy the enemy hero.” This just means you need to burn through your cards, get Mecha’thun out onto the battlefield and then kill him. If you can set it up, it’s a very easy win.

There are a few more solo adventures available since The Lich King. They are mostly dungeon run style adventures. I think I am going to jump forward to take care of the latest adventure (Galakrond’s Awakening) before going back to these. I’ve heard that the adventure is fairly easy to get through. I’m planning on going through that and documenting the decks I’ve used.

Stay tuned…

Playing Relative Insanity which is like Cards Against Humanity lite.

Playing pool, waiting to bowl.

This past week, I released a new version of Beer Style Guidelines. It’s the first update to the app in almost two years (Nov 6, 2017). Talk about a neglected app!

What’s since the last version

Here’s a full list of the things I’ve changed in the app since the last release. Most of it happening in the last month or so.

• Tore out Fabric/Crashlytics (good riddance)
• Set the deployment target for iOS 13+.
• Added Light/Dark mode support.
• Fixed the search bar (it was broken in iOS 13).
• Fixed a slew of compiler warnings (but not all 😔).
• Fixed a stupid iOS 13 Navigation (title) bar issue.
• Changed the versioning scheme from major.minor to year.release.

Fabric/Crashlytics

This was one of the first things I did in this release. I actually tore it out in March of this year.

I tore out Fabric/Crashlytics for several reasons. It always made me feel a little gross using it. It’s not owned by me (it’s now owned by Google). I don’t really know what they do with the data. And what they do with the data can change at any moment. They are also shutting Fabric/Crashlytics down early next year, so it’s going away anyway.

I have written my own analytics reporting engine. I think it’s mostly ready to go. But I’m not certain about it yet and I didn’t want to hold up an already two-year old release for this. For this release (at least), I rely on Apple’s App Analytics. I’m still not certain if/when my own analytics reporting engine will be put in place. For now, I’m focusing on other things.

iOS 13+

I think this is pretty self explanatory. I want to be able to support the latest and greatest that Apple has to offer. I will probably continue this every year by moving to the latest/greatest iOS version.

Light/Dark Mode

I’ve been wanting to add this for a long time. I’ve been tinkering with this off and on (mostly off) for three years. I have a really old branch in my GitHub repo called themes. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. It’s finally here.

Misc iOS 13 Issues/Warnings

This release also has bunch of iOS 13 specific fixes.

For example, when I upgraded to iOS 13, the search bar was acting silly. I think it was the way I had the list of Style Guide Chapters setup. I had to re-work a number of things to make this work correctly. But it’s all for the better now.

I also fixed a number of compiler warnings (deprecations mostly) that were introduced since I last worked on the project. I still have 4 or 5 warnings left. I plan on tackling these soon™.

Version Number Change

My last version was 1.9. This version is 2019.1. This makes sense to me. It’s the first release in 2019. The next version (if this year) will be 2019.2. I took cues from Curtis Herbert and Marco Arment. I think (a small) part of the reason I waited so long for a release was I knew I wanted to call it 2.0, but I wasn’t sure when was a good time to call it done. Now I just plan on adding a new feature or fixing some bugs and shipping it. No more fretting over what’s “enough” for a major release.

Website Re-Launch

There was a point in time when I had a website for Beer Style Guidelines. I just don’t know why I 1: let the domain lapse and 2: let it die.

So, I relaunched the site as https://beerstyleguidelines.app. I’m using the really old design for it. I have plans to update it. But I wanted to get something together for the launch of this version. I also needed to have a privacy policy page together for Apple and the App Store (which is a good thing).

What’s Next?

I’ve already started on the next version of the app.

In the app now, I’m using a UIWebView to display the guide chapter contents. UIWebView has been deprecated by Apple (as of iOS 12) and will eventually be removed from the OS.

Apple suggests moving to WKWebView instead which is currently supported by them. However, I’m not sure I want to do that. I was never a fan of using a web view to display the heart of the content to users. There is also a very slight delay in displaying the content for the first time. This slight delay also exists in WKWebView. I’ve been toying around with other ways of displaying the data and I think I have a pretty good solution. It currently has some drawbacks that I need to fix before I can even think about shipping this.

After a few more releases like this (modernizing the app in many places), I also want to start thinking about a macOS app. I also need to get new guides into the app. I currently have 3, but the last “new” guide was added in 2017. It’s almost 2020. Time to get more recent guides in place.

I already have a short mental list of what I want to change on the website. For starters, I need to add dark mode support. I hope to get that into place in the next week or two.

I recently called it quits on Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. I had been playing it for almost four years. I know I’ve posted about this game before.

