In a StackOverflow question, Thomas Tempelmann asked: How to get all TableCellView prototypes from a TableView object? […] How do I get to that TableCellView in its prototype form when I only have a reference to its TableView object, so that I can alter its tooltip for all rows added later?
Making just one type
@MainActorcan result in cascade of errors at all usage sites where the compiler now cannot provide thatMainActorguarantee. This virality can make it really hard to incrementally adopt concurrency with targeted changes. Perhaps that’s not too big a deal for smaller code bases/teams, but I bet this is a killer for big projects. So what do you do?You make use of dynamic isolation to contain the spread!
Instead of throwing (static) type annotations around, you can ease into the adoption of actor isolation with (dynamic) preconditions and running blocks of structured and unscructured concurrent code.
Niki Tonski with a very well-illustrated post on centering text, icons, and UI elements.
The problem is explored in great detail. Every big company fails at this. Type (font) design and UI design and icon design are all part of the problem.
After the build-up, this part killed me:
What can be done: icons fonts
STOP.
USING.
FONTS.
FOR.
ICONS.
I recommend looking at the pictures to spot all the annoying alignment problems and have a good time with this.
Why change perfectly servicable code today when there are problems to solve? “I’d be changing it again next week. So where’s the value? Might as well keep it as-is.” When you are inclined to change code without defects, this could indicate a new understanding that needs expressing. Changing existing code to reflect a new understanding is all we have. This is how we pay off debt in our design.
Ever wanted to recreate a beautiful Mac OS X Aqua app in SwiftUI? Technical Note TN2124 contains cool debug information, and a screenshot of the DebugTest Info app. Here’s a live-coding session (24mins) to recreate the DebugTest Info app:
On macOS, there’s 1 active window that receives your key input. Then there’s all the other windows, which are potentially invisible or obstructed by other windows. These inactive windows can be brought to the front and made active with a click. Then you can interact with these windows like normal. With inactive but visible windows, you cannot select items from lists, for example. The UI reflects this with a greyed-out or dimmed representation. You need to click once to activate the window (on the surface of the window, so to speak), then another time to interact with the control.
Programming is a Soulslike. Dark Souls is notoriously difficult. You need to memorize enemy movements and patterns to get good at the game. You cannot beat it casually. The “Git Gud” meme traces back to this whole ordeal: You need to become a better player, learn the movements and patterns, in order to beat the game.
Decoupling is hard work, especially when taken to extremes – as the team of Diablo II did when they decoupled the whole rendering stack of the original game from the rest of the engine to reuse both independently. Today I learned that Diablo II Resurrected is a true remaster: new 3D graphics, but the engine hasn’t changed. In an interview with Eurogamer, Rob Gallerani pointed out that
Swift KeyPath is a great shortcut for property-based mapping and filtering of collections: When you need a simple transformation, the simplest probably being the boolean negation operator, you only have two choices: So either you use the key path and separate the negation – which makes it harder to read as “I want the opposite of X”. Or you drop the key path and use a regular closure.
I spend a couple of hours investigating the XeLaTeX purgatory where character mapping live. I didn’t know what these were before, too, don’t worry. I’ll walk you through it. The observable behavior is the following. Let’s say you start with Markdown with “dumb” quotes like this: … and use a conversion tool like Pandoc or MultiMarkdown to turn it into LaTeX, and you pick German quotation marks (the non-guillemet ones). You’ll see why it’s important for this example to use the German quotation marks. They are different from the curly quotes you know from English texts.
Of course you don’t need comments in your code. But your future self appreciates explanations: What is this nested loop good for? What is its purpose? Comments provide context, and shortcuts for understanding: “you don’t need to read this, just think of it as …” Once you explain what the purpose is, suddenly you may also find a way to express the intent clearly in code.
I found out that you can bundle TrueType Font files (.ttf) with Swift Packages just fine. It’s not as declarative as adding Info.plist entries to your app, but the code is very simple. First, add fonts as managed resources under e.g. Sources/PACKAGENAME/Resources/Fonts/ (last subdirectory is optional):
Based on the calendar, I’m about two months into a server script project for the Zettelkasten website, but measured in actual work weeks, it’s now the start of week three. I notice that I’m now in a comfortable rhythm to develop features, and that’s always an exciting milestone.
Octavi Navarro reports that (some) people think (some of) his games should be free instead of paid: I’ve got hundreds of “this game should be free” angry reviews over the years but I find it shockinge every time. These are not evil corporation executives, but consumers (most probably underpaid workers themselves) who advocate very vocally against remunerated work.
On Mastodon, we had a discussion about whether you are more or less productive with SwiftUI or UIKit/AppKit. Der Teilweise (@teilweise@layer8.space) chimed in with an actual, measurable benchmark: a flexible-width window, with reflowing text, and equal-size buttons. Doable in 10 minutes. Can SwiftUI beat this?
Modern FastSpring storefronts come in three standard flavors. On top, you can create your own JavaScript client page that uses the Store Builder Library under the hood. Here they are: The most basic storefront is the Web Storefront (docs). It’s a hosted web shop where you can offer multiple products. Here’s mine for apps.
To tell OpenAI’s web crawler to skip your site, add these lines to your robots.txt (see docs): (via Hidde de Vries) The outlook is bleak: There’s no way to win this if you don’t want to be scraped at all, ever, except by not putting things online. If they don’t scrape your content, they scrape the copycat sites as Rik Schennink pointed out. Or ignore the robots.txt rule. (How could you tell, anyway?)
I listened to “Automate Your Way to Better Code: Advanced Property Testing (with Oskar Wickström)” and I believe that Property-Based Testing (PBT) clicked for me a bit now. Maybe. It never made sense to me before, but Oskar Wickström has a lot of actually interesting examples.
