building / breaking things
For as long as I can remember, I've always been a fan of motorsport. Not the one where you turn left for 400 laps, I mean like the other racing: Formula 1, Le Mans, IndyCar, etc. The fact that there's teams dumping hundreds of millions of dollars of research into the sole goal of building the fastest car, is so pure and simple. The goal itself is simple, but the actual requirements to build…
Well, that was easy! I posted about contemplating on upgrading my blog to use something like Publish so I could spend less time maintaining my blog and more time writing for it. In short, my old blog was a server I wrote myself which would take markdown files (blog posts) and dynamically convert them to HTML and serve them, this was kinda ineffecient, but it was a great learning experience. The…
Introduction This post follows where my server-side Swift Kitura adventures left off . Some sad news came about when it was announced that Kitura was winding down , and I realized that, since I built my blog using Kitura, I should probably find an alternative with a more stable future. I peeked around and Vapor caught my eye. Vapor Quoting their GitHub: "Vapor is a web framework for Swift. It…
A couple days ago I noticed a really weird bug, images that had been used as templates would occasionally draw darker or lighter (rather than the color originally chosen). I thought it was just some weird duplicate layer ontop of another layer that would lead to the icon being darker / lighter. I tried using Xcode's View Debugger, but it just wouldn't work at all and would error out with:…
Introduction This post follows where the first part left off. Now that you've written a blog, or whatever you'd like as part of server-side Swift, the next step is to get it hosted somewhere and running all the time. Personally, I use DigitalOcean for my hosting running an Ubuntu VPS. Most of the instructions here are fairly generic, but depending on the distribution of Linux (or Unix) you're…
Introduction Recently I attended try! Swift in Tokyo, Japan (which was an absolutely fantastic conference), and there I heard about a lot of folks that were using (or beginning to use) Swift on the Server. Now that Swift has reached version 5, and its ABI is stable, I thought it'd be a great time to try it out for myself. I didn't really know what to write, but I saw that @stroughtonsmith had…
Just wanted to add a bit of commentary to Steven’s awesome writeup on the UIKit hax we did with Apple Watch… :D WatchKit apps are handcuffed, as it were, only able to display UI through the elements WatchKit provides. They cannot get the position of touches onscreen, or use swipe gestures, or multitouch. Seriously, it’s horrible. Being able to build proper apps would be so great, instead of simple…
Intro Ever since Apple first announced Passbook two years ago, I've always liked the idea of using it to store business cards. However, it'd be far more useful if it could store Pokemon cards... someone should file a radar on that... Every year at WWDC (and any conference really) it's super fun to play the "trading card game" and collect various business cards from people. Some are really cool,…
Intro I'm not a huge vim person... yet. I like IDEs, usually... (I'm looking at you Visual Studio). Therefore I'll only really use a shell for cycript or other random ssh sessions and hax and such. However, fish is making the shell fun. What the fish? So what is fish anyways? While it sounds like the result of preparations of a sushi plate, it's this really awesome shell replacement. Bash, zsh,…
Intro iOS 4 brought us the wonderful feature to switch between apps quickly, and iOS 7 made this even more interactive through use of live previews of apps. I noticed an article written by @vpdn shared on twitter about making this switcher a little more lively through use of curated app content for multitasking. In other words, re-purposing the iOS 7 switcher as a sort of dashboard / widget…
Background Info On April 12th, 2013, Facebook released Facebook Home, a completely new mobile experience available solely to Android users. With Home came Chat Heads, a wickedly cool way to chat with your friends, in a way that makes that “face-to-face conversation experience” a little more feasible with text messaging. The minute I saw it, I thought “I can make this!”. Using box2d as a…
So as you may already be aware of, RIM just released their take on how tablets should be, also known as PlayBook. The PlayBook currently runs QNX as it's operating system, with which its apps are currently built in conjunction with the Adobe AIR 2.5 SDK. Just recently at the BlackBerry World Conference, the native SDK was unveiled (it was previously seen with their Quake 3 port). Personally, I see…
For a while now I've been checking up on a fabulous project entitled Disk for iPhone (formerly known as iPhoneDisk). Based on the MobileDevice API, it's a filesystem for MacFuse, which allows one to mount an iDevice in Finder. However having my iPod jailbroken I wanted to take advantage of the afc2 protocol. Low and behold, after compiling the source and installing the required daemons/extensions,…
hello world