Opinionated Notes

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.

swift

AsyncOperation

A few days ago, I was working on an app for a client. With this app you can basically see a staff roster, that needs to be downloaded from a server. The REST-API is built that way, that the app has to talk to different endpoints to download all the

swift

It's self again

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a short piece about self. Since then, a lot has changed: I got fired, found a new job, quit, and found another new job. I'm working from home now as employee of a fully distributed company. To reflect on that, I'

Gruber's dream iPad Pro vs. the real iPad Pro

When the iPad launched more than 10 years ago, John Gruber wrote a lengthy piece on Daring Fireball. In his opionon, the 256 MB of RAM were the biggest hardware weakness of the device. imagine what Apple could put in an iPad that cost as much as a MacBook Pro.

Tips by Sundell

Although I treated myself with an AppCode-license the other day, I'm still a daily user of Xcode. And I'm also a subscriber of John Sundell's Swift by Sundell's RSS-feed. A few days ago I noticed that he moved the little tips from

swift

Running Tests in pre-commit hooks and alternatives

A few months ago, I bought myself a fancy MacBook Pro. You know, one of those fancy devices with the fancy TouchBar, a nice Retina screen and a broken-by-default keyboard. And to make myself feel better, 'cause you never know what might happen in the next couple of years,

objectivec

Customizing UISlider — Either color or image

We're working on a pretty useful — at least we hope so — feature right now. Part of this feature is a slightly customized UISlider. In the end, it should look pretty similar to the narrow Scollbar you know from UIScrollView: As this component has existed in the app before,

general stuff

Some Thoughts on Code Review

A few days ago, Max and me recorded a new episode of the German Codestammtisch-podcast. We talked about code review and pull requests. In the last couple of days I witnessed again, how useful these two can be. The full episode will air on March 22nd — I still have to

objectivec

(!QuickFix) != (QuickFix != nil)

A colleague of mine works on a pretty important feature. He uses a seperate git-branch for this, so that his changes can be reviewed and thoroughly tested before being merged into the app. While working on that feature, he fixed some easy-to-fix, but important bugs on this exact branch. In

Preview CSS for redmine-Textile in BBEdit

A few years ago, I bought a license for BBEdit, a commercial text editor for macOS, that doesn't suck. But: I never read the manual and so I used it not very often. Until recently. Because recently, I discovered, that BBEdit has a Preview Mode for several Markup

objectivec

Save NSSecureCoding-decoding for Dummies

After my last wrong assumption, that I don't need to look up easy things, I stumbled upon this assumption again. This week, I failed to implement NSSecureCoding the right way. In the end, I learned some things. I wanted to persist some data using NSSecureCoding, NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver.

objectivec

Variable declaration in switch-case

Welcome back to Objective C-land! Last week, I doubted my own sanity more than once. One day, for example, I refactored some code to use an enum and I nearly dispaired on a simple switch-case, until I reminded myself that I've stumbled over this issue quite a while

general stuff

All Things Version Controlled

These are some things, articles and thoughts about version control. You are already using it, of course you are, aren't you? Recently, we recorded an episode for our German podcast. For nearly 50 minutes we talked about version control: We discussed the basic principles, git, Subversion and fossil.