You win some, you lose some

At this point the issue with HEIC images is on everyone’s mind. Apple users may not have noticed, but from what I can gather the moment iOS 11 came out, incompatibility was born. That said, I am already working on solutions.

It was obvious to me that the path of least resistance was to create an image converter for Snapie. That way mobile users on iOS, with the next update, would simply upload normal jpgs instead of the super compressed format Apple is pushing these days. This means there will be a little more processing, but I doubt that will be a problem, since most iPhones have plenty of power for that task.

Now this fixes the issue for Snapie, but it does not fix the whole problem. Other apps could have the same issue, and even the most modern browsers could end up showing broken images. With that in mind, some of the real developers we have began working on a wider solution. One that would ensure full compatibility for all front ends.

Rishi told me he was working on the silver bullet, but had to stop and focus on Holozing. With the proposal live and the weight of social pressure, I cannot blame him, but he did invite me to try to help.

To be honest, there are days when impostor syndrome kicks me in the rear. More so when I spend days troubleshooting the same thing and keep hitting the same wall. The good thing or the bad thing, depends who you ask, is that I am stubborn and it takes a lot for me to give up.

Rishi created a merge request to add HEIC support to the Hive image hoster (yes, the one we all use) by converting HEIC to WebP through the Sharp library. But for some reason Docker would not cooperate. The plan is simple enough, and doing the conversion on the fly makes a lot of sense, since the final image stored on the server would need no extra work afterward.

I will not bore you with too many technical details, but I did find the culprit. The darn thing finally worked. Maybe it was luck, who knows, but I am not complaining. I will take a win when I can find one. I already contacted Rishi and made a patch for him to test. Fingers crossed.

But the day was not over, and I could not just take the rest of it off. A sense of guilt creeps up on me after a couple of YouTube videos. So I began working on Snapie as well.

I made a rough call today, something I do not love, but something that makes sense. Since Snapie is my sandbox, my box of legos for things that may make it to the mobile app, I need the integration of new features to be easier. With that in mind, I removed aioha. This says more about my shortcomings than anything, but I kept running into issues with even the most basic tasks, like image uploads.

At any rate, it is past ten and this old man feels the bed calling. I think I can rest my head without guilt. I hope so at least.

Cheers,

MenO