Weeknotes № 16

At the start of the week, I worked on making our (private) SwiftUI library for drawing tree diagrams a bit simpler. It has code for both drawing the diagrams as well as parsing the type of a view and turning that into an interactive diagram. I separated that into two packages and simplified the tree diagramming library.

On Tuesday we recorded some Swift Talk episodes, and on Wednesday I spent time around the new house and with the family.

On Thursday and Friday, Florian and me sat down to finally start typesetting Thinking in SwiftUI. We tackled a whole bunch of stuff: the cover pages, much of the typography, highlighting, styling, and so on. A bunch of this code is in the attributed string builders package. We still need to add tests and documentation for those features, but for now, we just build what we need and test it by looking at the generated PDF.

I’m still not sure whether or not us writing the book generation ourselves (on top of attributed strings and TextKit) is a good idea, but it definitely is a lot of fun. For now it still seems very promising and much easier to write than LaTeX or using a program like InDesign. But let’s see what we think about this in a few years from now…

We left our temporary holiday home and went on a trip to visit our family in The Netherlands. When we get back, we’ll officialy and finally move into (the ground floor of) the new house. Very exciting!