Linkage Program

I am currently porting the Linkage app from Windows to the Mac. It’s a fun project with many challenges and many annoyances. Designing a Mac-style sidebar to show the properties of selected items was fun. Trying to use a Mac-centric help system is terribly tricky. For many years,…

Much of this post is written and/or edited by ChatGPT 4 based on my prompts. Abstract This paper presents a novel approach to simulating complex mechanical systems by representing mechanisms as collections of individual components that interact to form functional units. A key focus of the method is…

The editor has a lot of missing features, but a lot of it works. You can create mechanisms, save them, and load them later. There is no simulation and no undo feature. Feel free to try it, and let me know how it works for you. I would…

I’m always trying to write software that is as elegant and readable as possible. This often means identifying areas of confusion in the code and improving it. This also often means picking between styles or ideas that are all equally crappy. Today’s dilemma concerns snap lines. Snap lines…

The Linkage app uses a simplistic simulation algorithm that has some weaknesses. I’m not talking about the issues around links with three connections to the rest of the mechanism where each connection would need one of the others simulated before it could be simulated (being simulated means all…

I was trying to make a tutorial for the Linkage software to show how to design a vertical sliding garage door. The door is built out of four or five segments with rollers at the intersections. The rollers roll in tracks that are vertical then transition through a…

I read a while back about how linked lists were not included in the standard Swift library because they are something that only gets used in classroom situations where people are learning about algorithms., or some such nonsense (in my humble opinion). But then I did a test…