One of a series of posts about our next app as we make it. It’ll include some details about our technology and design choices and challenges.

Since I added some functionality to Bloop that uses Flint, we have been getting Flint’s detailed logging for free. You can however have too much of a good thing.

By default Flint’s logging will let you know when every action you perform starts and completes or fails. As I have added actions for some of the on-screen controls that show in our content player, the console output has become a bit too noisy.

Flint’s logging lets you toggle logging levels per-topic (a Feature is a topic) at runtime, so all I had to do was call this for the features that are too noisy and set the log level to warning on those, as I want debug for everything else in the app at the moment.

What we were getting was a mix of our on-screen controls logging as well as output from Flint’s internal workings.

🐞 16:58:18.428 Debug • main | Activity 'Dispatch' | OSDFeatures/PlayerOSDFeature/#ShowPlayerOSDAction | Starting | State: XXXXXX
🐞 16:58:18.428 Debug • main | Activity 'Dispatch' | OSDFeatures/PlayerOSDFeature/#ShowPlayerOSDAction | Completed (success (not closing action stack)) | State: XXXXXX
🐞 16:58:18.428 Debug • N/A | Activity 'Intent Dispatch' | FlintFeatures/SiriIntentsFeature | Action completed but did not return an intent to donate: Request 5 for PlayerOSDFeature action ShowPlayerOSDAction

The fix was very simple, but I had forgotten my own Flint API for this and hadn’t yet written up Flint documentation for it, so I added it. I changed my code so that the App delegate does this:

FlintFeatures.setLoggingLevel(.warning)
OSDFeatures.setLoggingLevel(.warning)

All features that are sub-features of those feature groups are now quiet as a mouse. All the other features of the app retain the default logging level.