mostly nonsense
If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s reinventing wheels. So here’s Roland – an open source, blog-aware, static website generator written in Swift that also uses PHP under the hood because PHP is still the best template language.
It took me a few days longer than I had hoped to get started, but here’s the first post in a new Favorite Things category celebrating #IndieSupportWeeks. First up, is the incomparable MailMate by Benny Kjær Nielsen. It’s “the email client for the rest of us”. Anyone out there remember Email init? Which then became … Read more
And when the other side is reached, I hope we can look back on the things we did and how we were feeling in this moment and learn from that.
With all that’s going on in the world, it may not surprise folks to learn that small developers are starting to feel the economic crunch along with everyone else. I hope you’ll stick around and read along as I go into excruciating detail about my favorite software and services that I can’t live without.
I was completely at my wit’s end and feeling like I had lost my mind until about a half hour ago. And I don’t know what difference connecting via a hostname versus an IP address would make when specifically using a non-standard port above a certain threshold. I’m not even going to go into it. I don’t want to end up on Hacker News again bitching about Catalina. I just hope I’ve stuffed this post with enough keywords so that anyone else searching on Google might come across the answer.
Now that we’re all stuck at home practicing social distancing, my children’s mood depends on their favorite TV shows and movies always being available during their iPad free time. And my sanity depends on not hearing the awful clicking noise of the external drive our video library is stored on while I’m working at my desk. Moving it to a networked file server running off a Raspberry Pi was simple enough and solved the problem. But after trying a few 3rd party apps to keep the network share always mounted, here’s the simple shell script I wrote instead.
I know I keep referring to this tweet of mine from last year… One day I will get around to either releasing or open sourcing the dozen or so bespoke, one-off Mac apps I’ve built just for myself. Today is not that day. The reason for that is because I really do have a backlog … Read more
Every task management app has a feature that will let you postpone, delay, or snooze a task. You can tell them to push a todo item out by a day or a week, etc. But I like to think Three Things is smarter than that. It’s designed to be flexible and forgiving – pragmatic and realistic. When you defer a task, it won’t accidentally reschedule it for a day that’s already overflowing with commitments. It literally will not allow you to schedule more than three tasks per day.
It fits my brain. Maybe it’ll fit yours, too.
…Firing up Xcode’s wonderful view debugger, however, completely blew my mind and shattered any remaining self-confidence I had as an app developer. And then nearly an hour later I’m really questioning everything I thought I knew about ones and zeroes until a google search leads me to this page. And, sure enough, my bug is spelled out right there.
DefaultApp is an open source starting point a template. I maintained it in Objective-C for over a decade before finally porting it to Swift in 2018. Anytime I start a new app big or small, whether or not it’s something I plan on releasing publicly or if it’s just a small prototype or utility app I’m building for myself I start with this project.
With DefaultApp I can go from initial idea to writing actual code in thirty seconds.
That said, I would’t use this as the basis for a billion dollar corporation’s enterprise app. Or with a team of “100 engineers” “solving hard problems”. But if you’re a one-person development shop or a team of just two or three engineers building a typical macOS shoebox or document based app? Please take a look.