To tell OpenAI’s web crawler to skip your site, add these lines to your robots.txt (see docs): User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / (via Hidde de Vries) The outlook is bleak: There’s no way to win this if you don’t want to be scraped at all, ever, except by not putting things online. … | Continue reading

I listened to “Automate Your Way to Better Code: Advanced Property Testing (with Oskar Wickström)” and I believe that Property-Based Testing (PBT) clicked for me a bit now. Maybe. It never made sense to me before, but Oskar Wickström has a lot of actually interesting examples. My … | Continue reading

I found this among my notes from 2013, and think it’s a fun little tool for analog productivity – the portable Kanban board! It’s a foldable personal Kanban board, suitable as an Every Day Carry in either A3 or A4 size (or US Letter or whatever). Fold the sheet of paper along t … | Continue reading

Here’s an anecdote for you: Imagine a dev team that performs task estimates expressed in “story points”, Agile style, and encounters a large estimate. Large, in this team, means “13 or more.” Then in one of these sessions, a specific task initially received an estimation of 13 st … | Continue reading

Chris Eidhof and team launched the SwiftUI Field Guide website today. I noticed that Chris fiddled with JavaScript animations and layout representations to mimick SwiftUI as close as possible and wondered what kind of e-book could be upcoming, but it turns out it’s a website! Cha … | Continue reading

I’m looking for testers for my macOS apps TableFlip and WordCounter to get an opinion on how accurately characters and “words” are counted, how text alignment in documents look. Reach out if that’s you! hi@christiantietze.de Hire me for freelance macOS/iOS work and consulting … | Continue reading

Went through some old notes this week (I’m doing this AppKit/UIKit stuff for surprisingly many years!) and found a problem with the tags I used in one of my notes. Let’s dive right in with an example: # 201801251531 Copy NSView contents into NSImage #appkit #image #screenshot ... … | Continue reading

In this fourth and probably still not final part of my series on NSToolbarItems with segmented controls, I just want to share a problem and a quick fix that Nathan Manceaux-Panot brought up today. The series spans 8 years and is this: Original Approach Enabling/Disabling Segme … | Continue reading

Here’s a truly inspirational list of things to do from the 32-Bit Cafe, “a community of like-minded website hobbyists and professionals helping to make the personal web fruitful and bountiful again”. It covers these topics: Page Ideas Potential Website Topics CSS & Page Desig … | Continue reading

Developers see the bugs and problems of their products, and thus they are prone to not charge a high price instinctively. The price of an app signals its value or worth to the prospective customer looking at the price tag. Jordan Morgen shares this from the Spend Stack days: It … | Continue reading

Today was a day of convergence. Our home server/NAS had a lot of SATA-related kernel errors and drive failures in the past weeks that I couldn’t track down. I replaced the drive and the cables and things have quieted down. This means I was SSH’ing into the server quite a bit this … | Continue reading

So I found this list of books I read and which I wanted to put on this blog in my inbox. It’s from a migration from OmniFocus to Emacs/org-mode from 2019, and the title is “Transformative Reading 2017”. What were the picks back then? And being 7 (!) years wiser, what do I think a … | Continue reading

So apparently, baby painted turtles survive being frozen. That’s the start of Patrick Dubroy’s blog post about cold-blooded software. Patrick likens software projects to warm-vs-cold-blooded animals: Cold-blooded: Some projects you can let sit around untouched for years without … | Continue reading

I was rummaging through my Zettelkasten today, looking for a reference. I found the note 20190823100132 You can choose when you live in surplus and in the spirit of celebrating a new year, I find it is worth sharing: Seth Godin in Living in Surplus: When you live in surplus, yo … | Continue reading

I’ve recently created a note in my Zettelkasten with a structure I haven’t used before: a timeline. It’s basically an enumerated list with 40 items and a divider that marks “now”. Things above the divide are in the past; things below the divide are in the future. I’m collecting r … | Continue reading

Maybe you have some old code (you wouldn’t write this nowadays, of course) that uses someValue is SomeType checks. Maybe you need to check if someValue is a generic type, like the following Box: struct Box { } Then your is predicates won’t work: switch someValue { case is Int, … | Continue reading

Watching Stephen Celis’ “How to Control the World”, NSSpain 2018 presentation, one of the common Swift/iOS patterns he brings up caught my attention. It’s this piece of code: protocol APIClientProvider { var api: APIClientProtocol { get } } protocol DateProvider { func date() - … | Continue reading

