I’ve added a new section to this site. Wanted to call it /books, but that’s taken and about my books :)

So I added the new /library index. It shows books added to my personal library sorted by year I read them.

At the moment, there’re only these three, all of which I needed (wanted) for the previous post:

• Christopher Alexanders’ A Pattern Language
• The Gang of Four’s book Design Patterns
• Gio Lodi’s Test-Driven Development in Swift

This collection is bound to grow. I missed something like this for a couple of years. An overview of posts about book would’ve been nice for lots of reasons.

Now the basics are prepared.

I’ve released an update to existing users of TableFlip last week. It works well so far, so now’s the time for the official announcement of the new version, available for direct download.

Most notable changes:

• TableFlip now guesses sophistically determines the delimiter in CSV files, if needed. So you can use ; or \t just fine, which means export from Numbers works out of the box.
• Non-comma-delimiters also “stick” when saving. No auto-replacement to comma anymore.
• The CSV loading and saving is more robust, especially with quoted content. There’s been issued reported in the past, and these should now be fixed. Thanks for your emails and sample files, folks! ❤️

For my nerdy readers, behind the scenes I also upgraded Sparkle from the XPC branch to the actual Sparkle 2.0 stuff. I sincerely hope it will ingest the upcoming updates, too. (It’d not be the first time I broke the update mechanism of one of my apps, heh.)

What is TableFlip, you ask?

TableFlip is a fast tabular data editor – the ideal companion app for Markdown users who want beautiful tables in their documents. Open the file in both TableFlip and your text editor, and you’re set: TableFlip lets you edit all tables it finds inside your document and updates live as you edit your text.

Well, and you can edit CSV files, too, and export to LaTeX.

TableFlip v1.4.0 is available from the website and the Mac App Store.

Found DevCleaner for Xcode yesterday and gave it a spin. It’s freeware on the Mac App Store with a tip jar.

Developers who ever nuked their Derived Data folder (I have an alias in my .profile for that) know how much stuff Xcode collects over the years. And then there’s outdated iOS Simulator versions nobody needs anymore. And log files, of course, by Xcode.

I’m pleased to say that DevCleaner does a good job at enabling me to select what I want to remove from the set of things that could be obsolete.

I have Xcode 14 beta installed (to my dismay), so DevCleaner suggested all Xcode 13.x related things could go away. It tries to be smart and helpful here, but I kept the Xcode 13.4.1 logs just in case. The option is there.

Where in the past I would occasionally nuke all Derived Data, DevCleaner shows these folders in a sensible way, with a reference to the project location. I usually create throwaway projects to test and debug something in my Downloads folder. The derived data of these projects is absolutely useless after a month, week, or sometimes even a day. Since DevCleaner shows where the original project was located, I’ve been able to delete data for every long-gone project that was in my Downloads folder.

I cannot stress enough how cool I find this.

Deleting derived data folders is often hard to do by name alone: when I download a new version of a 3rd part dependency that I am using in my apps, and open the project in my Downloads folder, and play around with it, then I have two derived data folders for this dependency, but only one is relevant for the actual project. Either I don’t care and delete both when I know building them is trivial, or I don’t bother at all and they stay around forever.

I really, really like this feature.

Would be even better if I could sort or filter by origin path, but it’s ok the way it is.