I'm writing this yearly update later than I usually do. A few things have been unsettled, and I didn't want to write until I had some idea how they would turn out.
We had been planning to buy the house we were living in, but that deal fell through in …
For most of my computing lifetime, I didn't bother with backups. They were too much trouble, and back when it took 20 floppy disks to back up a Mac hard disk, they took too much time. But now with services like Time Machine, CrashPlan, Backblaze, Dropbox, and Google Drive, it …
This week, we learned that Dr. Dobb's Journal is shutting down after 38 years. Admittedly, I haven't paid much attention to Dr. Dobb's for the past few years, but back when I was a kid who wanted to be a programmer, I anxiously awaited each monthly issue so that I …
Markingbird is a Markdown processor written in Swift for OS X and iOS. It is a translation/port of the MarkdownSharp processor used by the Stack Overflow website.
(If you have no idea what "Markdown" and "Swift" are, you can just stop reading now.)
Repository: https://github.com/kristopherjohnson/Markingbird …
Note: At WWDC 2015, Apple announced Swift 2, which includes changes and a new feature called "protocol extensions" that render much of the code below either irrelevant or incorrect. This article applies to Swift 1.x.
Apple's new Swift programming language isn't really a functional programming language. However, it does …
As an experiment in using Apple's new Swift programming language, I whipped up a simple tip-calculator app for iOS 8.
Yes, the world really needs Yet Another Tip Calculator, and it also really needs Yet Another Swift App Example.
In addition to using Swift, the app also uses an embedded …
A little over a year ago, I published A Web Page for Reformatting JSON Text, which is a simple web page for pretty-printing JSON data. I'm now learning AngularJS, so as an exercise I reimplemented the page using Angular rather than the original's jQuery.
This version is a little nicer …
OS X Server is now available free of charge for members of Apple's iOS Developer Program, so I have it installed on most of my machines. Unfortunately, having OS X Server installed complicates the use of the built-in local Apache web server which I use for web development. I've figured …
I've been playing around with Xamarin. Its IDE, Xamarin Studio, comes with a bunch of (IMHO) terrible color schemes, so I ported Zenburn to the Xamarin format.
You can find my Zenburn for Xamarin theme here: https://gist.github.com/kristopherjohnson/784360f9676b59766678
To use it, download the .json file, open …