After a brief affair with another editor, I’m now back to using my beloved Vim again. What’s more, I decided to invest the time I should have put in years ago when I started using it, and learned to do things more efficiently. Besides reading Practical Vim and watching some VimCasts, I went through my list of plugins I collected over the years, removed the ones I wasn’t using, learned about a couple of new ones I didn’t know, and re-learned some of the ones I forgot about. Here’s the list of my favorite plugins I ended up with.

Continue reading →

I’m not easily persuaded to try out a new editor, but since I heard so many great things about Sublime Text, I decided to give it a try. After all, it looked a lot better and smoother than my old and rusty Vim, and I’m a sucker for look & feel. So, I took the free courses on tuts+, and tried it out for a while on my daily tasks. Here are my findings.

Continue reading →

In Wonderful Life with the Elements, the Japanese author (and artist) Bunpei Yorifuji takes you through all the chemical elements in a playful, entertaining, and very graphical way.

Continue reading →

After 7 years of serving my blog/website with WordPress, I thought it was time to try something else. One of my biggest gripes about WordPress (apart from having to hold my breath on each version update) is that writing posts through a web UI isn’t very handy: it’s slow, inconvenient for complicated posts (especially if you’re used to your favorite editor), you can’t write while offline, and the versioning is limited (compared to real versioning systems). So, I decided to give static blog generators a try, and ended up converting my blog to Nanoc (after a brief stopover at Jekyll). Result: I can now write my posts in VIM, use Markdown syntax for writing, preview my posts live using tools such as Marked and MarkdownPad, preview the site using Nanoc’s built-in HTTP server, easily customize my site with some Ruby code, and keep everything versioned with Git. And of course move it on Amazon S3 in case my blog really hits off and starts getting million hits a minute (which should be any day now).

In case you’re interested in the details of how I converted from WordPress to Nanoc (including code), read on.

Continue reading →

Just in time for a 2012 release: Swift 2.0 is out! This new stable release has many enhancements and bugfixes, so head over to the Release Notes page to find out what’s new.

Happy New Year!

That’s right, we’re almost there: we just put up the release candidate of Swift 2.0. If no critical bugs are reported, this will become the final release. As always, we encourage everyone to get the new build and try it out, and tell us about any bugs they should come across.

We have just released the second (and final) Swift 2.0 beta. Apart from several bugfixes, highlights include the possibility to set custom connection options, getting detailed information about certificates upon connection errors, and improved room invitations. We encourage everyone to get the new build and try it out, and tell us about any bugs they should come across.

Last sunday, we finished our week-long Swift Hackathon, and it was a great success, leading to Swift 2.0-beta1! Here’s a list of the things we achieved during that week.

Continue reading →

After another year of development, we’re happy to announce that we released our first Swift 2.0 beta! We encourage everyone who is interested in helping us with testing to try out this new release, as it has many bugfixes and enhancements (see the release notes for more details).

Thanks to the hackathon week (of which details will be posted shortly), we believe this first beta to be pretty stable. Nevertheless, should you find some bugs, please come and tell us about it!

In his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech, Steve Jobs explained how his interest in typography played a fundamental role in creating the first Macintosh computer, and how the beautiful typography set the Mac apart from other personal computers out there. He was obviously passionate about these things, going as far as pixel-perfectionism about fonts and icons. That’s why I was a bit shocked when I started noticing bad kerning (aka keming) in the iOS 5 status bar. Could it be that these are the first artifacts of the post-Steve Jobs World? (Update: No)

Spoiler alert: As XKCD points out, recognizing bad kerning is something you may not want to learn about. If you like your iOS status bar, consider not reading on.

Continue reading →