Ever since upgrading from OS X 10.9 to Yosemite (10.10) I’ve been getting a dialog popping up with the message “To view this web content, you need to install the Java Runtime Environment” periodically. As far as I know I have no software that needs Java to run.
When I asked on Twitter1, the most common suggestion was that it was the Adobe updater. But I don’t have PhotoShop or anything else likely installed.
For some reason, when I saw the poster for the new movie “Fury,” I misread it as “Furry” and saw a beard on Brad Pitt that wasn’t really there. I’ve tried to correct these errors.
I was so busy when it came out that I never quite got around to blogging about it here: I have a new app out! It’s called ShareEverywhere. It is built exclusively for iOS 8 and uses the new, built-in “share” functionality, allowing you to share to a good number of services from any app that uses the standard share button.
When I first wrote it, I wasn’t sure how many, if any, developers would build share widgets into their apps. Now that we know the answer is “a lot of them,” I still use ShareEverywhere because it beats having a dozen widgets hiding in your action menu. And there are still services, like Pinboard.in, that don’t have their own native apps.
Maybe I have some duff feeds in my RSS reader. Maybe I have a few poor choices of people that I follow on Twitter. But I see links along these lines all the time:
How do you do something in Swift?
The answer is, almost always, exactly the same way you’d do it in Objective-C!
You want to do pull-to-refresh? Same.
You want to play with location services? Same.
You want to display one of the new UIAlertControllers? That’s the same, too.
Graham Lee’s “Why is programming so hard?” made me think about how I started programming and whether I’d be coding now if I was twelve.
When I began, I had a Sinclair Spectrum. Back then, home computers booted into a programming language (BASIC typically) and to do anything you needed to know at least one command. To be fair, even then many people didn’t get beyond J, Symbol Shift-P, Symbol Shift-P (‘LOAD “”‘, the command used to load a program from tape).
Over the years I’ve been asked to do a lot of programming aptitude tests. I’ve had to do some in the last couple of months and I’m deliberately writing this now before I get the results back of the most recent one so you won’t think that this post is just sour grapes…
I’m not going to get into the details of the tests because it doesn’t really matter what they are or who administered them for the purposes of this post.
If you look at the Swift Language guide, you get the distinct impression that the type system is sleek and modern. However the more you dig into it the more eccentricities you find.
The one I’m going to look at today makes sense only if you look at the problem domain from a slightly skewed perspective. I’ve been trying to think whether this is a sensible, pragmatic way of designing a language or a mistake. Judge for yourself.
I’m seeing a surprising amount of vitriol aimed at Swift, Apple’s new programming language for iOS and Mac development. I understand that there can be reasoned debate around the features (or lack thereof), syntax and even the necessity of it but there can be little doubt about the outcome: if you want to consider yourself an iOS developer, it’s a language that you will need to learn.
The only variable I can think of is when you learn it.
Swift is a new programming language designed by Apple for development on OS X and iOS. I thought that I should try to learn it a little so I decided to convert a non-trivial collection of classes from one of my apps (www.cut) into Swift. I always find it better to work on a real project rather than just to play around with things aimlessly. Also, by re-working an old project, I knew that all the problems I would find would be language related rather than anything to do with the architecture.
I’ve been pretty quiet here for a couple of of weeks and that’s because… well, a picture speaks a thousand words.
Junior took his sweet time popping out — we were in the hospital over a day before he made his grand appearance — but for Juniorette we weren’t sure we’d make it there in time! In the end we checked into the delivery suite just after ten in the evening and the birth was recorded just before eleven.