2026-08-30

This Week’s Puzzle

Think of a state capital and say it out loud. Change one vowel sound in it to name something many schoolkids study. What things are these?

2026-08-23

I started a new job recently and I am enjoying it very much. The office is near to my house – about a 30-minute walk so I won’t do it every day (yet), but I did walk home on a nice afternoon this week and saw this nest.

It’s a bald-faced hornet’s nest which I am informed isn’t a hornet but a type of yellowjacket wasp. (I was on the other side of the street!)

The office building is a “Class-A” office space, meaning it’s schmancy. I haven’t worked in such a building for a long time, and never in one that had multiple tenants. I can’t photograph inside the office itself, but here is something I saw the other day…

There is always something interesting to photograph 📷

2026-08-23

This Week’s Puzzle

Spell out the numbers from 13 to 20 – THIRTEEN, FOURTEEN, FIFTEEN, SIXTEEN, SEVENTEEN, EIGHTEEN, NINETEEN, TWENTY. Select one letter from each word, in order, to name another number. No anagramming is necessary. What number is it?

Day 90

2026-08-22

.sheet(isPresented: $showingEditScreen, onDismiss: resetCards, content: EditCards.init)

.sheet(isPresented: $showingEditScreen, onDismiss: resetCards) {
            EditCards()
        }

Day 89

2026-08-11

Day 88

2026-08-10

Project 17, part 3

More with gestures — starting on the Flashzilla app

Designing a single card view

• since flash cards are traditionally on 3x5 index cards, we’re going to force landscape mode

Building a stack of cards

Turtles all the way down

Moving views with DragGesture and offset()

Moving and rotating discussion that sounds a lot like RoboRally

Day 87

2026-08-09

Project 17, part 2

monitoring notifications using Apple’s Combine framework

Triggering events repeatedly using a timer

timers can become publishers, which are things that announce when their value changes

So if your timer publishes every second, then your receiver onReceive() can run something every second until the timer is stopped.

You have to go the “upstream publisher” in order to cancel the connection (if it is an autoconnect)

No guarantee of precise timing

How to be notified when your SwiftUI app moves to the background

@Environment(\.scenePhase)

3 scene phases we need to consider — .active, .inactive, .background

Supporting specific accessibility needs with SwiftUI

Using more @Environment variables to see if the user has certain accessibility

Day 86

2026-08-08

Project 17, part 1

Flashzilla: a project for learning about gestures

How to use gestures in SwiftUI

• More than onTapGesture()
• onLongPressGesture() can be adjusted to trigger after a certain amount of seconds
• onPressingChanged: keeps track of the progress of the trigger
  
• watch out for clashing gestures — child gestures have priority unless you specify otherwise
• you can also have gesture sequences, e.g. let combined = pressGesture.sequenced(before: dragGesture)

Disabling user interactivity with allowsHitTesting()

• if a View has .allowsHitTesting(false) it gets ignored on tap
• you can do a lot of confusing things!

2026-08-07

I put together a table of examples for the Asterias generators. Most of the generators aren’t in the github repo. I “just happened” to choose my favorite color scheme 🌅

Day 85

2026-08-07

if prospect.isContacted && filter.self == .none {
    Label("", systemImage: "person.crop.circle.badge.checkmark")
        .accessibilityLabel("Contacted")
}