The other day, Miguel de Icaza announced a pair of Swift packages to do email stuff. This, of course, makes me happy. I love email. Email is one of the greatest technologies in existence for the sometimes online computer: it gracefully handles periodic disconnections, so it’s my go-to for thinking about how to deal withContinue reading “App Design Project: Inbox Assistant”
Tag Archives: programming
Framework: PowerSync
I’ve decided not to sweat trying to sell my applications (or even make them available) through the App Store. That is pretty freeing, really. It means I can stop trying to solve everyone’s problems and just focus on solving my problems. Given this new clarity, I’ve been thinking about what my problems really are, and the oneContinue reading “Framework: PowerSync”
App Publishing Tool: AltStore
This has come across my awareness a couple of times in the past several weeks, and it sort of entangles with some app development ideas I’ve been wrestling with. But anyway: AltStore. It’s a way to distribute apps to iOS platforms without (sort of) going through the Apple App Store. The easy way is onlyContinue reading “App Publishing Tool: AltStore”
My Creepy AI Tool
I recently spent some time with an LLM doing some brainstorming. Some people have observed that our current crop of AI models don’t so much create as they copy and remix. Let me just start out by saying that I’m not great at everything, and if there’s a way for me to ask the, I dunno, few hundred millionContinue reading “My Creepy AI Tool”
Learning to Nope
Over Thanksgiving, a fellow suggested I take a look at writing some bit of software to do with juggling voxels. I explained that there are three general kinds of programming that are specifically not fun for me: compilers, user interface, and drivers. Doing lots of math and spatial geometry in an attempt to squeeze outContinue reading “Learning to Nope”
Okay, I Guess I’m Learning Ruby
Right, so a macOS application has a ‘Help’ menu by default, but unless the developer does some complicated and poorly documented stuff, there isn’t any help. Now, I’ve found a swell tool, Middlemac, that helps make the process much simpler. However, it doesn’t work with Ruby 3, because stuff in the past. Nowadays, middleman doesContinue reading “Okay, I Guess I’m Learning Ruby”
The Mysterious Fix
And now that we’re home and I’ve got a decently fast and wide connection (compared to the ship)…I’ve spent a bunch of time rebuilding and testing my various layers of Docker images. And guess what? Ubuntu “jammy” with OpenSSL 3 compiles my stuff just fine. *sigh*. Again, the lesson here is that people who writeContinue reading “The Mysterious Fix”
Here’s a (docker) image for you
We’re getting closer to a long vacation with intermittent Internet, so I’m going through all my developer tools, making sure that everything’s ready. Now that I know how to get VSCode to persist its downloaded stuff between runs in a given container (make sure there’s a .vscode-server/extensions directory in the container user’s $HOME), I wantedContinue reading “Here’s a (docker) image for you”
Oh, Xcode
Okay, so, Mastodon. Yay, there’s a web interface! Great, but…do you know anyone who wants to interact with, say, Twitter, via the web interface and not some app that makes it easier to deal with? Right. Enter Mastonaut, except it got started before SwiftUI was really a thing for macOS, so it’s all AppKit andContinue reading “Oh, Xcode”
Data Representation
I’m currently working on a suite of programs (which sounds a hell of a lot fancier than, “a couple of apps and a database,” — word to the wise, &c.) that deals with people. A person record has, as an option, a birthdate. You never know, someone, somewhere, might like to commemorate great-great-great-uncle Ralph’s birthdayContinue reading “Data Representation”