A Few Toys
Since the release of Terrella and the big update to Super Speller I’ve slowed down a bit with Quiet Spark work. But that doesn’t mean I’ve completely stopped working on personal projects. There are a few things over on github that I’ve been picking at here and there as the mood strikes me.
First I have a Swift based video poker app for iOS. It’s called Poker. Clever eh? I’m not sure I would use any of that code in anything real since it was mostly a testbed that I used to teach myself Swift. Very basic. Except maybe the expected value calculations that I added. There are probably more efficient ways to calculation EV. I just used a brute force method, but I was trying out different ways of iterating over objects and evaluating ~1.5 million poker hands was a good way to put Swift through its paces.
Next up, a very simple app to try and find bundle and sandbox locations of apps installed on the simulator in Xcode 6. What with the fifty-eleven different simulator configurations I understand why Apple decided to rework the simulator locations. I’m not sure why there isn’t an easy way in the simulator or Xcode to get to these locations though. So I wrote SimDirs (another clever name) to try and track these locations down. I’ve not been able to find a 100% reliable way to do this though. Feel free to improve upon it.
Finally, I’ve been trying to do a better job giving back to the developer community, hence the recent activity not only on github, but also StackOverflow. I try to keep this stackoverflow page open and skim through the questions as time allows. But what I really wanted was an app that would let me see new questions and hide those I’d looked at and/or ignored. So I wrote… wait for it… StackMonitor. Again, nothing fancy. I’ve not even put this one through its paces for a whole day yet actually, so who knows how well it’ll work in practice.
The SimDirs project has actually seen a bit of interest so I was motivated to try and make it a bit better. There’s definitely still room for improvement so I may continue to pick at it and the others as the mood / need strikes me.