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I work in Java and Swift very often. Swift lends itself to writing fewer lines of code, which appeals to me because maintaining fewer lines of code always seems easier. But more importantly, fewer lines of code to do the same thing is more elegant, in my humble…
Continue readingMany years ago, I created a messaging system for a puzzle hunt (AKA puzzle race) and I utilized Twilio for SMS text messages. Twilio provides a way for their customers to send SMS text messages through cell phone carriers to their devices. In other words, you can text…
Continue readingAt work starting about 12 years ago, I was tasked with porting an old Android app to Windows phone. Then I ported that to Windows a year or two later. Many years after that, and after making many changes to those apps, I wrote an iOS app from…
Continue readingMuch 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…
Continue readingThe 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…
Continue readingI’m working on the Linkage app for Mac, and I’m a little annoyed at the online comments about installers in general and Windows in particular. I appreciate many of the shortcomings of the Windows MSI files and how a simple drag-drop action to install an app is simple….
Continue readingI’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…
Continue readingOccasionally, I see a video recommendation or stumble on a blog post about inheritance in programming. For those who don’t know, object-oriented programming languages usually allow an object to be defined as a “child” of another object. For example, you could define a “vehicle” object and then create…
Continue readingThe 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…
Continue readingI like programming in Swift, but the language designers made one choice that I disagree with. In fact, I strongly disagree with it. Here are two sets of code that do the same thing (assuming Swift were to allow the second bit of code to work). Which one…
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