Parsing Cause

After a great deal of stalling, I've begun the updates to "A Swift Kickstart". You can buy it now if you want, the update will be free.

What was I doing while stalling?

I was looking into changing my tools.

I've been a big fan of Panic's Coda and use that to write and edit my books, teaching materials, and websites but it is coming to the end of its life as Panic prepares to introduce Nova.

The announcement of Nova made me assume that it was being released earlier than it apparently is. They showed screenshots in March 2019 and have been in beta since November of last year with an announced release of 2020.

I know it's still 2020 but with no other announcements I've begun to get antsy. I don't want to be changing toolsets in the middle of a project. (Their response when I tweeted this was to stress the value of patience. I'm a pretty patient dude but it's easier when you have a rough idea of how long you need to be patient for.)

So I played with writing my own tools and learned about Parser Combinators and probably have a good chunk of a tool I may use to create the slides for my videos at some point (not now - I need to ship something first).

I've updated my CSS to support night mode and dark mode (supporting night mode for Books has been a problem as Apple Books has no documentation on it and I'm not sure if the gist I found on line will continue to be supported. App developers complaining about the 30% they pay should have to sell Books on Apple platforms and still give 30% and not get simple answers to how to support Night Mode in a book. But I digress.)

I've started updating the actual content and the first bit of business is the change of tools from Apple. My book supports Xcode Playgrounds for those who want to code on a Mac and Swift Playgrounds for those who want to code on their iPad.

Now Swift Playgrounds are also available on the Mac.

I've switched up my instructions to get going but I currently still prefer using Xcode Playgrounds on the Mac. It may just be what I'm used to.

On the other hand, installing the code for Swift Playgrounds is a lot easier for the reader.

For now I'll present both options.

I'll also keep you up to date on this rewrite.