A blog on independent software development, Swift, Elixir and more...
Inlay is a library which renders embedded previews for content links (Mastodon, Pixelfed, Apple Music, Bluesky, Spotify, etc..) on your Lustre page I'm very happy to announce a new library I've been working on in the last couple of days - Inlay . The Gleam Way I've been actively looking for opportunities to integrate more Gleam into my work and the recent 11ty news have provided an excellent…
Introducing week notes, work on Flowvi.be and the road ahead It's been a while since my last post. I think form now on, I will be focusing more on short notes highlighting interesting happenings and progress on my side projects. I'm tentatively calling it a Weeknote but we will see if this is sustainable 🙂. The last two weeks were focused on getting Flowvi.be 1.7.2 ready for release. I'm very…
Swift 6.2 is great and a few qualify of life improvements to Xcode can make it better In a recent exchange with Matt on Mastodon , I realised it's been a while since I had a chance to write about Swift Concurrency. Swift 6.2 comes a long way to alleviate the rough edges of the initial release and now I find myself using it comfortably. I think the biggest friction at the moment, is awareness of…
Experiment to create a Qt6 library with a familiar and safe Swift SDL My first encounter with Qt took place before I was even a developer. Way back in high-school (think 2003), I was discovering KDE 3 with a CD of Linux Mandrake that happened to be in one of the monthly PC Magazine editions. Konqi and I have been friends for a very long time. The KDE mascot Konqi holding a paint brush - KDE e.V.…
LLMs require a human operator with deep understanding of a problem before they can generate useful code I recently stumbled on this post - a good read that makes the point about being lured into a pitfall of believing that LLMs provide a shortcut around deep learning for their human operator. The Loop Before The Code Software development rarely begins by writing code. Usually, the first step is…
If you’re building a backend mostly alone, Elixir lets you avoid service sprawl and ship features faster. I’m very excited that this year’s StackOverflow Developer Survey showed quite a few mentions of Elixir, Erlang and Gleam . Elixir is one of my favourite ecosystems, and it always feels good to see that a growing number of developers share my enthusiasm. Most of you know me as someone building…
🐾 It is through tears that we say goodbye to Dexter today. Our sweet Dexi. She gave us 11 unforgettable years of love, intense cuddles, games and shenanigans. We had so many adventures together - chasing sun bunnies, barking at the neighbours, and taking upside-down naps. We were her humans and she was our kitty. Farewell sweety. Upside-down naps were the best Strong opinions about Interface…
How to configure a keychain profile for custom notarisation of binaries for macOS The steps below should be familiar if you've been building applications targeting macOS. I was recently working on a client project involving a privileged `launchd` service and a companion desktop application, which made me revisit the process and refine the steps below for the current version of Xcode 16. The…
New version of the headless audio player Gadulka adds extended playback controls for volume, position, playback rate and more Playback controls The initial release of Gadulka enabled a consumer to simply play an audio file. It was very much a "play and forget". With version 1.6.3, several methods have been added to allow a consumer to control the playback of the underlying player: Make it possible…
A small update adopts Kotlin 2.1.0 and K2 mode A new minor release of Gadulka is now available targeting Kotlin 2.1.0. If you're using the library, it should be possible to upgrade without other changes on your end. Bumping the Kotlin version brings some exciting language features and opportunities for optimizations like guard conditions in a when statement (I use when practically all the time) as…
What a week! I hope you had a good one. I finally figured out how the AltStore works With the state of things and everything happening in tech, I've been very curious about alternative marketplaces. Here in Europe, we have access to the AltStore, and I've been trying to figure out how it works. Although they have some excellent resources on their website , for some reason I initially struggled to…
Remotely 🎧🎥 As some of you know, things have been changing quite a lot for me professionally in the last couple of months. I feel very lucky to have been able to meetup with new people and spend even more time working on projects I, personally, enjoy and want to support and want to help move forward. It was a long week... What's an app? In preparation for the launch of my new project Brefi…
A new version of Gadulka is now available with experimental support for wasmJs targets Kotlin Multiplatform has been gaining traction lately. Just in the last few weeks, I've had two separate occasions to chat about the technology with folks outside my usual tech bubble. And it's not surprising, of course. Kotlin Multiplatform offers a unique blend of native and cross-platform technologies to…
A new version of my browser companion app for the Mac is now available This update focuses on bugfixes and other internal improvements. Most notably, the app uses Sparkle to allow for automatic updates. This means new versions of the app will be available directly from within the app. [BREAKING] The app now requires macOS 15.0 [FIX] The project uses Swift 6 strict concurrency checks [FIX] The…
A couple of tweaks I apply to my KDE desktop so it feels right at home It's safe to say that one of KDE's superpowers is customization. Thanks to Plasma, most aspects of the shell are provided by some kind of widget, fully open and customizable. This means you can spend a great many hours lost in tweaking things until they work, look and feel juuuuust right. Add to that, building new widgets is…
This is both a message and a reminder that things and life are constantly changing and while it's not easy, it's necessary to remain in control. This post was inspired by recent events and a short chat with a friend. There are two main points: Create distance between your happiness and big tech Cultivate resilience Create distance between your happiness and big tech There are so many…
Gadulka is a minimalistic player library for Kotlin Multiplatform. It targets Android, jvm and iOS, allowing consumers to play audio files. Hi all. I hope you're having some spooky fun this week 🎃. On my side, I've been taking a couple of days off work which means I got time to work on some personal projects. One of these projects was an app which needed a way to play short audio files. Since I'm…
DHH's recent talk on Rails 8 got me thinking about resiliency of native apps. Can you update and run an app made than 5 minutes ago? In that talk about Rails 8 , DHH talked in depth about taking back control of our apps - removing hidden complexities from both the build pipeline and hosting. It made me think about resiliency and, specifically, resiliency of apps. Native apps. The Rails talk…
Does anyone have a recommendation for a IRC client that works on macOS/iOS? A couple of days ago, I posted a question on Mastodon if anyone knows of IRC clients for macOS. A lot of interesting suggestions were put forward (thank you everyone for taking the time to reply) and I'm going to list them below for future reference. Disclaimer: While some of the names below are familiar, I haven't had a…
What should I write about? Good question. There are days when I catch myself wanting to post these absurdly long threads on Fedi. You know, when it’s hard to fit the essence of a point in 500 characters * . And yet, I never do because who wants to have to scroll through a full-screen view of a toot about something random? Side note : This wasn’t really a problem on a Pleroma/Akkoma instance, where…