You Can't Subclass UIColor

I lied. You can. But it’s not as straightforward as you might expect.

When implementing an iOS app, there are a lot of classes from UIKit that we can subclass: UIView, UIViewController, UIButton. This is probably familiar to any iOS developer. Some classes aren’t as straightward to subclass. UIColor is one of them, and we’re going to look into why.

Circular References Between Swift and Objective-C

Apple has put a lot of work into making it possible to use Swift and Objective-C in the Same Project without too much hassle. There are still some challenges that arise when working in a mixed codebase.

Some of these challenges arise due to circular dependencies between Swift and Objective-C. I run across some of these situations from time to time, so I thought it might be worth writing them down.

How Burger King Got Me Into Folk Music

It’s probably not too common that a fast food company influences someone’s musical tastes. But that’s just what happened to me. I can trace my current interest in folk music artists such as Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, or The Dubliners, The Clancy Brothers directly to an ad campaign by Burger King.

Heidi and Adelaide, Girls of the Alps

I am unashamedly a big fan of Heidi, the 1881 book by Swiss author Johanna Spyri. I’ve read the book twice, and seen a number of different representations.

In 2010, German researcher Peter Büttner discovered an interesting story written 50 years before Heidi by German author Hermann Adam von Kamp. It is also about a girl who lives with her grandfather in the alps, until she moves away, gets homesick, and eventually returns. He suggests that Spyri may have been inspired by this older story.

This fascinated me, and I had to track down the original text! None of the news articles I found had a link to it, let alone one translated into English. I managed to find a PDF of the Public Domain work, so I took it upon myself to transcribe it into plain text, and put together an English translation:

• Adelaide, the Girl from the Alps - English Translation
• Adelaide, das Mädchen vom Alpengebirge - Original German Transcription

WWDC 2017

This year I got to attend WWDC for the second time!

Here I’m going to try and explain what WWDC is like, what you can expect if you go, and a little bit of what I learned and experienced this year.