Chen's blog
Swift, SwiftUI, tooling, app architecture, and the small product details that make software feel considered.
Most of us have a rough mental model of what a library and a framework are. This post lays out the basics — not every byte, just enough to be useful. I covered the broader compile process in Build Process …
A programming language goes through roughly five stages on its way to a running program, each with its own tool: Preprocessor Compiler Assembler Linker …
I saw something making the rounds in the dev community recently, so I built a small tool — a quick way to consolidate a few Cocoa-app features I’d …
Launching at login is one of the most common features for a Cocoa app — especially the menu-bar utilities that are meant to be always-on. Let’s walk …
Menu-only apps are one of the most common patterns in Cocoa-land. They don’t take up a spot in your Dock, they don’t get in the way when …
Evernote runs a separate account system in China — Yinxiangbiji (印象笔记) — and last year the team there spun off entirely. But the Safari Web Clipper is …
NSView is the most basic building block in Cocoa — the foundation of every Mac app’s view hierarchy, exactly like UIView is for iOS. But the …
All diagrams in this post are from the book RxSwift - Reactive Programming with Swift. In the Rx world, a Subject is something that’s both an …
Background I’ve been working on a small Mac app that runs an AppleScript to pull data out of OmniFocus and visualize it. Problem: it kept coming back …
Update — 2019-01-29 First thing this morning, the moment I plugged into the office network the download rate shot up to 600 KB/s. Sure enough, it was that …