As I’ve done for the last few years, here are a few quick thoughts about today’s new iOS release, version 11.

I’ve been using the iPad version since the beginning of August and the iPhone version for only a couple of week but I think I have reasonable picture of what you’re going to see.

## Good

• Multi-app support on the iPad. Wow! It’s quite different. You might need to give it a while before you get used to it. I also found that I needed to rearrange my dock so that apps I use to multitask are quickly available
• “Swipe up on the iPad keyboard to get symbol characters.” Such a time saver
• The voice synthesis of Siri is way better. But I agree with Gruber, if I could have dedicated engineering resources to Siri that wouldn’t have been where I would put them
• iCloud sync for Photos. No more training each device to receognise each person!
• Lots of nice, minor changes. The “Now playing” lock screen widget, the “play” button at the top of playlists/albums in the music app
• Control Center is improved (but see first item in the “ugly” section below)

## Bad

• I’m guessing this has something to do with the iPhone X, but the one 3D Touch gesture I used all the time was the hard-press on the left side of the screen to trigger the app switcher. That’s gone in iOS 11. This is going to take a lot of getting used to
• It won’t work on older devices. I get the “why” but it always sucks when they get left behind

## Ugly

• Why did the WiFi button is Control Center change to be “disconnect” rather than “switch off”?!
• Not sure about some of the animations, especially on iPhone.

How do you interview people for developer and technical jobs? This is an enduring question, and one with many angry factions.

It’s too big a subject to tackle in its entirety and I have no intention of trying. Instead, I want to talk about one aspect: should you ask Computer Science questions or not?

In one corner are the people who argue that you never need to implement a linked list or write Quick Sort in real life, so asking you to do that in an interview is unreasonable and excludes good candidates. They argue that there are more important things to consider, such as the use of applications frameworks or design or working with other people.

This was all set to be a story of how much the whole family were enjoying the Nintendo Switch¹. While that’s true, there’s another side. We’ll get to that but let’s start with the good stuff.

Long story short: after just over a week, we’re all getting a lot out of it. The games are fun, even my three year old gets a kick driving Princess Peach around what looks like Sugar Rush from Wreck-It Ralph.

It’s a sad day when a web service that you use dies. It’s extra sad when a web service you made a (tiny) business on goes away. So I wrote a few words about the demise of Delicious over on the Wandle Software blog.

I thought I’d jot a few notes about next weeks WWDC, Apple’s major developer conference. Full disclosure: I’ve not been following the rumour sites very closely this year. I’ve not even done as much iOS development since WWDC 2016 as I have for the last few, so what follows is just a wish list. It’s based on neither leaks nor an in depth knowledge of failings of the current developer tools.

Earth Day bugs me.

Okay, not Earth Day itself. The idea of respecting and preserving the world is difficult to argue with. No, what annoys me is all the big corporates jumping on the bandwagon just to be seen to be there.

These companies do, effectively, nothing, or at least nothing actually useful, just to say that they’re supporting Earth Day. It’s worth talking about a couple of examples.

My employer had committed to turn off the lights that illuminate the logos on all its buildings for our lunch hour. They also suggest that we turn off unnecessary computers and other equipment for the same time. They generously suggest that home workers to do the same.

With all the pieces printed or purchased, it was time to assemble Otto.

Since I’d already tested the Arduino and enlarged the holes for the eyes and stepper motors, the process of putting it together was actually fairly uneventful.

Because of the small size, some parts were very fiddly but it wasn’t hard per se. Kudos to the people who put the instructions together!

I came across three minor problems.

The first stage of building a dancing, obstacle avoiding robot was to build the body and legs using my 3D printer. The second was to test the electronics before assembly. This would prove to be more eventful than the printing.

I was least sure about all the electronics. They components arrived and… they sure looked okay. I didn’t think the buzzer looked quite right — it looked too big, but I figured that it even if a little lose it should make something approaching a buzzing noise.

The first stage of building a dancing, obstacle avoiding robot was to build the body and legs using my 3D printer.

Surprisingly, for someone who has been playing around with computers since I was eleven but only had a 3D printer for a month, I was much more worried about the electronics than the actual making stuff.

So confident, in fact, that initially I placed all six pieces into one print job.

My wife got me a 3D printer for my birthday/Christmas. I’ve printed a few little things since then, but I’ve been itching for a bit of a project. I didn’t want anything too ambitious but, clearly, there’s no point in doing something that can’t fail.

After much searching, I decided upon Otto, a walking, dancing, obstacle avoiding robot.

In this post I’ll talk about how I prepared for the project and my thoughts on its likely success (or otherwise).