This was a game that I had liked for the longest time. However, over the last year or so, they’ve started making some decisions that really didn’t sit well with me.

I mostly enjoyed the Player vs environment (PVE) content. Raids, combat missions, even Territory Battles. I enjoy playing against the game/environment (rather than other people). This is how I feel with most games. The latest content in Galaxy of Heroes felt like a re-skin of old content and they just cranked up the difficulty exponentially. It felt like more of a chore to play it without any sense of Pride or Accomplishment (a jab at this reddit comment from EA - who also makes Galaxy of Heroes).

What I really enjoy are new raids and there hasn’t been a new one in well over a year. And the last raid was just so-so.

I was a fairly competitive player. I usually stayed in the top 30 in Player vs player (PVP) squad and fleet arenas daily.

I was not a Free-to-play (FTP) player. I did spend money on the game. Not a ton. But enough to feel like I was helping show my support to the game. I know that sounds weird. But it’s technically a free game and I wanted to help support a game that I played every day. So I would purchase things here and there. I wasn’t a whale by any means.

Over the last year or so, the developers have made staying competitive really hard. They’ve essentially put these huge paywalls in front of getting the latest/greatest characters in the game. It’s been like that for a while now. Previously, you would only need certain characters unlocked at a very minimum “gear” level to obtain them. If you were smart and read the tea leaves, you could unlock the necessary characters needed. Now, you need the characters unlocked and at an almost maxed level to have them. That’s very unrealistic to do without spending a ton of money. The window to unlock these new super power characters has also shortened from week-long events to weekend-long events.

Now these new character events do come around again. So I could wait for the event to return. I did that with the first of these character events (a Darth Malak event). I didn’t have the necessary characters at a high enough gear level to even enter the event. I did manage to unlock him the second time around. But I came up with an even better idea for the latest of these new character events (a General Anakin event). Why not just stop playing altogether? That’s exactly what I did.

Two weeks ago, a friend and I decided to quit.

I am so happy that I did. It felt like a huge weight was lifted off of my shoulders. I’m no longer checking the game every few hours for new guild orders or free energy. My dinner time hours are no longer occupied by trying to climb in both PVP arenas for the daily payout.

I should have done this sooner. I’m not sure I was really ready to though. I’ve finally had enough.

I have no plans on going back to playing Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. The game was fun while it lasted. But either I’ve fundamentally changed, or the game has. I feel that we are no longer compatible.

So. What am I doing now to occupy my time? Not a whole lot of new things. I’m just enjoying not having this extra weight on my shoulders. I’ve been reading a bit more, playing a bit more of Hearthstone (single player only) and working on my side project.

It’s really been a refreshing change now that I’ve quit. I am so glad that I did.

Yesterday was a bit of a sad day for me. I retired two apps of mine from the iOS App Store. I removed both MyCntdwn and Showers: White Noise Generator from sale.

I had mentioned that it may come to this in my last post (Summer 2019 Development Goals). I made some progress with updates for both MyCtndwn and Beer Style Guidelines. But ultimately I decided that the progress on MyCntdwn wasn’t enough to continue forward with it.

MyCntdwn has been in the App Store since shortly after the App Store launched (in 2008). It was actually coming up on it’s 11th birthday. But I have also lost a bit of motivation to keep maintaining it. I haven’t made any valuable updates since the iPhone X was released two years ago. I’ve had plans on big updates to the app, but just could never get things going.

Showers is a much more recent app. I launched this app in early 2014. The last update to it was in 2016. I hadn’t even planning on making any future updates to it. I was just holding onto it. Retiring this app was a much easier decision and I’m surprised that I didn’t do it earlier.

There is good news from all of this. I can finally stop making half-hearted efforts on two different apps and focus instead on making updates to my remaining app: Beer Style Guidelines.

Beer Style Guidelines is still alive and kicking. There hasn’t been an update to it for a little while. But I have one in the works. A small update with iOS 13 compatibility should be submitted in a few weeks. I have a few small (I hope) bugs to work out and then I can submit it for review. In upcoming versions, I plan on rewriting most of what’s under the hood and adding new/updated style guides.

I hope that officially retiring two of my apps will open up some mental capacity for me to keep Beer Style Guidelines updated and fresh.

On the off chance that anyone would like to purchase either MyCntdwn or Showers: White Noise Generator from me to take over development and maintenance. Please reach out to me on twitter.

I’ve made a set of goals for the Summer. In the recent past I have been bad about making goals. I’ve been so busy with life, that I’ve just tried hanging on and making it through.

