#swiftui

SecondCopy — Mode A is alive

I've got the Misrecogniser running end-to-end. The app now routes OCR + what3words + Ezra (GPT) into a three-line caption that sits comfortably in the APD register—grounded in what the camera sees, nudged by place, and allowed to be a little sideways. It will miscaption and misrecognise; it will also land on those odd, enlightening phrasings I wanted.

What’s happening on each label

Photo → OCR: pull concrete nouns/verbs from the page/scene.

w3w: fold in 1–2 words from the location (no slash soup).

Ezra prompt: ask for three lines, lowercase, field-note tone; line 2 must anchor to at least one OCR keyword.

Post-process: de-fluff, enforce anchors, keep it legible.

Output: ZPL to the Zebra QLn420 over Wi-Fi, plus a PNG “second copy”.

Quality of life

Preview now renders as a true 4×4″ square (matches the printed label).

Captions lean observational/philosophical rather than cryptic riddles.

Why I like it

SecondCopy treats misrecognition as material. The label is a tiny field report: context + place + a thinking error that occasionally hits the truth at an angle.

Next job — Mode B (Relay to Ezra)

I'm turning this from a private tool into a public submission app:

Users create as in Mode A.

Instead of printing locally, they tap Relay to Ezra.

The app uploads PNG + ZPL + metadata to a small cloud inbox (Firebase).

A home listener watches the queue and auto-prints to the Misrecogniser in the studio.

The user still keeps a “second copy” in Photos.

I have a lot of home videos on VHS. For years, I wanted to use my parent’s tape converter to transfer the footage to a CD, but the fear of it eating tapes was always in the front of my mind. After all, I had a VHS player eat my brother’s tape of Princess Mononoke that he blamed me for.

Not too long ago, I was talking to my mom and she said she shipped our home videos off to a company that does all the converting for you, no need to worry about VHS players destroying the tapes. It’s not a cheap process, but compared to the potential devastating results of DIYing it, it’s worth the cost.

Several weeks later, my mom hands me a USB thumb drive with gigabytes of memories: Cub Scout meetings, Christmas parties, vacations, 3rd grade birthday parties, GoldenEye for the N64. The list goes on. My wife and I had a marathon movie night and binged them all.

Still reading?

I really miss the authenticity of home videos. What will we reminisce about years from now? YouTube Shorts? TikTok videos? Snapchat/Instagram filters? Will they age as gracefully as analog media does, or does technology move so fast that they’ll be dated long before nostalgia sets in?

I started coding my first video editing program that functions like an old tape player, built in Swift for MacOS. I’m designing the whole UI from scratch so that it looks like a tape player/recorder too.

En esta charla, nuestro querido Pedro nos hablará del uso y configuración de Charles Proxy en dispositivos Apple.

Charles es una app proxy que nos va a ayudar en el desarrollo de la capa de servicios de nuestras aplicaciones. Entre otras cosas nos permite:

Capturar el tráfico http y https de nuestro dispositivos. Tanto peticiones como respuestas.

Simular varios escenarios de conexiones lentas a internet.

Ver de forma cómoda las respuestas JSON y XML.

Repetir y modificar peticiones.

Modificar peticiones y respuestas para simular escenarios que necesitamos durante el desarrollo, como la simulación de errores.

Añadir breakpoints a peticiones, respuestas o ambas

¿How cool is that? Pues esto y más cositas es lo que veremos en la charla.

Anímate y ven. Hazte el favor.

Donde y cuando:

Próximo miércoles 17/04/2024 a partir de las 19h en el espacio Puerta de la Innovación, c/ Toledo 110., Madrid.

Puedes registrarte en el siguiente link a MeetUp:

Labs, Sessions, and Meetups (Oh my!)

by Ethan Saadia

Today was a busy Day 3 at WWDC 2021! I began the morning by watching a session detailing advanced graphics and rendering with RealityKit 2, including custom shaders, full control over meshes, and the ability to customise post-processing events. To prepare for my RealityKit Lab at the end of the day, I began trying out as many on the new features as I could in my previous projects and sample apps. As I prepared for my Object Capture Lab to learn more about best practices for scanning, I decided to test out the quality of the scanned meshes by 3D printing the koala I scanned yesterday. Although I reduced the size to speed up printing time, I was impressed at the level of detail I captured with just 64 photos.

At the Object Capture Lab I learned some great and useful tips for improving scans that I will share in a later post. As I worked through trying out more RealityKit features, I joined the Demystify SwiftUI session watch-party at the WWDC Lounges, where Apple Engineers answered questions live as we watched the video. Throughout the day I accumulated an entire list of RealityKit questions across multiple Xcode projects, and the engineers who talked with me were extremely helpful and made the most of our short appointment by going through all of my questions. I have four ‼️ Lab appointments tomorrow, and I can't wait to experiment some more with the new frameworks and learn more from the Apple engineers who built them.

AR Roundtable Meetup

In the virtual Augmented Reality Lab that I built for WWDC Community Week, I gathered a group of developers to discuss augmented reality. I met several people with exciting AR projects, gave an interactive presentation about RealityKit, answered all their questions, and led a conversation about AR on Apple platforms and beyond.

It was especially wonderful to interact with people who have benefitted from my online tutorials and hear about the apps they have built. My favorite part of being a developer is giving back to the community that helped me get started, so hosting this meetup and meeting my readers was an extremely rewarding experience!

Last weekend was the first (and hopefully annual!) SwiftUI Jam, which I had a lot of fun taking part in. For a completely remote event I found it to have a surprisingly communal feel, with lots of great discussions and tips flowing through Discord all weekend.

My project for the jam was an app I brainstormed that same weekend with my wife, Emily, based on one of her ideas: a toddler book reading tracker. Most reading tracker apps aren’t designed for super short books that you’re reading over and over and over again, day after day, and we thought it would be fun to be able to see how our son’s interest in books develops over time. When we read to him, we’re reading between 5-20 books a day, and he often seems to go through phases of obsession with certain books (he’s now at the stage where he brings us the books we’re going to read) that might be fun to track & chart.

Another thing I liked about this idea was that I could see a clear path from a weekend’s work on a prototype to shipping a minimum viable product and future updates post-jam. Here’s what I wrote as a feature list at the start of the jam:

List of books with number of times read & date last read

Flow for adding a new book (stretch goal: isbn scanner and lookup)

Flow for marking a book as just read

Flow for marking a book as read with a past date

Stretch goal: an Apple Watch app, since I often don’t have my phone with me when reading to 👶.

I didn’t end up getting to any of my stretch goals, or the flow for adding past read dates, but I did get the other main features built and fully functioning, and had a lot of fun while working on them.

Some technical takeaways…

While I’ve now used SwiftUI for just about every new screen and UI component I built for Picky over the last six months, they were all embedded within UIKit view controllers and working with a pure SwiftUI app has a different feel to it, especially when it comes to data flow.

While you get some really nice out of the box functionality when using Core Data, it really is showing its Objective-C origins and just doesn’t feel right with Swift (especially optionals). I think I’m going to explore some options for how to more naturally integrate it with some sort of middle layer to hide some of the rough edges from my pretty SwiftUI code.

I barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but the ButtonStyle protocol is a really neat way to customize controls.

I didn’t end up having any time to play with animations but I saw a lot of really inspiring work from other folks taking part in the jam. Definitely making it a goal of mine to really put SwiftUI’s powerful animation potential to use.

If you’re curious my somewhat hacky code (remember, this was a project done in one weekend, primarily while 👶 was asleep) is here on GitHub.

Lastly, here are a few screenshots to give you an idea of where I ended up at the end of the weekend: