heckj

Language and framing

Quite a few years ago, I was fortunate to sit in a presentation where Yukihiro Matsumoto talked about his inspirations when making the Ruby programming language. One of the references he cited was the 1966 science fiction novel from Samuel Delaney Babel-17. I was in Portland at the time, and was able to get aContinue reading “Language and framing”

Chart

I’m starting, or more specifically re-starting, a project that I envisioned a couple years ago. In some of the apps I’ve created, I’ve found it useful – sometimes critical to what I want – to provide small charts (visualizations) of data from the app. One example of this is a series of histograms that showContinue reading “Chart”

RealityKit on macOS

Guessing which frameworks are going to be updated, and which aren’t, is — I think — a part of developing software on Apple platforms. Sometimes it’s clear based on what’s been updated over the past three or fours, as is the case with RealityKit. I started my experiments with SceneKit, another lovely high-level API toContinue reading “RealityKit on macOS”

DocC plugin PSA

In my last two posts about using DocC, I’ve been implicitly encouraging the use of the new docc-plugin for the Swift package manager. I did so knowing that it is in beta and the underlying APIs are evolving – and in my example scripts I include how to do the same thing with commands thatContinue reading “DocC plugin PSA”

Tips for getting the most out of DocC

1 – Start by adding doc comments to your types. The starting point is adding a single short summary sentence as comment (using the ///) for each public type in your library or app. Feel free to add more: if you add a “blank line” (meaning include another line with /// but nothing else inContinue reading “Tips for getting the most out of DocC”

Hosting your Swift Library Docs on Github Pages

The beta for Xcode 13.3 dropped yesterday. With it came a released version of Swift 5.6 and a bunch of neat additions that the 5.6 release enables. A feature I was watching closely was two-fold: the capability for plugins to extend the commands available within swift’s package manager, and a static hosting option that wasContinue reading “Hosting your Swift Library Docs on Github Pages”

Looking for help to solve a specific 3D math/trig problem

I’ve been working on a Swift library that implements Lindenmayer systems, but the past week has me deeply stuck on a specific 3D math problem. There’s a specific 3D rendering command that’s described in The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants – the ‘$’ character in that work, that has a special meaning that’s taken me quiteContinue reading “Looking for help to solve a specific 3D math/trig problem”

API Design decisions behind Lindenmayer in Swift

Procedural generation of art is fascinating to me. The scope of efforts that fall into the bucket of procedural generation is huge. Quite a lot of what you find is either focused on art or video games. Within procedural generation, there is a topic that really caught my eye, I think primarily because it wasn’tContinue reading “API Design decisions behind Lindenmayer in Swift”

Adding DocC to an existing swift package

During WWDC 21, Apple announced that they would be open sourcing documentation tooling (DocC) that’s used to build and provide documentation within Apple. At the tail end of October 2021, the initial version of DocC was released — available on Github, scattered through multiple repositories: swift-docc swift-docc-render swift-docc-symbolkit Apple hosts documentation about DocC (presumably writtenContinue reading “Adding DocC to an existing swift package”

A time for change

For some reason, the fall seems to match the most with the inflection points in my life where I’ve made notable changes. This fall is no different, as today is the last day of a contract position that I started just before the COVID lockdown. The 18 month gig was wonderful – sometimes a bitContinue reading “A time for change”