A meandering path to Terminus, an open source library. In biology, animals like the crocodile are sometimes called living fossils because they appear to have changed little from specimens found in the geologic strata of the past. Computer technology has a few living fossils of its own. The terminal, or…

Will Swift become the one language to rule them all? — Modern programming is complex. In one of my most recent mobile apps, BG Snapshot, I utilize shell scripts for low level file system tasks, Python for data munging and machine learning (ML), C++ for approximate nearest neighbors search, and Swift for building the final iOS App. The process and its…

The data sure do show a different landscape. For the last year and a half we have all been drowning in a sea of articles about Covid. I’ve read about testing, tracking, lockdowns, masks and ventilators, healthcare worker burnout, overflowing hospitals, death, vaccines, more about masks, vaccine mandates, and the…

A short guide to ingesting JSON responses in CoreData — CoreData, Apple’s framework for data persistence on iOS, is battle-tested, fully-featured and integrated with other frameworks such as CloudKit and SwiftUI, but has a steep learning curve. …

For the non-web devs out there. — The Web today is a wonderfully addictive mashup of culture, commerce, and technologies, both old and new. As an iOS developer, interacting with the Web is usually trivial. Make an endpoint request of a REST API from a web-server, get back data, decode data. Boom! Done. At least, that’s what…

In SwiftUI TextField is the goto View for capturing freeform input from your users. It works great out-of-the-box for capturing strings, but as with any stock API there are limitations and behavior that may catch you off-guard, especially if you try to work with optionals and other data types. …

Hint: It’s a matter of style. — One of the most frustrating aspects of working with SwiftUI is trying to debug unexpected behavior. I recently ran into a noodle-scratcher while adding search and interactivity features to views inside of a List. …

Before you break your actual keyboard, let me show you the way. — SwiftUI, Apple’s declarative framework for rapid user interface development, has continued to mature as a useful alternative to UIKit with a 2.0 release at WWDC this year. As a newbie to the framework, I enjoy the instant feedback that the canvas preview provides with each code modification and am thoroughly…

Over the past few years my wife and I have really gotten into gardening. We enjoy planting flowers and vegetables, getting outside, and rearranging our plants to enhance the aesthetic appeal of our yard. But having a garden is a lot of work and maintenance, especially when it comes to…