Coding Moment: Being Slow to Spot a Pattern
Started a tweet, foresaw it becoming a long flurry of tweets, decided to make a blog post. Was spinning my wheels adding what seemed a simple feature. Most of the needed code already existed. “Just”...
View ArticleWho’s on First
A friend posted this on Facebook: I think it’s okay. It respects the original while adding a little something fresh. I wonder who the guy who plays “What” is. I felt bad when he didn’t get big cheers...
View ArticleThe Power of Unoriginal Storytelling
A friend posted this video on Facebook: The video tells a story, but its purpose goes beyond storytelling: it is a marketing tactic used by a company that sells copywriting services. The blind man...
View ArticleJust a Tool
When it comes to the “Mac or PC” question, I am not neutral. It’s more that I decided at a certain point to wash my hands of the business of telling people which to buy. I am not the right person to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Radar’s UI For Entering New Issues
UI rule of thumb: use the biggest buttons for the most likely actions. UI rule of thumb: Convey a sense of progression by putting a sequence of steps in a row or column, one after another. Corollary to...
View ArticleSwift’s Range Operators
I was going to wait until I had more first-hand experience with Swift before blogging any opinions, but then I remembered this is the Internet. So here I am, late to the party, weighing in on Swift’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Double Hotkeys with Keyboard Maestro
When it comes to hotkeys, there are too few key combinations I’m comfortable with, and my memory is too weak, for me to assign a unique hotkey to each of the things I want to do quickly. Spotlight is...
View ArticleOn Tim Cook being “the first”
Alanna Petroff, writing for CNN.com: It’s a landmark moment for both the gay community and the business world. Tim Cook is now the first and only openly gay chief executive in the Fortune 500. Of...
View ArticleI’m Fine With the Accents on “Fresh Off the Boat”
Yesterday I watched the first two episodes of Fresh Off the Boat, a sitcom loosely based on the childhood of Eddie Huang. It’s the first network show in 20 years starring an Asian-American family. The...
View ArticleSome Ways I Use Keyboard Maestro
Today, thanks to Michael Tsai, I found out there’s a major new release of Keyboard Maestro. I use Keyboard Maestro all day long, and look forward to checking out the upgrade when I have time. Here are...
View ArticleQuick Explanation of the Receipt File
I was explaining the MAS receipt file to a friend and decided to write a blog post instead of an email, on the principle Scott Hanselman has brilliantly advocated that we should conserve and amplify...
View ArticleQuick Explanation of the Term "Application Bundle"
Follow-up to my previous post about receipt files. Again, this is Mac-centric. WHAT IS AN APPLICATION BUNDLE? "Application bundle" is Cocoa developer terminology for an application as it exists in the...
View ArticleCookie Monster Using Siri
This made me smile. I can't remember Apple having a more beloved spokescreature (human or otherwise) than Cookie Monster. Now if only I could get Apple to do ONLY things that I love, and not things...
View ArticleThe New Adventures of Old AppKiDo
I have been making progress on a reboot of AppKiDo, which is a Mac app that I wrote for browsing the Cocoa documentation that comes with Xcode. AppKiDo stopped working in 2014, during the betas of...
View ArticleThe Incredible Shrinking Docs
Wouldn't you know, I was wondering about documentation in Xcode 8, and indeed it has fundamentally changed. The DevPubs team has hugely reduced the size of the docs and apparently integrated them with...
View ArticleChessFidget
I'm halfway through a 12-week stint at the Recurse Center. One of the first things I did was to write a silly chess app called "ChessFidget" to help myself learn Swift. Here's more about it, including...
View ArticleNotes After 8 Weeks at the Recurse Center
I just finished week 8 of a 12-week "batch" at the Recurse Center, which is a diverse community of people who come together to help each other become better programmers. The community includes both...
View ArticleSwift vs Python for Advent of Code
Lately my daily addiction has been Advent of Code. It's a two-part programming challenge posted every day at midnight from Dec 1 to Dec 25. As long as you submit the right answer, you can use any...
View ArticleNotes After Finishing Advent of Code 2016
I finished this year's Advent of Code. I'd love to go back and clean up my code and write notes about each problem and the process I went through and the things I learned. Maybe I'll get around to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Quick Intro Notes on the Smalltalk Language
[I'm posting this for some friends who have asked about Smalltalk.] "Smalltalk" refers to both the Smalltalk language and the Smalltalk environment. I've forgotten a lot about the environment, and even...
View Article