Technicat

Topic

Software

Software development

Feeling Schemish

After a couple of decades of complaining how I miss Lisp, I was finally in the mood to get back to my roots today and do some coding in Scheme (used once upon a time in MIT's intro CS course Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, alas since supplanted by

Mac Dim Sum

I'm finally reaping the rewards of Flutter's multi-platform support by publishing a Mac version of Talk Dim Sum on itch.io, using the same codebase as the Android version, but with Cupertino widgets (sometimes "cross-platform" means duplicating a lot of code). The iOS version was already on the Mac App

The Game Localization Handbook

I see there’s a newer edition of this book. Here’s a review of the first edition that I wrote on Epinions, so it’s a bit dated (with reference to hardware). As video games become more respectable(?), an increasing number of books, magazines and web sites offer to

To Program Is Human

When I worked in Silicon Valley, it seemed everyone wanted the title Software Architect. It’s a sexy-sounding title, maybe because in the movies all the cool people work in advertising or architecture firms, but in the real building world, while the architects get the glory, someone has to put

Tax Time

I always get my tax software before the end of the year to get a head start on my taxes and get an idea of any actions I should take by year end (like selling off all my losing stock to offset taxes on the gains). I also get a

Behind Deep Blue

I’ve never been a particularly good chess player — when I played on my high school chess team, my rating peaked at just above 1700, which is, well, decent. But ever since I played and lost to my first chess computer, I’ve aspired to writing a great chess program.

Creativity, Inc.

When I saw Creativity, Inc. on the bookshelf, I thought it was just another business book on creativity — in other words, dumb. But this book is by Ed Catmull on how Pixar is run. I mean, this is the guy who invented texture mapping. The early part of the book

Markdown

Displaying styled text in an iOS app has always been a hassle, resorting either to an HTML view or cramming together attributed text, but now there's a more convenient option, markdown support provided by iOS 15. And now I have a reason to upgrade my Talk Dim Sum app requirement

The Road to iOS 15

This has got to be a personal record – I have two updates for the same app, Talk Dim Sum, released on the App Store in the same day, I suspect because I included the phrase "fixes for iOS 15" in the release notes. The first update replaced all the action

The Mystery of the Play Button that Acts as a Back Button

Even just cruising in maintenance mode, minding your own business, bugs just show up. This week I noticed a weird one – hitting the Play button in the iOS version of my Talk Dim Sum app would pop back to the parent page, acting like a Back button. But only when