Not following a tutorial today, just going to see if I can wrangle control of EventKit.

On weekends I’m trying to get away from tutorials per se, although at this point in my developer journey I’ll still be stealing adapting a lot of other people’s code. I’ll do my best to credit anyone whose code I cite here on the blog, and of course I’ll observe licenses when it comes to publishing anything.

I’m interested in working with EventKit, Apple’s framework for accessing calendar and reminders data. Specifically, I want to build an app that works with reminders. So far I haven’t found much any sample code online that uses EventKit in a SwiftUI environment; Apple’s Calendars and Reminders Programming Guide doesn’t even use Swift but rather Objective-C. (If he sees this @chrislowiec will be saying “I told you so!”)

I’m going to try starting with Peter Friese’s Building a To-Do List App with SwiftUI, Combine, and Firebase, which seeks to replicate the built-in iOS Reminders app, but instead of rolling a clone of the system’s underlying Reminders data store in Firebase I’ll be connecting to the original one. Once the basic create/delete/edit functionality is in place I have some ideas for different ways to view and manipulate tasks that I think could be useful for myself and others. Oh, and I’ll be writing mine for macOS and possibly iPadOS, because I think the iPhone screen is going to be too cramped for what I have in mind.

Since I’m going to be switching out bits and pieces derived from sample code from different sources, I’m making this as modular as I can, with a separate file for each view. Other than that, a #if statement for the .navigationBarTitle modifier that’s not available for macOS, and a few naming changes to make it easier to replace various elements of Friese’s code later, I haven’t yet written anything today that’s not taken directly from there, so there’s not much point in posting any of the code here.

Not sure if I’ll return to this before next weekend. Tomorrow I’m going to pick up where I left off in Paul Hudson’s 100 Days of SwiftUI.

Alternative Christmas movies for people who hate holiday sentimentality:

1. OK, I’ll give you Die Hard!

2. Bad Santa

3. Eyes Wide Shut

4. … other suggestions?

macOS custom menu command

https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui/creating-a-macos-app

“The pattern for defining focused values resembles the pattern for definining new Environment values: Use a private key to read and write a custom property on the system-defined FocusedValues structure.”

“definining” lol

I am lost. Time to read the Swift language reference?

private struct SelectedLandmarkKey: FocusedValueKey {
    typealias Value = Binding<Landmark>
}

extension FocusedValues {
    var selectedLandmark: Binding<Landmark>? {
        get { self[SelectedLandmarkKey.self] }
        set { self[SelectedLandmarkKey.self] = newValue }
    }
}

FocusedValues is a struct type defined in the SwiftUI framework, a “collection of state exported by the focused view and its ancestors”.

So, within the app, ¿FocusedValues knows if a given Landmark is selected/has focus?

• [ ] Find a thorough explanation of the <AngleBrackets> syntax

• [ ] And ¿what the heck is self[SelectedLandmarkKey.self]?

• [ ] Also find documentation for SwiftUI .tag(x) modifier

• SelectedLandmarkKey is a struct that I just defined.

• So SelectedLandmarkKey.self is… a reference to that struct type?

• And, in the extension, the first self is a reference to (an instance of?) FocusedValues

• [ ] But FocusedValues is a struct, not an array or a dictionary, so ¿how does the square brackets syntax work with structs?

Apple tutorial: Interfacing with UIKit

Completely lost on this coordinator stuff.

import SwiftUI
import UIKit

struct PageViewController<Page: View>: UIViewControllerRepresentable {
    var pages: [Page]
    
    func makeCoordinator() -> Coordinator {
        Coordinator(self)
    }
    
    func makeUIViewController(context: Context) -> UIPageViewController {
        let pageViewController = UIPageViewController(
            transitionStyle: .scroll,
            navigationOrientation: .horizontal
        )
        pageViewController.dataSource = context.coordinator
        
        return pageViewController
    }
    
    func updateUIViewController(_ pageViewController: UIPageViewController, context: Context) {
        pageViewController.setViewControllers([context.coordinator.controllers[0]], direction: .forward, animated: true)
    }
    
    class Coordinator: NSObject, UIPageViewControllerDataSource {
        var parent: PageViewController
        var controllers = [UIViewController]()
        
        init(_ pageViewController: PageViewController) {
            parent = pageViewController
            controllers = parent.pages.map { UIHostingController(rootView: $0) }
        }
        
        func pageViewController(
                _ pageViewController: UIPageViewController,
                viewControllerBefore viewController: UIViewController
            ) -> UIViewController? {
            guard let index = controllers.firstIndex(of: viewController) else {
                return nil
            }
            if index == 0 {
                return controllers.last
            }
            return controllers[index - 1]
        }
        
        func pageViewController(
            _ pageViewController: UIPageViewController,
            viewControllerAfter viewController: UIViewController
        ) -> UIViewController? {
            guard let index = controllers.firstIndex(of: viewController) else {
                return nil
            }
            if index + 1 == controllers.count {
                return controllers.first
            }
            return controllers[index + 1]
        }
    }
}

What do y’all think: update MailSuite and stick with Mail.app for another year, or drop a few extra bucks and jump ship to @MailMateApp?

