Bill Morefield My thoughts, discoveries, and occasional rambiings.

I know it’s not Black Friday, but who just puts things on sale one day anymore.

If you missed the launch sale on SwiftUI by Tutorials when it came out in October, you’ve another change to pick it up at half price through Monday, December 2 as part of the bigger site sales on raywenderlich.com.

SwiftUI by Tutorials will help you learn the “new way” of building responsive UI with modern declarative syntax with SwiftUI. It assumes a knowledge of Swift, but requires no experience with app creation. By the end of the book, you’ll have a firm understanding of using SwiftUI and be ready to put it to use in your own apps.

If you’re looking for a bit more than one book, you can also pick it up as part of the Advanced iOS & Swift Black Friday Bundle through Monday for a total of ten books.

The sale is only through December 2.

Two recent articles of mine published on the RAYWENDERLICH site. From earlier this week an article on the Top Five OS X Markdown Editors. From back in November a review of Paintcode.

I’m writing this entry late in the evening of my fortieth birthday. Tonight I sit here taking a few quiet moments to let myself recharge after a number of very social days. The importance of a single birthday because it’s a round number like forty can be debated, but I’ve been asked a few times my thoughts on this birthday the last few weeks so I thought a moment to reflect wouldn’t be out of line.

Having a birthday less than two weeks before Christmas means that I’m used to it being a busy time. There is the normal activity as the days count down to the holiday season and the end of the year. Having worked in higher education for the last thirteen years it’s also a time that marks the end of a semester, student exams, and graduation ceremonies at work.

Even with those factors, I’ve been busy lately. Earlier this year had challenging times, but as summer turned to autumn I’ve found myself both fairly busy an mostly happy. I don’t think those are unrelated. I’ve opened myself back up more socially after closing off for a while. Meeting people without expectations has left me busy, at time even hectic, but enjoying life as it comes by.

As I reach forty I find myself happy. Not all of my life is perfect, but is life ever? It is pretty good. I’m in the best health I’ve been since I was a teenager and the best shape of my life. When I look forward it’s with optimism and the feeling that my best years are coming more than they have passed me by. And that is truly I think all I could ask for any day.

My article on Securely Handling User’s Login Credentials is up on Tuts+ Code.

For most websites, you have different areas within it (home page, user profile, admin page, etc.), some of which will be public and others will need to be restricted to only certain users. You often want to uniquely identify users so you can provide customized content or to capture specific information from a user. Many sites also need to protect part of the site, such as an administrative area to maintain and update the content of the site. In a CMS site, some users may be able to create content, but others must approve that content before it is shown to the public.

Read the Rest.

A couple articles/reviews of mine published this week.  First back on Monday a look at what PowerShell for Windows let’s you do on Windows.AppStorm.

Also my first article for Mac.Appstorm reviewing SideEffects, a program that puts color icons back into the sidebar in Finder.

My article on Creating HDR photos with Luminance is up on Windows.AppStorm. A preview:

HDR attempts to compensate for the lesser dynamic range of a camera by taking multiple images that together cover the entire dynamic range of the scene and combining them together to produce a photo that better presents the full dynamic range in the original scene. Many high end graphic processing packages such as Photoshop contain the ability to create HDR images. Other specialty programs designed only to create these images also exist. Creating these images does not require expensive specialized software. Here we’ll look at using the free open source Luminance to produce HDR images.

Read the rest on Windows.AppStorm

Understand that I’m a reader.  I love books, have books, and will often buy a book that looks interesting knowing that I probably won’t be able to get around to reading it for weeks or months.  When I travel I love to find a used bookstore and can spent a couple hours going through and leave with a stack of books so large that they have to be shipped home instead of packing in my luggage.

When I read the news that Borders is expected to file for bankruptcy this week it surprised me then my reaction was largely, “Meh.”  It’s not that I dislike Borders, but honestly I just don’t go there for books that often.  A lot of blame for the demise of Borders is being placed on the “Internet” much like it’s some vague evil force.  In truth I’ll expect in the end management mistakes and being late to get into the online sales routes did most of the work to take Borders down this road.  For me Borders never competed against the Internet.  For me Borders competed against the fact that the nearest store is about an hour’s drive from my house and to be honest if I want a book it’s only about a fifty-fifty chance they’ll have it unless it’s the newest Stephen King or latest hot business book.  Sure they can order it, but I can do that myself from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Books-A-Million and have it at my home in a few days.

In fact since I got a Kindle about a year ago, unless it’s a book I expect to reference certain ways, I’m just as likely to just buy the eBook and have it in a few minutes.  I enjoy the book experience, but I’m finding more the ability to carry an entire library with me anywhere is just too much of a benefit to ignore.  The ability to reference a book any time without having to remember where I’ve stored it means I’m re-visiting books that I’ve already read more than before.  The ability to take time that otherwise felt wasted (waiting on an oil change or at the doctor’s office) and read instead makes me feel more productive and I am getting more read thanks to these small moments.  Now that my phone has a Kindle app, I expect I’ll do this even more and not just when I expect to be waiting.

I don’t think books will go away and I don’t want them too.  The truth is though that a lot of books are read, digested, and then simply shelved or resold.  Something is lost perhaps in the move to eBooks, but I think more will be gained.  I hope the used bookstore with the musty smell and surprise finds never goes away.  I do think that the traditional bookstore will change, but I don’t think that they will all go away.  Some will thought and it appears Borders might be the first.

I tried to watch a recorded screencast yesterday only to keep getting an error that the correct codec wasn’t available.  After some checking I figured out the video had been recorded using GoToMeeting and I did not have that installed on my new machine.  If anyone else ever runs into that problem, you can download the codec at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/codec.