Hello! It’s been a while. What a crazy year it’s been. XD
This is a blog I’ve been meaning to write since March, since I went to Japan and bought a Japanese Apple Watch Series 2. But now that the Series 3 has been announced, now’s just as good too.
So in March of this year, I flew to Japan to attend this year’s try! Swift Tokyo conference. To say I had a fantastic time was an understatement. XD
I love the iPhone. So much so that people have accused me of being an Apple fanboy in the past before (they’re probably right).
I also love Japan. I spent a chunk of my childhood growing up there and I now enjoy traveling back to the country whenever I can.
So during the September Apple keynote this year, you could imagine how excited how I was when Apple announced not just the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 2, but that both of these devices had the necessary capabilities to have Suica loaded onto them.
What’s a Suica? Suica is a NFC-based prepaid smart card that you can use to pay for things in Japan with a simple tap of the NFC receiver. You can buy them pre-charged in Japanese train stations, and while they were originally intended for automatic paying of fares on train lines, they can now also be used to pay at vending machines, and even some types of stores.. Easily the most convenient way of paying for things when you’re over there.
And WWDC 2016 is now officially behind us! What an absolutely crazy week it’s been.
For the third year in a row, I sadly did NOT get a ticket to WWDC (Next year Gadget! Next year.), but thanks to the nature of my work, it’s always still absolutely worth the trip out here anyway to join in on the alternative conferences happening during the week, as well as the festivities during the evening.
Whew! I’m back home from Japan and settled back in. What an amazing trip that was! Before it becomes too much of a distant memory, I figured I’d write a wind-down blog post on it. 🙂
So late last year, I was invited by Natasha Murashev (Better known as @NatashaTheRobot) on recommendation of my colleague JP Simard, to come and present at a conference she was organizing in Japan for March of 2016. The conference, known as try! Swift was going to be a 3 day conference consisting of a stream of 25 minute talks, specializing in Swift, Apple’s new programming language but also including iOS development in general.
A trip to Japan (one of my favorite places), to hang out with iOS developers and talk about app development (one of my favourite things)? I couldn’t say ‘hell yes’ fast enough! 😀
Here’s a neat little thing I’ve been working on lately. 🙂
When it comes to building apps for iPhone and iPad, there’s often a design requirement in quickly displaying web pages to users, without needing to kick them out to another app in the process.
One example of this is social media apps; ones that deals with massive amounts of user-posted content, often with links attached. One of my most favourite apps on iOS, Tweetbot, handles this incredibly elegantly.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post on the quickest and easiest way I knew of to get your international iPhone working in Japan. And, after one of my friends traveled to Japan late last year, I can confirm that renting a Japanese SIM card from JCRCorp is STILL a quick and viable option, with unlimited voice, and unlimited data.
That being said however, while JCRCorp is really good, their rates start to get quite expensive the longer you stay in Japan. It’s probably fair to say that this is a service that is geared mainly towards tourists of Japan; those only staying for a short while before promptly leaving.
So last year, when I went to go work at pixiv, something I knew that I would be doing in upwards of 7 months, I figured I’d have to do something else. I also figured that since I would be going to Japan on a working visa, I could most likely pop into a telco shop and just grab a pre-paid SIM card.
So, armed with my carrier-unlocked iPhone 5 (Bought outright from Apple), I traveled over to Japan!
Unfortunately, when I got there, a few of my friends who had traveled over there a few months early, broke the news to me; apparently a ‘pre-paid SIM’ as we know and understand it in Australia, doesn’t really work in Japan.