The SwiftRex project is similar to ReSwift in design: it’s a library to design applications with a unidirectional data flow underpinning. In contrast to ReSwift, which is around for years and years already, SwiftRex has had a fresh start and supports Combine, RxSwift, and ReactiveSwift to create state change subscriptions. That’s a nice touch. I’ll have to experiment with the library some day, but so far it looks nice and the README is full of sexy ASCII diagrams.
At my work at university, I was often a facilitator for groups in workshops to produce unique insights and interesting visualizations. We experimented with a lot of things – one particularly successful idea was pair-programming, but for presentation-making. Not every pair thrived, but all pairs found out something new in the process. So I’m – well, not “on the hunt”, more like: passively fishing for new ideas like this all the time.
Just this week I came across Nielsen Norman Group’s newsletter edition about sketching of diagrams, user interfaces, and stuff like that: “How to Get Stakeholders to Sketch: A Magic Formula”. Their formula boils down to 4 key components to encourage non-artists to participate, reduce their averse feelings, and create visualizations:
Use fat markers: thick strokes look more sketchy than thin lines, so they’ll think about the general picture more;
Tiny spaces: folded paper or note cards can help to overcome the fear of the blank paper;
Time Limits that are enforced by the facilitator can help to encourage high quantity output.
Ugly Examples that are very lo-fi encourage participants to draw ugly stuff as well
There’s no real magic involved, but this is useful advise to keep in mind when you prepare the next brainstorming session or meeting.
Microsoft is becoming more and more relevant for Apple platform devs. Microsoft’s App Center swallowed HockeyApp and now the GitHub repository of the underlying PLCrashReporter framework has migrated to @microsoft on GitHub. They have now just released v1.4.0, so it looks like the future of Open Source crash reporting is bright for a while.
Since I’m spending so much time in Apple Keynote anyway, I figured I might as well share a couple of tricks. Here’s one. When you use the “Spin” animation for showing an object, it usually spins around the center. That works well when you have rectangles or square diamonds. With rotated shape objects, I was less lucky.
I really want to like Swift property wrappers for UserDefaults. But I have a hard time making them 100% useful. Take the post by Andy Ibanez on the topic for example. It’s a well-written post with great code examples. If you want copy-able code for your app, read it. It’s good.
I don’t show a clock on my computer. Sometimes, I quickly want to find out what time it is, though. I often run date from the shell to get the current time, and can often get there in my Quake console-like iTerm 2 Hotkey Window by pressing the “up” key since I seldom use the Hotkey Window for anything else.
The situation was resolved, but it took 1/4 of a year for Guilherme and Apple to resolve the issue. Read Guilherme’s post about the incident.
I don’t want to blame Apple here. I just want to make sure that we all stay aware of the fact that part of our livelihood depends on a company than can, and will, make mistakes eventually. These mistakes can become fatal for your business.
If you do a simple exercise in Antifragility1 training, you’ll see that having all your eggs in one basket where you do neither own the basket, nor the eggs, puts you in a pretty bad situation.
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Today I learned about an ingenious tool called csplit on the Zettelkasten Forums. It’s available on macOS and Linux. You can use it to split a single Markdown file into multiple files, one for each chapter or section.
I use Dash every day. And while it seemed the last upgrade to v4 wasn’t that long ago, my 1Password-powered licence purchase history tells me it was in February 2017 that I last paid for a Dash license, almost 3 years ago. So it’s about time that a paid upgrade hits Kapeli’s online store!
Emacs is a text editor, kind of. But I use its Org mode for “keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system” – its Agenda became my daily productivity hub. It’s a calendar view of all things scheduled for the day, plus some other info interspersed: thanks to the plain text nature of the whole interface, it’s simple (albeit not easy) to re-style everything you see there. Add sub-headings, spacing, links, text, what have you.
I was recently following a link to The Wiki, the original c2.com wiki by Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. It was a link to the FourLayerArchitecture page. At the very bottom, it currently says “Last edit August 25, 2006”. In the early 2000s, the wiki had to be closed for editing by the general public because of abuse, and this page seemingly lays dormant ever since.
