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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…
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…
Continue readingI had trouble getting this to work. Actually, I had no trouble getting it to work – I had trouble finding the necessary information online (documentation) to tell me how to do this. This is one of those things where I’m never sure how the first person to…
Continue readingI’ve been dealing with this issue for years. I want a Swift custom view class based on a .xib file. That means the .swift file contains the logic for the class, but the definition of the contents, such as text fields, icons, constraints, etc., is in a .xib…
Continue readingI recently told someone that the Windows version of the Linkage app has 30,000 lines of source code. I didn’t get a chance to explain what all those lines of code do, but I want to explain where they all come from in case anyone finds it interesting….
Continue readingI wrote some code to simulate creatures in an environment. It didn’t work because it was not well thought-out. I wanted to jot down some thoughts about it to help me do a better design job on version 2. My creature simulator is a Mac app written in…
Continue readingCities: Skylines 2 is about to come out. It has been available for preorder for a while now and I’m excited to get it. But it does have one flaw that most video toys have: The developers are trying to make it a game. I think that the…
Continue readingMy kayaking/hiking/biking trips log page uses Google Maps to show a log of “all” trips I’ve taken on foot, biking, or kayaking. I started the log just for kayaking so it is missing all of my bike rides from the first decade that I lived at Lake Tahoe….
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