About last week: 7th July 2019

Inspired by Brendan Dawes (in particular, his process blog), who I learned of through an interview with my friend Gerry Scullion on the This is HCD podcast, I set an intention to follow through on a few side-projects which are currently betwixt and between, sharing more publicly as a way of showing progress and holding myself accountable. More on these in the coming weeks.

To enable this, I've updated my website using Kit - an open source language from CodeKit which is essentially just HTML with special comments allowing variables and imports. Using Kit, I've defined shared components (such as navigation, footers, etc.) which I can reuse across pages making it quicker to make updates (such as building the blog section and individual blog posts, and including this section in the navigation). It's probably not the "best" solution, but it keeps things simple which is exactly what I need at the moment.

I also started working on an update to the Oppo Studio website, announcing our decision (at least 6 months ago) to dedicate ourselves 100% to Umano and stop taking on new clients, and showcasing some of our favourite projects. There is still some content to be written, but I'm hoping to release this in the next few weeks.

I succumbed to my own pressure and installed Apple's iOS, macOS, and tvOS public betas on my devices. I was actually looking forward to trying out iPadOS the most (sidecar in particular) however my iPad (and iPad Air 2) didn't make the cut. Hopefully Duet Display (which I currently use) sticks around. Otherwise - bugs and incompatible apps you would expect of pre-release software aside - I don't have much to say about any of this at the moment (although I still don't understand dark mode).

To close out the week, I spent the weekend camping in the Newnes State Forest, overlooking the Wolgan Valley on the western side of the Blue Mountains. Apart from some light rain during the night, the weather turned out great (much warmer than I was expecting for this time of year), and sitting by the campfire was a good opportunity for some quiet beers and reflection. On Sunday morning, I visited Maiyingu Marragu Aboriginal Reserve - an important meeting and educational place for the local Wiradjuri people as well as the wider Aboriginal community. With more time, I would have loved to explore the reserve further, as well as to venture further into the valley to Newnes - a historical village with extensive industrial ruins - and the surrounding National Parks. Next time.