Yes, even on Thanksgiving. (I suppose I should write something about how grateful I am to have the wherewithal to learn code, etc., and honestly I am, but I’m allergic to the orchestrated sentimentality that accompanies the fall and winter holidays.)

CaseIterable

/// A type that provides a collection of all of its values.
///
/// Types that conform to the `CaseIterable` protocol are typically
/// enumerations without associated values. When using a `CaseIterable` type,
/// you can access a collection of all of the type's cases by using the type's
/// `allCases` property.
///
/// The compiler can automatically provide an implementation of the
/// `CaseIterable` requirements for any enumeration without associated values
/// or `@available` attributes on its cases. The synthesized `allCases`
/// collection provides the cases in order of their declaration.

Dictionary of arrays

var categories: [String: [Landmark]] {
        Dictionary(
            grouping: landmarks,
            by: { $0.category.rawValue }
        )
    }

• Look at features of Swift Dictionary type

Still in the Apple SwiftUI tutorial.

I don’t like that the tutorial is having me drag in downloaded view files rather than writing them myself. Even if the code consists of techniques that have already been covered, I’m not a grizzled veteran who’s been coding Swift everyday for years, and the reinforcement would have been useful. I mean, I guess I could retype it from the downloaded source files…

Should I track down the source of the “snag” or just go on with the tutorial? I don’t really see myself drawing a lot of paths in my own apps, and I haven’t coded since starting my new (non-technical, alas) job, so I’d like to get on with the stuff I’m more interested in mastering.

I started the Apple SwiftUI tutorial as a break from Paul Hudson’s brilliant 100 Days of SwiftUI because the former includes a macOS lesson… but it’s preceded by quite a bit of iOS-centric material, and I still haven’t gotten to the Mac stuff.

The accompanying text of the tutorial (not the code itself, of course), always uses the full word ‘structure’, never just ‘struct’.

¿OK, what does Hashable do again, precisely?

Other than manually disabling and later reenabling cross-posting, is there a way to post to micro.blog without cross-posting on a per-post basis?

Back to (micro-) blogging, in the spirit of Andy Matuschak’s concept of “Working with the garage door open”. Time will tell how long I stick with it this time around and how often I actually post.

Mission San Jose, San Antonio, 2020-12-25

Hi folks — I’m trying to decide whether I want to drop $300+ on an external Thunderbolt SSD. I’m driving a 2018 Mac mini with 500GB internal storage, and 1) I keep running into capacity issues, and 2) I’m a little leery of installing Big Sur on my work machine, even once the final release is available. So I’d like to get an external SSD that I can use as a boot drive, but I wasn’t aware until this morning how much more I’d have to pay for the Thunderbolt interface. Any thoughts?

Once again our Black sisters and brothers have shouldered the burden of saving this nation’s soul. That they have borne the brunt of the struggle again and again is itself one more in the long litany of injustices. But thanks to them we all are rediscovering our commitment to America’s highest ideals of freedom, justice, and equality. The struggle is far from over but the tides are turning.

I’ve been thinking a lot about “emergence” lately, since with luck we’ll all be emerging from social isolation within a few more weeks and looking around at whatever’s left of our lives. I have a feeling there are a lot of aspects of our former ways of working and living that we won’t be able to go back to, any many others that we won’t want to. Our “business as usual” was already failing in increasingly obvious ways, and this forced reset is one of those crises that we can’t afford to let go to waste. Those of us fortunate enough not to be dealing with actual medical emergencies have an opportunity now to make choices that could shape not just our personal lives, but our whole societies for generations. So… currently mulling ideas for at least a major blog post on that theme, and beyond that we’ll see what emerges. I’d love to hear any thoughts y’all might have along these lines.

My sister in Germany just sent this:

What are we building after the plague? Because the world is never going back to “normal”. It’ll be up to us to create a world where the disasters of the early 21st century don’t just keep happening.

A Zettel is a slip of paper; a Zettelkasten is a “slip box”. Since that phrase doesn’t mean much in English, the German word is often used in English among #Zettelkasten method adherents. Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten resembled a pre-digital-age library card catalog. The actual slips were roughly the size of index cards but on thinner stock. Modern zettelizers most often use digital files in a text management software application.

US distillers have been hard-hit by EU tariffs, but other high-growth export markets remain. Learn more #WhiskeyWednesday

Swift Passage is offering free assistance with 2020 State Trade Expansion Program (STEP) grant applications for eligible TX businesses. Reimbursement for up to $10K in export-related expenses. swift-passage-trading.com/2020/01/2…

Sometimes the value of reading a book is as much in the ideas it shakes loose in one’s own mind as in those actually contained in its pages.

Unless it’s just a short underground section of a longer line, I’m having a hard time understanding how a 1.6-mile subway would accomplish much. www.kxan.com/news/loca…

My old Toastmasters friend Lukáš Liebich is becoming quite a storyteller. lukasliebich.com/2019/12/2…

Seems AccountEdge is giving up on ever building a 64-bit (Catalina-compatible) version. Can anyone recommend a standalone desktop, preferably non-subscription, alternative that supports multiple currencies?

Testing post from MarsEdit 2020-01-10 12:34

TAP TAP! Zis thing work? (Testing cross-posting from micro.blog to Twitter and LinkedIn)