My highlights are instances where you have to think outside the box, like a good puzzle:
None of this sounds like a replacement for what unit tests would do. But they do sound like a much better high-level approach to regression testing!
If nothing else, I’m intrigued to learn more about this now.
Can absolutely recommend this episode.
Actually, I recommend the whole podacst.
TableFlip v1.6.0 got approved to the Mac App Store (direct customers got the update a bit earlier, as usual). Check out TableFlip The least exciting feature first, so that it doesn’t go unnoticed: you can now scale the font in TableFlip (aka “zoom in and out”).
I found this among my notes from 2013, and think it’s a fun little tool for analog productivity – the portable Kanban board! It’s a foldable personal Kanban board, suitable as an Every Day Carry in either A3 or A4 size (or US Letter or whatever). This produces four quadrants and the folded size is ideal to stuff it into a backpack, book, or maybe even your pants. Thus, it’s convenient to transport to university, school, or work.
Here’s an anecdote for you: Imagine a dev team that performs task estimates expressed in “story points”, Agile style, and encounters a large estimate. Large, in this team, means “13 or more.” Then in one of these sessions, a specific task initially received an estimation of 13 story points. This marks the team’s threshold for considering the division of tasks into more manageable pieces by convention.
Chris Eidhof and team launched the SwiftUI Field Guide website today.
I noticed that Chris fiddled with JavaScript animations and layout representations to mimick SwiftUI as close as possible and wondered what kind of e-book could be upcoming, but it turns out it’s a website!
As a resource to learn, the approximations are more than good enough. They are excellent and by virtue of being interactive, they are also much better to get a feeling for everything than the SwiftUI documentation’s images can ever be. There’s only so much an API documentation can teach you before you need to observe how it really behaves.
Since it’s in a browser, the preview is of course even faster than Xcode Previews would be, and without the crashes. (Oh, the crashes …)
I wish the SwiftUI Field Guide had been available a year ago when I had to figure out so many things through trial and error!
Some sections apparently aren’t finished yet (they’re greyed-out), but you can learn a lot about the reverse-engineered layout system’s inner workings.
I’m looking for testers for my macOS apps TableFlip and WordCounter to get an opinion on Reach out if that’s you! hi@christiantietze.de
Went through some old notes this week (I’m doing this AppKit/UIKit stuff for surprisingly many years!) and found a problem with the tags I used in one of my notes. Let’s dive right in with an example: It’s a how-to note with a code snippet. Its tags are: #appkit, #image, #screenshot.
In this fourth and probably still not final part of my series on NSToolbarItems with segmented controls, I just want to share a problem and a quick fix that Nathan Manceaux-Panot brought up today. The series spans 8 years and is this: Nathan recently went through the series to implement segmented controls in toolbars but discovered that the overflow menu items would not enable (a validation problem) and when they enable, they don’t fire the action. When he brought this up today, I investigated.
I can’t for the life of me remember which trash bin bag size to buy. Once I find a fit, it’ll be months before I buy the next batch. By then, I’ve long forgotten which one I bought. Some more expensive ones have the bag’s size printed all over them. That helps exactly one (1) time: until you buy a cheaper make of the same size. Next time, it’s guessing time again.
Here’s a truly inspirational list of things to do from the 32-Bit Cafe, “a community of like-minded website hobbyists and professionals helping to make the personal web fruitful and bountiful again”. It covers these topics:
It’s a refreshing read (and brings up a lot of nostalgia)!
Developers see the bugs and problems of their products, and thus they are prone to not charge a high price instinctively. The price of an app signals its value or worth to the prospective customer looking at the price tag. Jordan Morgen shares this from the Spend Stack days:
Today was a day of convergence. Our home server/NAS had a lot of SATA-related kernel errors and drive failures in the past weeks that I couldn’t track down. I replaced the drive and the cables and things have quieted down. This means I was SSH’ing into the server quite a bit this month. Mild data loss ans corrupted file systems included.
So I found this list of books I read and which I wanted to put on this blog in my inbox. It’s from a migration from OmniFocus to Emacs/org-mode from 2019, and the title is “Transformative Reading 2017”. What were the picks back then? And being 7 (!) years wiser, what do I think about the picks now? Here’s the list. I don’t know why I originally ordered them this way, but I left it as-is.
I admit: I’ve been relying heavily on ChatGPT to get to grips with some PHP things. Asking for interpretation, alternatives, and PHP 8-specific stuff was a lot of help. I’ve been using this in a separate floating window (aka ‘frame’) in Emacs next to my editing context, and that was great. Until I accidentally closed the buffer and lost the history.
Normally, you’d associate file path extensions with major modes in Emacs via auto-mode-alist. The associative list contains entries like ("\\.html" . web-mode) so that when you open (aka “visit”) an HTML file, Emacs automatically switches to web-mode, which in turns supplies shortcuts and syntax highlighting and so on.
So apparently, baby painted turtles survive being frozen. That’s the start of Patrick Dubroy’s blog post about cold-blooded software. Patrick likens software projects to warm-vs-cold-blooded animals:
I was rummaging through my Zettelkasten today, looking for a reference. I found the note 20190823100132 You can choose when you live in surplus and in the spirit of celebrating a new year, I find it is worth sharing: Seth Godin in Living in Surplus:
I’ve recently created a note in my Zettelkasten with a structure I haven’t used before: a timeline. It’s basically an enumerated list with 40 items and a divider that marks “now”. Things above the divide are in the past; things below the divide are in the future. I’m collecting rough things to keep in mind below the divide (like a