19 Sep 2016

Kindle Calendar

Kindle Calendar

Mostly photos of my latest project today. I write morning pages, longhand. I like to write the date at the top of the page. This causes me more problems that you might expect, given that I’m ditzy first thing in the morning, and have recently switched from a watch with a date display to one without. My cure for […]

10 Dec 2014

A Quick Hack to Quote Swift Strings in a Playground

A Quick Hack to Quote Swift Strings in a Playground

Tonight, André Daniel asked a good question on Stack Overflow: does Swift have a “heredoc”-like syntax for saying, “no, really, these characters are exactly what I want in my string literal.” Unfortunately, the answer is “no”. The same is true of Objective C. Previously I’ve worked around this limitation by putting my strings into string […]

19 Mar 2014

Placeholder Satisfaction

Placeholder Satisfaction

I’m no designer, but there’s something very satisfying about the first time I replace the development environment’s placeholder icon in an app with a placeholder of my own. I use Sketch for most of my design work. In this case, I’m just mashing up an adjusted version of something from the Feed Icons devkit with the […]

12 Jan 2014

Obsolete Paper

Obsolete Paper

It’s Spring. Or it feels like it, anyway. So I’m pruning my (paper book) library, picking out anything from the shelves that I’ll never read again, or that has no sentimental value, and chucking it into a cardboard box to be taken to a charity shop. Sadly, though, there are some books that shouldn’t even […]

9 Nov 2013

Trace/BPT trap: 5 when accessing SystemVersion.plist in Mavericks

If you’re reading this blog entry because you’re a subscriber, I’d stop now and skip this one. Unless you’re extremely geeky. This is more of a public service announcement to anyone who’s installed OSX 10.9 and Xcode 5, and finds themselves oddly unable to compile even the simplest program using the command-line tools, from gcc […]