App Updates

Just a quick post to let you know about some recent app updates…

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Consistent Swift Style

  • Why is important to style your code?
  • How do you decide on a style?
  • Is there a way to enforce this style automatically?
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Icon Builder 5

Icon Builder 5.0 is now available from the Mac App Store . This is a complete re-write for better compatibility with Apple’s latest icon requirements. Read on to see what I have fixed and how…

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NCSS 2018

I gave a Masterclass on Swift at the NCSS Summer School 2018 in the University of Sydney on 9th January 2018. This post contains useful links for use in relation to the material covered during my class.

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Mark Time

Mark Time is an application for Celestial Navigation that solves the problem of how to take an accurate time reading to go with each sextant sighting. Here is how it was developed…

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Moving to Hugo

Yesterday, I came to update my blog: I had a new post in draft form and I wanted to update the Swift code to version 4. However installing High Sierra had removed Jekyll which is the site generator that I had been using. I re-installed Jekyll but found that it had been updated from version 2 to version 3.

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JSON Parsing in Swift 4

Updated: 3rd September 2017.


Since JSON has become the de facto standard for data transfers around the internet, there has always been a lot of interest in Swift libraries to parse JSON into Swift classes or structs. Searching for “swift json library” on GitHub discovers 77 86 repositories. So why are there so many? And what has Swift 4 done to sherlock them all?

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Posting from my new iPad

Last week I got a 10.5” iPad Pro. I have had an iPad ever since the original release, but I have to confess to mainly using it for content consumption rather than creation. Since I am usually close to a Mac anyway, there didn’t seem a lot of point. But now that iOS 11 is really addressing the issue of making the iPad a “pro” device, I decided to give it a try.
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JSON Feed for TrozWare

jsonfeed.org has announced a new format for web site feeds, designed as an alternative to RSS. TrozWare has had an XML RSS feed for years, but I don’t think anyone ever uses it (I certainly don’t), so today I have replaced it with a JSON feed, which you can access through the button at the top of every page.

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Blackmail Marketing

I use my iPad to play games as a form of relaxation. Nearly all the games I play are puzzle apps with levels that can be played in a few minutes. Nearly all of them are free to install. So how do they make money? Now I would be the last person you should consult about marketing but it has always seemed to me that the best way to market your product is to convince people that it offers something they want so that they are prepared to pay for it.
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