Author Archives: heckj

Integrating SwiftUI Bindings and Combine

A misconception I had when first learning SwiftUI and Combine was that SwiftUI relied on Combine alone for updating data. There was a throw-away comment in one of the 2019 WWDC presentations (Data Flow through SwiftUI) relating the two, and I over-interpreted it to mean that SwiftUI solely used Combine. To be very clear –Continue reading “Integrating SwiftUI Bindings and Combine”

The evolution of “safe” and “unsafe” in the Swift programming language

There’s been a lot of motion in the last four months of the evolution of the Swift programming language that I’ve been wanting, waiting, and hoping for. The language maintainers are tackling concurrency as a first-class construct in the language. I’m following along with the language evolution proposals in the forums, and so far haveContinue reading “The evolution of “safe” and “unsafe” in the Swift programming language”

M1 arm64 native OpenSSL with vcpkg

This article isn’t a how-to so much as a debugging/dev diary entry for future-me, and any other soul who stumbles into the same (or similar) issues. Let me provide the backdrop for this story: I’m working on a private C++ language based project, previously written to be cross platform (Windows, Linux, and Mac). It hasContinue reading “M1 arm64 native OpenSSL with vcpkg”

Creating Machine Learning Models with CreateML

I have been following the bare outlines of building, and using, machine learning models in Apple’s software ecosystem for a while. Most of my learning and personal research has been with foundational technologies – following some of the frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, SciKit-Learn) and some of the advances in models and their results. Until this holiday,Continue reading “Creating Machine Learning Models with CreateML”

Apple’s M1 Chip Changes… Lots of Things

The new Apple Macs with an M1 chip in them is finishing a job that started a few years ago: changing my assumption that commodity hardware would always win. Having worked in the technology/computing field for over 30 years, you’d think I know better by now not to make such a broad assumption, even internally.Continue reading “Apple’s M1 Chip Changes… Lots of Things”

Combine and Swift Concurrency

Just before last weekend, the folks on the Swift Core Team provided what I took to be a truly wonderful gift: a roadmap and series of proposals that outline a future of embedding concurrency primitives deeper into the swift language itself. If you’re interested in the details of programming language concurrency, it’s a good read.Continue reading “Combine and Swift Concurrency”

The range operator and SwiftUI’s layout engine

This post is specific to Swift the programming language and SwiftUI, Apple’s newest multi-platform UI framework. If you’re not interested in both, probably best to skip past this… I was working on visualization code that leverages SwiftUI to see how that might work, and ran into a few interesting tidbits: playgrounds with SwiftUI works brilliantly,Continue reading “The range operator and SwiftUI’s layout engine”