Sam Soffes

I sat down to work on Whiskey the other day and go super side tracked. I have this new master plan to greatly improve Whiskey's markdown parsing, but it's a lot of work so I started procrastiworking. I noticed some bugs in SyntaxKit, what I wrote so Whiskey can do code coloring for things other than Markdown, and decided to start fixing them. Because I was procrastiworking, the logical first step was to rewrite it in Swift 2 :)

Since this isn't terribly specific to Whiskey, I decided to open source SyntaxKit. It makes TextMate-style syntax highlighting easy. It works on iOS & OS X. There aren't any dependencies besides system frameworks. Boom.

Carthage is the recommended way to install SyntaxKit. Add the following to your Cartfile:

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Value types are one of my favorite things in Swift. At first, I was resistant. It’s a much different way of thinking. Let’s look at a simple example that really shows the power.

I was recently working on a little control for entering in numbers on Apple Watch. Here's the code:

It's really straight forward. There's a little bit of math to insert or delete numbers. It's not bad though. Here's how you use it:

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Yesterday, Redacted for Mac hit the App Store. It's this little app I've been working on here and there to quickly hide parts of an image. Here's a one minute video demo if you want the quick rundown.

All I did was tweet the video about it a few days before it came out and then tweeted that it was out early the morning it was ready. Someone else submitted it to Product Hunt after seeing my tweet. The results were pretty shocking!

For launch, the price was $4.99. I may play with that some over time. I was originally thinking $2.99 and a bunch of folks on Twitter said $4.99 was better. Anyway, Redacted was #8 top paid in the US and #1 top paid in Graphics at the end of launch day. It was also at the top of Product Hunt with 538 up votes! Wow!

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Recently, I replaced the headphones I've had for a long time with some new ones. I've used Beyerdynamic DT 770 for years (now discontinued). On a flight last year, someone leaned the chair back in front of me suddenly, the cable got caught, and the jack bent really bad. They cut in out a lot. I realize I could just replace the jack, but I thought it was a good excuse to go nuts.

My whole setup with new headphones, case, DAC, preamp, and cables was a little under $400 (half for the headphones and half for all of the toys). You could definitely just get the headphones for $200.

If you're looking for something on the cheap, I recommend a pair of Sony MDR7506. Standard issue studio headphones. Can't go wrong for only $70.

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I spent awhile today trying to convert a regular expression from Ruby to NSRegularExpression. It was being dumb and took me awhile to figure it out.

The main this is NSRegularExpression's options. By default Ruby, has AnchorsMatchLines on and NSRegularExpression doesn't. I simply turned that on and had good luck.

Here's my specific case (Jekyll front-matter):

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