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 makes it harder to read as “I want the opposite of X”. Or you drop the key path and use a regular closure.
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: … and use a conversion tool like Pandoc or MultiMarkdown to turn it into LaTeX, and you pick German quotation marks (the non-guillemet ones). You’ll see why it’s important for this example to use the German quotation marks. They are different from the curly quotes you know from English texts.
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 what the purpose is, suddenly you may also find a way to express the intent clearly in code.
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 subdirectory is optional):
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.
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 probably underpaid workers themselves) who advocate very vocally against remunerated work.
On Mastodon, we had a discussion about whether you are more or less productive with SwiftUI or UIKit/AppKit. Der Teilweise (@teilweise@layer8.space) chimed in with an actual, measurable benchmark: a flexible-width window, with reflowing text, and equal-size buttons. Doable in 10 minutes. Can SwiftUI beat this?
Modern FastSpring storefronts come in three standard flavors. On top, you can create your own JavaScript client page that uses the Store Builder Library under the hood. Here they are: The most basic storefront is the Web Storefront (docs). It’s a hosted web shop where you can offer multiple products. Here’s mine for apps.
To tell OpenAI’s web crawler to skip your site, add these lines to your robots.txt (see docs): (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. If they don’t scrape your content, they scrape the copycat sites as Rik Schennink pointed out. Or ignore the robots.txt rule. (How could you tell, anyway?)
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 highlights are instances where you have to think outside the box, like a good puzzle:
None of this sounds like a replacement for what unit tests would do. But they do sound like a much better high-level approach to regression testing!
If nothing else, I’m intrigued to learn more about this now.
Can absolutely recommend this episode.
Actually, I recommend the whole podacst.
TableFlip v1.6.0 got approved to the Mac App Store (direct customers got the update a bit earlier, as usual). Check out TableFlip The least exciting feature first, so that it doesn’t go unnoticed: you can now scale the font in TableFlip (aka “zoom in and out”).