Early this year, I wrote about my upgrade to modus-themes v4.x and how I used a custo mechanism to style the scroll bar indicator I like using, mlscroll.el, so that it looks nice. This week, J.D. Smith, author of mlscroll.el, pointed out that mlscroll.el’s color declarations nowa … | Continue reading

Sven Schmidt alerted me to the fact that you can check in Package.resolved to pin Swift package versions in Xcode-managed projects if you add the file from within the generated project.xcworkspace file in your .xcodeproj bundle: git add *.xcodeproj/project.xcworkspace/xcshareddat … | Continue reading

The current TelemetryDeck for web setup guide (version of 2023-12-01) is quite simple. Insert this into your HTML, and you’re set: From that point onward, you’ll be collecting signals per web site hit. Internally, the signal’s type is "type":"pageview". These signals will inclu … | Continue reading

TableFlip v1.5.1 just got approved to the Mac App Store (direct customers got the update a bit earlier, as usual). Again: kudos to Marin Todorov for the export improvements on HTML! From the release notes: New: tableflip://preference/ added to URL scheme. It currently handles s … | Continue reading

This is a note from 2022 I found by accident today. Teaser: It will become relevant again, soon, so I want to share the rough idea with you today. JSON data containing nested object lists within object lists, namely, arrays of objects within other arrays, cannot be mapped direct … | Continue reading

I’m upgrading my 4TB drives in the NAS to 12TB drives. “Let’s be clever,” I thought (foreshadowing), “and do two things in parallel!” So installing the next drive into the disk array of my Unraid NAS, I let Unraid do these tasks: Replace a 4TB disk in the array with a 12TB disk … | Continue reading

Earlier today, I was posting some ad-hoc thoughts about how I prefer SwiftUI layout over programmatic AppKit on Mastodon. I expected this to become a blog post later today. But instead, I find myself thinking along the lines of: “am I holding this wrong?” I’m programmatically set … | Continue reading

Marin’s Swift Heroes 2023 talk was just uploaded yesterday. It’s called “A 100% SwiftUI App”, and I believe you should watch it, because it’s not actually about what it says on the tin! Marin Todorov: “A 100% SwiftUI App”, Swift Heroes 2023 talk Marin’s a charismatic presenter an … | Continue reading

Nathan Manceaux-Panot shared his contribution to Sparkle the other day, available in version 2.5. of the updater library: attaching CSS to parts of the release notes that are actually new to the user. Say you ship updates in x.x.1 increments to beta testers, but x.1.x updates on … | Continue reading

I suggested the use of UserDefaults.register(defaults:) today. During the conversation, I realized that this behaves very much like the Optional/Nil-Coalescing operator ??. When UserDefaults have a stored value for a key, it’s like .some(...). When UserDefaults don’t have a st … | Continue reading

The Swift standard library has a mutating func append(contentsOf:), but not an immutable variant. Usually, the Array and Collection types offer both. I wonder why that’s not the case here. To be fair, the concatenation operator + does the same trick. Here’s a basic implementation … | Continue reading

Tunds (@tundsdev@iosdev.space) shared a video tutorial about SwiftData this weekend. I hadn’t looked at SwiftData at all until now. The thumbnail read “Store Images in SwiftData”, and I was immediately worried: I recall it’s a bad idea to store megabyte upon megabyte of binary da … | Continue reading

SwiftAsyncAssert by Angu (@angu@techhub.social): Instead of writing import XCTest func test_should_succeed() async { do { let isTrue = try await shouldSucceed() XCTAssertTrue(isTrue) } catch { XCFail("Should not throw an error") } } conveniently write imp … | Continue reading

The whole responder chain is traversed like the following, via the documentation for NSApplication.sendAction(_:to:from:): Start with firstResponder in the key window Try every nextResponder in the chain Try the key window’s delegate Try the same for main window, if it’s dif … | Continue reading

Remember when I wrote about MVVM and eventually in 2015 produced this: I learned that the “view model” in the architectural style of MVVM is a “model of the view” instead of a “model for the view”. Let me explain the difference and the benefits of being able to chose between bo … | Continue reading

Is the following a thing in the U.S. of A, or common anywhere else, and I just didn’t notice that? For about a year, some people reply to email questions by interspersing their replies with my questions. That’s good in general to provide context. But what I don’t understand is th … | Continue reading

Ok ok, I know Super Saturday Sharefest is not a thing, but it’s too late for Follower Friday, alright? I want to give a big shout-out to Matt Massicotte of ChimeHQ for dropping another awesome Swift open source package that makes using XPC Swift-ier. I’m really grateful for all t … | Continue reading