Yesterday, WatchKit became available for us developers, and as far I can tell, open for the entire world to see, which is a first for Apple at least since the iPhone introduction. I thought it'd be good to share my first impressions.

I remember the second day the first official iPhone SDK had entered beta. It was new. It was fresh. At the same time it seemed well thought out. It was opinionated. It laid a path of where we would go. And it was a very nice framework on top of BSD. I was thrilled!

WatchKit doesn't quite feel this way. The first thing I noticed that "the way it's done" in iOS is not the same on WatchKit. For instance, there is no autolayout. Autolayout is THE way to do dynamic layout, Apple has been pushing it hard. Yet it's nowhere to be found on WatchKit. It's older brother, springs and struts, is ...

I decided on what to do about the iMac harddrive situation mentioned in Finding a good Thunderbolt disk: I ordered a Seagate GoFlex thunderbolt adapter and caddy, containing a 1TB drive, which I'm going to replace with a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO drive.

That means that I'm not going to get the 550 MB/sec of the Samsung drive, but about 330 MB/sec where the SATA/Thunderbolt adapter caps out. I'm sad about that, and I'm also sad that I couldn't find a SATA/Thunderbolt 2 adapter at any half-decent price (not that anything Thunderbolt is decently priced, but I mean not ridiculously stupidly priced)

It was a toss-up between the Lacie and this one, but believe it or not, the built-in Thunderbolt cable came in as a minus for the Lacie, as I don't know how I'd go further ...

Finding a good Thunderbolt disk

Wow, the 5K iMac is a beauty! Like so many Mac users I've been dreaming about a retina iMac since around the iPhone 4 days (man, was that only 2011?) expecting my 2011 Sandy Bridge iMac to be ancient history for long. Now that it’s here, I’m not getting it. My iMac is still great, and I want to hold out for the Skylake architecture (thus even giving Broadwell a pass).

My iMac has an SSD that I used to build a custom Fusion Drive, but I still am not happy with the performance. So I want a more modern SSD, more precisely I want a Samsung 840 EVO0. I was holding out until after the October event to make any decisions, but now ...

I was happy to run into José Valim at Goto Aarhus this year. I asked him about the many web frameworks for Elixir and which one to choose. His response was that most are abandoned in favour of Phoenix. Phoenix was on my shortlist from before, so I will be spending some time writing myself back to Elixir with Phoenix.

I just received a Xiaomi Mi3, chinese Android phone, for a work project, and wanted to put it in developer mode. Most guides are for Android 4.2 and 4.3, but this one had version 4.4.2. The guides advice to tap 7 times the Android version, but that will just give you a really weird easter-egg. Instead, tap the build version seven times, and it will go into development mode.