I am not saying smartwatches are finished, but if you look at the figures they are hugely on the decline. According to one report, only 2.7 million devices were sold in quartile 3 in 2016, with Apple still at the top with 1.1 million shipments. Garmin is the only manufacturer to be actually increasing market share, with Apple being the biggest loser here.
The thing with smartwatches is that most people probably do not need them. This is the main reason behind me not buying one because I could see it becoming something that would never see any use. I understand it saves people time when you get a text because you don't have to reach for your pocket to get your phone, but that just doesn't appeal to me.
Now then, the question is, how much longer will Apple continue to make smartwatches? Sure when Apple Watch 3 comes out it might attract a few million customers, but Apple Watch 2 failed to amaze the world, instead just leaving a disappointed feeling. According to the original report, Apple's Q3 sales have not been great for the Watch, which reinforces the point made by Trusted Reviews about its lack of new features. At the moment, sales of the Apple Watch 2 are more likely to be to new users than original buyers, since the second iteration doesn't add a massive selection of new features, and I guess the same will be the case with the Apple Watch 3. Once everyone owns at least some smartwatch, it will be very difficult to sway them to another one - it's just not like the smartphone market.
BalfBlog now features a built in 'related posts' tool. Nothing needs to be changed to have this in an existing blog other than one setting needing changed to enable it. This new feature makes it even easier to generate your own related posts section than I had done before. Simply turning the toggle to on will then make BalfBlog auto generate this after each post.
It's a very powerful feature that will help generate more readers for each post.
ZPE 1.5.0 is finally just about ready. The main changes in this version focus on backend (compiler) side things. In particular, the way in which the return function is compiled, evaluated and allocated a byte code has completely changed. For a start, it is no longer considered as a function but as an actual language token. This means that it is also allocated a byte code when translated to byte codes.
As well as this, recursion has been made more efficient than before and the call stack has been expanded. Overall, this is the best release of ZPE to date. I hope you find it useful too.
Today I finished the backend of BalfBlog polls. You can now make polls straight from the dashboard.
It's easy enough to create polls from the BalfBlog dashboard, but it is my intention to make it even easier in the future.
For now, you can simply insert the information at the end of a post in the Poll section. Options should be one per line and should not contain the new line character. Polls will then be generated automatically.
As well as this, I am working to change the system in which users who do not have .htaccess or web.config support (Apache or IIS servers) would utilise the system.What this means is that instead of accessing posts through /posts/post-name you would access the post through some URL parameters like ?nme=post-name. This will make it more flexible but it is not the only way in which these users will be able to access the pages. I will be trying it out on my own IIS web server soon and will keep everyone up to date on this.
In January of 2015, I redeveloped the backend of my website and released my DragonScript powered website. DragonScript is not really even a programming language or anything, so the name is a kind of misnomer, so I wasn't entirely sure about it, but I kept it anyway and it's my plan to keep the name.
My latest changes will be known as DragonScript 2.0. This is a backend change that should not affect the front of my website. However, it is a huge change. Part of this change is developing my old BalfPHP file into a more modern, object oriented version. DragonScript 2.0 focuses on a much cleaner and a more efficient, as well as overall faster, development that will focus on what's actually needed to make my website function and removes a lot of the ugly bits that were a part of it before. As well as this, DragonScript 2.0 utilises an object oriented approach.
As part of a few fixes I laid out on my own website, I have decided to updated both BalfBar and BalfBlog today.
Most crucially, BalfBlog received an update that makes it more compatible with future versions of PHP. When it was written it was written for use with PHP 5.2. Now it is compatible with newer versions of PHP so you should have no trouble installing it on your newer installation.
BalfBar has now received an important update that adds more flexibility to the SASS code (and even provides all of the settings to rip off the menu from my own website) as well as changes that make the JavaScript more flexible.
BalfBar is receiving a big update this weekend!
This update focuses on changing the menu items from being absolutely positioned to fixed positioning. This will allow a lot of new things like scrolling (hidden overflow doesn't work well with absolute positioning, since the element resides inside it's parent, whereas fixed detaches it). The menu will still look exactly the same but the way the items are positioned will allow me to finally bring scrolling to the items and allows you to set a maximum height to the items.
As much as I am more a fan of green code (CSS) over the yellow code (JS) for design and layout, I feel that using it was more appropriate here for what is being done, since it will give a lot more functionality.
This is currently experimental since this change was implemented in next to no time (only took me about 30 minutes to implement) and therefore not tested enough yet. I will post more in my Project blog when more becomes available.
This update will become BalfBar 1.2.
I will be trying it out on my website soon too, so keep an eye on it!
I didn't think it was going to be easy to set up push notifications for BalfBlog and that it would take quite a long time for me to work my way through the OneSignal API but alas I was wrong. BalfBlog now features push notifications, and it's deeply integrated too, meaning that it's built in to the settings.
Subscribe to my main website to subscribe to this new form of notification!
After messing with some ideas, I finally decided to ditch my oversubscribed underused newsletter system on jamiebalfour.scot and replaced it with push notifications. These push notifications are achieved thanks to OneSignal's service.
Push notifications represent a much lighter way for me to develop a communication method, similar to Twitter and allow me to send much smaller and more frequent messages to my subscribers. On top of this, they allow me to get immediate results out there. They are a huge part of the open web and moving towards a more standards based approach.
My plan is to deeply integrate these push notifications through OneSignal into BalfBlog in the near future. At the same time, I will also integrate them into my website.
As well as this, users of my website who can login will be the only people to receive email updates. These will mostly be related to software alphas, beta versions and new features to come to my website as well as my software.
Finally, the subscribe page (which was also the very first bit of PHP I ever wrote on my website) will also be disappearing. Well, not entirely. I'm going to keep it with details on how to subscribe, including a button that will help you to do so.
I hope this is satisfactory with everyone, but if you wish to be unsubscribed from my website, please email me now using the contact form on my website.
You can easily subscribe for push notifications through the button that says 'Subscribe' on it or by clicking on the button below:
In the next few weeks I'm going to begin work on ZPE again. I'm focusing in on improvements to the actual compiler and I am looking at new things like function inlining and so on to improve performance. I'm also going to be quite daring and look at parameter optimisation for static parameters, since I do believe this can be achieved in ZenLang.
The next version will also add even more functionality in other areas such as the GUI mode.
Also, currently recursion is not working perfectly due to changes made to make it more efficient. If you bare with me I will be working on this at some point in the near future again.
