Jamie Balfour

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Find out more about me, my personal projects, reviews, courses and much more here.

Jamie Balfour'sPersonal blog

2020 has been a strange and different year and for many of us, Christmas will be different this year compared with normal. Keep safe and have a Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Posted in Life
christmas

Today is a major leap in the history of Apple Silicon! Microsoft Office apps are now fully optimised for the Apple M1 based Macs!

Microsoft has done it!

Running them is a breeze and they start instantly - even shorter a wait than I had before. This native support will not only improve performance but also improve battery life whilst they are being used.

This is a monumental step forward for Apple Silicon.

Posted in Tech news
apple
macbook pro
apple m1

Visual Voicemail is now available on the Vodafone phone network on iPhones. Yesterday when I was about to press the Phone Voicemail button I have grown used to I realised I had something different. This is the first time I have had Visual Voicemail since my original iPhone back in 2009 with the O2 network.

Posted in Tech news
visual
voicemail
vodafone
iphone

After a long time of a very square/rectangular look to my website, I have brought back subtle curves here and there across the website. These curves are designed to make things like buttons more obvious as well as add to separation. There has been a lot of exploration around what suits it and what doesn't but I think the changes I have made are very clean and follow design techniques of today.

For example, input boxes and windows now have curves. You may have also noticed that I have introduced a new quick alert to the site as well as the newest version of BalfPick.

I'm aiming to make my design a combination of curved buttons and elements built on a flat design and think I've done it well so far.

Posted in Website news
website
update

I have finally redesigned BalfPick from the ground up for the second iteration. This version is completely different and relies on much less JavaScript and does more using CSS. It's much higher performance, better on mobile devices with touch and much lighter in weight too. 

Part of the new design focuses on streamlining the manner in which it is used and instead of providing a custom dropdown list it simply uses the original dropdown list built-in to the browser or operating system.

Below is how these new dropdowns look on my website in dark mode.

As someone who loves computer hardware, I found this article a very interesting reminder of the benefits of RISC over CISC and the benefits of CISC over RISC architectures.

https://medium.com/swlh/what-does-risc-and-cisc-mean-in-2020-7b4d42c9a9de

Posted in Tech talk
risc
cisc
processors

It is at long last that Apple has announced its own silicon will be used in the next range of Macs. The Apple M1 was announced today as Apple's first in the line of successor CPUs to the Intel range they've used since 2006 (I still remember the day back then and I wrote a little article in Microsoft Word so I could remember the day).

As a result, I of course had to be one of the first owners of these new machines so I ordered it straight away. This new MacBook I've ordered comes in the form of a MacBook Pro (though I was very tempted by the Mini as well) to replace my 2013 MacBook Pro 15". I wanted a 13" again this time since I wanted the portability again.

I am really looking forward to reviewing this machine and hope that it is everything I had hoped for! 

Posted in Apple Corporation
apple
macbook pro
apple m1

He was the first James Bond and an amazing actor. Sean Connery set the standard for what James Bond was and is. As Bond, he was tough, brutal and yet a hit with the ladies - everything Bond should be. 

File:SeanConneryJune08.jpg

Much like Roger Moore who passed away a few years back, Connery had his own style that brought something amazing to Bond. I cannot actually believe he's no longer with us. I will certainly miss him.

ZPE 1.8.11 is now available and is another small update in terms of the number of features but big in what the new features bring. 

The first big new feature is support for infinite parameters. This is done within the definition with the double dot notation such as function x($y, $z ..). There is more in the documentation.

Reference functions have been completely redesigned, as have objects. With objects, there is a 2x performance increase whilst with reference functions, there is a much larger performance increase as well as a stability improvement. Reference functions can now be chained to each other much easier and this change requires much less code to do it.

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