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Indie Dev Weekly #5

Authors

March 13-19, 2023

There were many things happening in the AI field this week, such as GPT-4, Midjourney v5, and ERNIE Bot.

I also did a lot of things, so this weekly will be long.

Zen Flip Clock (App Store, Google Play)

Widget

I spent two days this week working on the design and optimization of the Zen Flip Clock iOS widget, spending about 10 pomodoro each day.

Anyone who has developed an iOS widget knows that this part of the development work is very difficult. Xcode's preview has many bugs, the size of the widget on each device is different, and debugging is basically unusable. This makes widget development particularly time-consuming and labor-intensive. I can only make a small change, run it on a real device, and then adjust it.

Localization

Zen Flip Clock Android has not been updated in the Chinese market for three months, and the downloads for this month has decreased by half compared to the same period last month. On Friday, I spent half a day adding new flip sounds and French localization.

With the help of New Bing and ChatGPT, I localized the French in just 3 minutes, and also sorted out the localization of other languages, and then optimized the description page copy of most languages on Google Play.

Originally, the localization of my app was done by volunteers from different countries, but often I couldn't find a suitable native speaker, or communication was difficult, or the translation work was stalled. With the help of AI, I removed the entry for volunteer translation, saving a lot of time and energy.

Various AI Tools

Stable Diffusion

Midjourney released v5, and I also saw various amazing works. Compared with them, Stable Diffusion is too difficult to use. Dreambooth, Hypernetworks, Embeddings, Lora, VAE, and various sampling methods. The parameters that SD needs to adjust are too many, and generating a good picture is much more complex than Midjourney.

The following is the robot avatar I generated for a friend:

Codeium

It is said to be the free version of GitHub Copilot, and I tried it out simply in Android Studio and VSCode. It is really good. Unfortunately, it does not support Xcode yet, but the developer of CopilotForXcode said that they will work with the official to integrate Codeium into Xcode. I'm really looking forward to it!

Cursor

I learned about Cursor on the same day as Codeium. After experiencing it briefly, I feel that it can help me a lot next week. I have been wanting to migrate the data of Zen Flip Clock's server from Parse to cloud database. With this tool, I should be able to complete it without much effort.

New Gears

Capsule Coffee Machine

The coffee capsule machine(SCISHARE) I used on Saturday suddenly broke down. After putting in the capsule, no liquid came out, and the top cover could not be opened. However, after many attempts, I finally broke the top cover... I had to buy a new one. After a simple comparison, I ordered the Mijia capsule coffee machine (which is also manufactured by SCISHARE).

A simple comparison shows that the advantages of the Mijia capsule coffee machine are:

  • The overall design is simpler, in the style of Mijia's design
  • The cup holder has two adjustable heights, so you can use a higher cup to hold the coffee
  • The top cover looks stronger
  • The outer casing of the water tank is frosted instead of transparent, which may not be easy to mold after being exposed to sunlight for a long time
  • Comes with 20 capsules, including my favorite No. 10 and No. 12

Niz 82 Keyboard

The Niz keyboard mentioned last week was received on Tuesday. Overall, I am very satisfied, but there are still two small regrets:

  • The F function keys at the top are not consistent with the Mac keyboard in Mac mode, but I only use volume and music control the most, so I can tolerate it
  • The default keycaps are not comfortable, although I want to replace them with my own, the side of the default keycaps has various functional prompts, which will be very inconvenient to use my own keycaps, unless I memorize the combinations of these function keys first

Movies and TV series

It's been a long time since I watched a movie. I watched three movies at once this week:

  • Black Panther 2, only the music is the highlight, ⭐️⭐️
  • Missing, I laughed so hard at KevinTheeStallion and bus CAPTCHA🤣, ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • Post Truth, a good story, and I like Dapeng more and more, ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I didn't watch the last episode of The Last Of Us Season 1 until Friday. In summary, it is an excellent restoration and wonderful adaptation.

The first time I heard about this game was 10 years ago (in 2013) when I was interning at Adobe. The entire team was working on a website for Sony's PlayStation in Europe (yes, Adobe also does outsourcing), and the homepage of the website featured this game. One of the senior members of the team kept praising this game and said that he had played it twice, and even wanted to save it for his son to play. 😂 However, I only played this game on the PS4 last year, and I played both the first and second parts consecutively. After finishing the game, I listened to various podcasts and video explanations, which gave me a lot to reflect on.