Soemarko Ridwan

I haven’t been writing much, but I’ll get into why another time. But part of the reason is that I’ve stop opening up tumblr, I’ve planned to migrate away from it for awhile now. Wordpress was the top candidate, but I still have mixed feelings I’ve had before.

And then I can across htmly, which is a flat file CMS. Sounds brilliant. Then I look further into these flat file CMSs, in theory they seems to be perfect replacement for tumblr. I loved tumblr for what it was, a dead simple blogging platform that allows custom domain for free. But they seems to have this twitter / facebook envy, and trying hard to be a social network. So,… goodbye tumblr.

This is the only post that’s crossposted. I’m not migrating anything over. The old tumblr links will work as long as tumblr allows free custom domain, and not suspend my account for being inactive.

iPhone X vs Plus

😃 Larger screen on smaller body 🙁 Has less actual width, just longer.

Everyone's going nuts about the iPhone's 10th anniversary, granted the smartphones today would be worlds different without this very first iPhone. But as Steve Ballmer famously said, the first-gen iPhone sucked.

Again, he was right. Let’s break it down;

it was $500-$600 + contract (it was waay over $1000 outside of CONUS),

no AppStore, therefore no third party apps,

2G only.

In 2007 “smartphone” standard, the iPhone sucked.

That is what I bought then, the HTC Touch Diamond. It runs Windows Mobile, it has 3G and GPS at half the price of iPhone in Australia. I got TomTom app up and running within a week of owning the phone, it was one of the main reasons of choosing this phone.

Now, it’s a different world. Apple has shaped the iPhone to be the golden standard of smartphones. People (my buddies) always thought of me as a fanboy or Apple apologist.

Up there, earlier in this article, is exactly the case that I am not. It’s just iOS is better at a lot of things, not everything. But most of the things I care about. Mainly the third party apps. Same app, from the same company, 90% of the time, the iOS version is straight up better. And I’ll jump ship whenever there’s a company (Android or otherwise) that leapt iPhone and iOS by a decade, the way Apple did Windows Mobile.

@actual_ransom

There are a few who asked in StackOverflow, here’s another. I too looked around on how to do this. But many lead to different approaches, most don’t work or no longer work without a lot of fixes. I found a few on CocoaControls, none work.

Simpler to work with. A lot less verbose and easier to read.

Number of files are halved. Duh?! No more header files.

Above simplification actually change my approach on structuring the files, and doing the app's view in a different way (still no storyboard for me), but more on that on later post. Maybe.

Still confused about ? and !, I mean I understand what they meant. I just don’t know when to use it, I just let Xcode yell at me.

The community are maturing. I was in the midst of porting two of the libraries I always use (ALActionBlocks and UIView+AutoLayout), turns out, the swift alternative already exist in GitHub. ActionKit and autolayout-helper-swift.

Dead simple calculator in swift 3

When I search around for a simple calculator in swift, to see what’s out there rather than “re-inventing the wheel,” so to speak. However, I always landed on tutorial where first you draw grid of buttons using interface builder, then compute it with shoddy programming.

As I wrote before, I’m learning swift. One of the easiest ways for me to get started is to start a small project, while reading a bunch of documentations and sample codes in swift while figuring out how to think in swift.

Enters Wi-fi Widget. I notice the basic premise of this app is quite interesting, getting and sharing Wi-fi password. It should be perfect for learning swift, not a lot of API calls and I'll need to look through part of the documentations that I'm not familiar with. But searching up-and-down the Apple documentations (and asked StackOverflow), I can’t find anything to securely access iOS Keychain for Wifi password. Detecting the SSID on the other hand, is just 4 lines of codes.