Maybe I'll make my commute better

Yep — I went down another rabbit hole

I'll spoil the surprise: the next project I intended to work on was something tentatively called Intake. Simple meal tracker. Take photos, enter text with a photo, or just enter a text description. Track your breakfast, lunch, dinner and any snacks. It's not meant to be exact — just meant to ballpark where I'm at.

Here's what that looks like.

I made progress on this a little more quickly than I anticipated. So I started thinking about another project I wanted to take a stab at, and before long, I had something that went beyond workable and became probably the coolest thing I've done to date.

Railtime.

The MTA app is neat — don't get me wrong. It's also weighed down by its need to cover every type of transit in the city.

There are some neat subway-focused web apps out there, too, such as realtimerail.nyc and closingdoors.nyc.  I took a bit of inspiration from a few of them (example: I made a "real-time" countdown to a route's arrival an option in Settings; closingdoors.nyc does this and it's really cool). I just wanted something native that could allow for a bit of personalization.

More than anything, though, I wanted a Live Activity function. This was the driving force for me going at this. It's the thing I am still, to this minute, trying to fix.

There's another little feature I'd like to tack onto this that seems extraneous, but as soon as it entered my brain, I wanted it. What if you could tap a button and get an arrow that points you toward the nearest subway entrance? Not to where the station is itself on the map, but the entrance. And the right entrance for the direction you're going in.

Nothing overly complicated — just "walk that way."

This I want to figure out. Then maybe I'll get to how utilitarian the thing looks.

YouTube Music is... bad

I try not to double- or triple-up on subscriptions where I can help it, so this month, I tried to divorce myself from Apple Music. I was paying for the service separately alongside a $0.99 iCloud sub. I'm already paying for YouTube Premium, which grants access to YouTube Music. So I thought, do I really need Apple Music if I'm technically paying for YouTube Music?

So far, the answer has been yes.

YouTube Music might be a decent option for people in other places or in other transit situations. If you drive every day, if you take the bus, or if you simply intend to use it at work or at home, I'm sure it would do the job.

This service is not compatible with subways.

The few days I've spent using YouTube Music on my rides to and from work have been filled mostly with silence. The service doesn't buffer ahead enough to fill the gaps in connectivity between stations, and when you do manage to reach a point where you can regain signal, you stand about a 20% chance of the app functioning as you'd expect.

The rest of the time, the stream flat out dies, then the app flat out dies. It forgets what it was doing, and the next time you click an Airpod to try and restart your dead song, you'll be talking to Apple Music, which will admirably attempt to play you something. In my case, it hits the handful of songs I purchased from iTunes during college.

Ah yes, "The Best of Me" by The Starting Line again. YouTube Music must have died.

Anyway, that'll be that. I'm resubscribing to Apple Music and treating this as a lesson learned. If you have a good thing that works, don't mess with it.