Matt Massicotte: Making just one type @MainActor can result in cascade of errors at all usage sites where the compiler now cannot provide that MainActor guarantee. This virality can make it really hard to incrementally adopt concurrency with targeted changes. Perhaps that’s not t … | Continue reading

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 … | Continue reading

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 expressin … | Continue reading

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 wi … | Continue reading

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 an … | Continue reading

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 … | Continue reading

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 … | Continue reading

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: … | Continue reading

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 … | Continue reading

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 sub … | Continue reading

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. | Continue reading

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 pr … | Continue reading

To tell OpenAI’s web crawler to skip your site, add these lines to your robots.txt (see docs): User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / (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. … | Continue reading

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 … | Continue reading

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). Fold the sheet of paper along t … | Continue reading

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 st … | Continue reading

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! Cha … | Continue reading

I’m looking for testers for my macOS apps TableFlip and WordCounter to get an opinion on how accurately characters and “words” are counted, how text alignment in documents look. Reach out if that’s you! hi@christiantietze.de Hire me for freelance macOS/iOS work and consulting … | Continue reading

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: # 201801251531 Copy NSView contents into NSImage #appkit #image #screenshot ... … | Continue reading

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: Original Approach Enabling/Disabling Segme … | Continue reading

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: Page Ideas Potential Website Topics CSS & Page Desig … | Continue reading

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: It … | Continue reading

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 … | Continue reading

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 a … | Continue reading

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: Cold-blooded: Some projects you can let sit around untouched for years without … | Continue reading

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: When you live in surplus, yo … | Continue reading

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 r … | Continue reading

Maybe you have some old code (you wouldn’t write this nowadays, of course) that uses someValue is SomeType checks. Maybe you need to check if someValue is a generic type, like the following Box: struct Box { } Then your is predicates won’t work: switch someValue { case is Int, … | Continue reading

Watching Stephen Celis’ “How to Control the World”, NSSpain 2018 presentation, one of the common Swift/iOS patterns he brings up caught my attention. It’s this piece of code: protocol APIClientProvider { var api: APIClientProtocol { get } } protocol DateProvider { func date() - … | Continue reading

Early this year, I wrote about my upgrade to modus-themes v4.x and how I used a custo mechanism to style the scroll bar indicator I like using, mlscroll.el, so that it looks nice. This week, J.D. Smith, author of mlscroll.el, pointed out that mlscroll.el’s color declarations nowa … | Continue reading

Sven Schmidt alerted me to the fact that you can check in Package.resolved to pin Swift package versions in Xcode-managed projects if you add the file from within the generated project.xcworkspace file in your .xcodeproj bundle: git add *.xcodeproj/project.xcworkspace/xcshareddat … | Continue reading

The current TelemetryDeck for web setup guide (version of 2023-12-01) is quite simple. Insert this into your HTML, and you’re set: From that point onward, you’ll be collecting signals per web site hit. Internally, the signal’s type is "type":"pageview". These signals will inclu … | Continue reading

TableFlip v1.5.1 just got approved to the Mac App Store (direct customers got the update a bit earlier, as usual). Again: kudos to Marin Todorov for the export improvements on HTML! From the release notes: New: tableflip://preference/ added to URL scheme. It currently handles s … | Continue reading

This is a note from 2022 I found by accident today. Teaser: It will become relevant again, soon, so I want to share the rough idea with you today. JSON data containing nested object lists within object lists, namely, arrays of objects within other arrays, cannot be mapped direct … | Continue reading

I’m upgrading my 4TB drives in the NAS to 12TB drives. “Let’s be clever,” I thought (foreshadowing), “and do two things in parallel!” So installing the next drive into the disk array of my Unraid NAS, I let Unraid do these tasks: Replace a 4TB disk in the array with a 12TB disk … | Continue reading

Earlier today, I was posting some ad-hoc thoughts about how I prefer SwiftUI layout over programmatic AppKit on Mastodon. I expected this to become a blog post later today. But instead, I find myself thinking along the lines of: “am I holding this wrong?” I’m programmatically set … | Continue reading

Marin’s Swift Heroes 2023 talk was just uploaded yesterday. It’s called “A 100% SwiftUI App”, and I believe you should watch it, because it’s not actually about what it says on the tin! Marin Todorov: “A 100% SwiftUI App”, Swift Heroes 2023 talk Marin’s a charismatic presenter an … | Continue reading

Nathan Manceaux-Panot shared his contribution to Sparkle the other day, available in version 2.5. of the updater library: attaching CSS to parts of the release notes that are actually new to the user. Say you ship updates in x.x.1 increments to beta testers, but x.1.x updates on … | Continue reading