This Summer, I want to do some quality development work on both MyCntdwn and Beer Style Guidelines. The thing is that I say this every Summer. And for the last few Summers, I haven’t done enough quality work to ship anything. I’ve even gone as far as committing to a Data Sync Series which I eventually gave up on.

It’s been tough the last few years. I have a lot of things that I want to do, but I haven’t made this development work a priority. Other things in life have been a higher priority (work, family, etc). They still are, but this Summer I am going to do a better job of removing the time wasters. Instead of vegging out and watching a series of stupid TV shows in the evening, I’m going to do more development work.

I’ve decided that if I don’t do some good work and actually ship app updates this Fall, I’m going to stop development on these apps. It’s not fair to the small number of users I have to keep these apps in the Apps Store and not properly support them.

So far I’ve made some nice progress.

I’ve torn out all 3rd party analytic support in favor of one that I’ve written myself. This in itself has been a year-long project (with long breaks). This one I’ve written allows me to have much finer control over what’s being sent to my analytics backend. There’s no sneaky stuff going on there. And the users can easily turn all analytics tracking off.

I’ve also enabled Dark Mode support for both apps. I already had support for this in MyCntdwn. But now that it’s supported at the OS level, I was able to rip out a bunch of code I no longer need.

I’m currently tinkering with SwiftUI and seeing if I can replace a bunch of UI-based code and Storyboards with SwiftUI. Early indications are that I will be able to. I’m not 100% certain yet. I need to do more exploration with SwiftUI.

Next on my list will be to support data sync. It looks like they’ve made that much easier in iOS 13. But I’m not there yet. So I’m not going to get my hopes up with it.

And if this all works out nicely. I may even try to make them both macOS apps with Catalyst. But this is way down the road for me.

As you can see I’ve got some lofty development goals here. I just hope I can make them enough of a priority in my life to get them done. Honestly, I’d be happy shipping what I’ve done already when it’s time. But I want to do more. Stay tuned to see if I actually follow through on these plans.

I’ve finally had a minute (or 60) to sit down and start watching videos from WWDC 2019. I know, I’m over a month late to the show.

I watched both the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union on the first day of WWDC. But since then, I’ve been so busy with work and other stuff that I haven’t had much time to catch up.

From the keynote and state of the union videos, I knew SwiftUI looked amazing. But I didn’t get a real sense of it until this week.

I watched Introducing SwiftUI: Building Your First App. That was such a good video/session. I feel like I need to watch it again. I’m also looking forward to watching the other SwiftUI videos and learning much more about SwiftUI.

I think Apple really nailed it with SwiftUI. It looks so simple and intuitive. I should be able to remove a lot of code in my personal apps (and eventually professional apps) because of SwiftUI.

Tonight, I had a chance to sit down and start tinkering with SwiftUI. I currently feel like I’m lost in the woods with some things. It’s a bit overwhelming at first. There’s a lot going on that I don’t know how to do yet (interaction with Timers and Core Data). I need to watch more of Apple’s videos and really dig into the code a bit more.

I’ve got plans to update both MyCntdwn and Beer Style Guidelines to use SwiftUI (among other new features). I’m really hoping that I get good chunks of time this Summer to really dive in and learn the new stuff.

I just hope I have some time to actually make updates to my apps. Like for real this time. Things are so busy with the kids, that I rarely have much time to do this sort of thing anymore.

But this Summer, I’m determined to watch many more videos from WWDC and incorporate new technologies into my apps.

This morning I did not want to get up and work out. I managed to get it done though. Now it’s done for the day.

Setting up the new (fake) Christmas tree at our new house. We’ve never had a 10 ft tree before.

Recently, I’ve been starting my mornings with either a long walk, workout or yoga. I’ve found it’s a great way to start the day.

I’ve recently started learning rxSwift. Are there any good resources out there?

I started playing Kingdom Rush Vengeance last night. It’s a fun game. I haven’t played a tower defense game in a while. itunes.apple.com/us/app/ki…

Caught a cold while in Italy. Luckily it happened later in the trip. Still trying to fight through it now.

Home after a marathon vacation through Italy. Wonderful trip. Wonderful country. Took almost 24 hrs and a train, tram, two car services and two flights to get home. Great trip, but we’re all tired.

It’s definitely a Queen Essentials kind of morning. itunes.apple.com/us/playli…

Working from a local coffee shop this morning. They have a coffee called Unicorn Tears that is excellent.

I’m really looking forward to the Disney streaming service. Disney announces a second live-action Star Wars show

Today’s work companion.

It’s been a while. I’ve been avoiding social media of most kinds for months.

Finished another one.