Weeknotes 2021 W49

December 6​–​12, 2021
500 words

I realised this week that I don’t qualify for my COVID-19 booster yet. I’ll have to wait for another two weeks.

Technology has been failing me this week. I accidentally remapped the R key on my keyboard (the Kinesis Freestyle Pro) to option, and it took me about an hour to figure out what happened. I even switched back to a different, older mechanical keyboard, which turned out to have a broken P key.

Games: I’ve spent some time in AC Valhalla, and I’ve now finished the base game as well as the two DLCs. It’s good fun, though it’s quite long, and got a little boring near the end.

The game has time-limited community challenges, which requires all players to work together to reach goals. I like how this creates a sense of connectedness to other players, even though there is no multiplayer per se.

TV: I watched Alex Rider season 2, because I quite enjoyed season 1, though season 2 feels bland and predictable. I also watched Elves, which is rather forgettable teen horror. I’m rewatching Cowboy Bebop because it’s now on Netflix, and it’s quite the nice throwback.

My experiments with Swift and SwiftUI haven’t made much progress.

Swift seems to be an ever-changing language, where old documentation and old advice no longer applies because the language has changed so much already.

SwiftUI is underpowered, and I find it tough to build something without falling back to good-old AppKit.

Additionally, vast amounts of Apple’s developer documentation has been archived, and the up-to-date documentation is woefully incomplete.

Furthermore, because the Foundation and SwiftUI frameworks are closed source, it is not possible to dig into its source code to figure out how to use things. There’s also only a tiny amount of open source Swift projects on GitHub and so it’s tough to find resources to learn from.

I’m now in the stage where I wonder whether Swift and AppKit/SwiftUI is what I want to continue with to build the side projects that I have in mind. I’m somewhat tempted to try something out with Electron instead — and yep, that’s pretty much what I was trying to avoid.

In terms of side projects, there’s not been much progress. I’m still preparing to open source closecontact, but it’s more effort than I expected, and most of that is documenting things.

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