Opinionated Notes

ai

Duck AI!

AI or more precisely: LLM-based GenAI is still the hype of the hour — I can't wait for both of it to die. When cycling back home after wasting half a day at the office[1], I had to think about the duck test. A quote from the Internet:

mastodon

M stands for money

In the last few months, several Mastodon clients shut down and several developers shifted to Bluesky. One reason: Money.

ios

Mastodon Moderation (for iOS)

Up until July 2024 I worked on Mastodon for iOS and since May 2024 I am volunteering as moderator for a small community. But the official, web-based Moderation-interface annoyed me and so I wanted to do something about it. In other words: I decided to build a small, native iOS

Simple, Stupid

Following my ongoing fossil-endeavours, I decided to read the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, as it's also mentioned in fossil's docs. It is a collection of essays, the first named A Brief History of Hackerdom. In Chapter 4 (The Rise of Unix), it reads: Unix

Fossil

Re-discovering Fossil

There are other SCMs than git. Rediscovering Fossil has made me think about how I use git.

swiftuwhy

But why?:

Maybe it's a leftover from Objective-C, but I — still — consider readability way more important than brevity. Code is not a limited resource, you can be as verbose as you want to be.

swift

Cheap and dirty

This started as a two-toot-thread on my Mastodon but I couldn't resist the urge to write a few more words. Luckily, I have a blog. This will be about crappy SwiftUI and so this won't be the last post about it.

iPad

Popover on iPad with a custom content size

On an iPad-app I had to set a custom content size of a modal sheet and took the wrong of two options. I had to learn again, that reading the documentation can save me some time.

software development

I'm used to IDEs

I'm thinking about tools. Again. After writing iOS-apps for roughly a decade and using Apple's Xcode to do so, I'm used to IDEs. Sure, I use real text editors like Textmate or BBedit or even vim for taking notes or writing blog posts, but

elixir

Weird layout

I started a little Phoenix-project. But the layout of that project's main page looked weird. Using the layout solved the issue.

Autocompletely Broken

I just updated all my devices to the recently released most recent Apple operating systems. After doing so, I had to download Xcode 16 as the previous version wasn't compatible anymore. After opening the IDE for the first time, Xcode asked me what additional SDKs to install. For

Make a SF symbol look better

Sometimes I learn useful things and use these useful things just once and immediately forget them afterwards. The next time I have to start from scratch again. Unless I write a blogpost about it, so consider this of these blogposts, it's about combining different UIImage.SymbolConfiguration (Documentation) using

Organic Software

Today, I attended a small barcamp about cooperatives and I met so many smart, caring and interesting people. The conference took place at the head office of the German newspaper taz, a cooperative itself. And somehow, one thought has resonated with me since then, a simple thought. It's

iPad

The two covers

In 2018 I bought an iPad together with an Apple Pencil and a red Smart Cover. Sometime later I also got a case with a keyboard that could be flatten in a way, that I still could use the Pencil with the iPad being in the case. A few weeks

mac

Re: The M1 Macs

When it launched some weeks ago, I bought myself a new iPad Pro (M4) after the old one has gotten slower and slower after six years. Mostly, I've used the new iPad as a $2000 Mastodon Ebook machine to read in bed work on my pile of unread

xcode

Skimm through Crash Reports

The other day someone filed a crash report for Mastodon for iOS on Github — thanks a bunch! Although I haven't fixed that yet, I learned that you can skimm through different stack traces for one crash using the Xcode Organizer.

mastodon

Mastodon for iOS. Year One.

I've worked on Mastodon for iOS for over one year now. What happened during that year? What did I do? Time to look back!

elixir

One thing at a time

Last time I wanted to learn vim while learning the Elixir-programming language, which was too ambitous.

elixir

But WHY?

I started to read a book about the amazing Elixir-programming language but I'm stuck when it comes to function returning functions. Good thing I'm reading this not alone!

mastodon

You will always be remembered!

We changed the Welcome-screen in the Mastodon-app for iPhone and iPad. The old screen was fancy and so is the new one.

elixir

A Possible Solution

I'm reading another book. It's called Programming Elixir >= 1.6 and it puts the fun in functional. Throughout this book, there're several exercises to deepen the reader's knowledge. And, of course, there's a PDF with solutions. So, yeah, I&

swift

Open Mobile Maps for iOS

A native mobile SDK for OpenStreetMap-map-data on iOS and Android.

Google Analytics

No revenue from the past in Firebase

This week, my boss asked me to look into an issue with Firebase and Google Analytics: The revenue generated from an Android-app didn't show up, although it was visible in the Google Play Developer Console.

swift

Reorder some rows but not all

I'm still writing iOS-apps using Swift and UIKit instead of SwiftUI — I've never been one of those cool kids using the latest tech, and my 100 days of SwiftUI lasted for 33 days or so. Maybe I should give it another chance. But today I found

Dash and Xcode 12

During my day job as an iOS developer I heavily rely on Dash. Basically, I have no idea what I'm doing and Dash helps me to cover that. Well, it was helping me: Something went wrong with Xcode 12 and so the Apple API-docs in Dash are broken.