Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Also deleted a bunch of code left over from some unrelated exploratory work that was ultimately a dead end since none of it was needed for the solution I eventually got to. I thought I'd already deleted all of that, but I guess not.

Implementing something that I sketched as a redesign and am far enough along in that to see that I do, indeed, like the new design better from a usability perspective. I feel like the new design makes what it is more obvious, shows more information, and saves 1 click per operation for mouse users.

Purchased theater tickets.

Today's coding work was mostly just moving code around to make pieces interact in a way that's nicer, but there was also a case of running into a limit that wasn't in the old version of a dependency (because I wanted to see how bad performance got in a degenerate case [surprisingly not that awful]) and working around that when it may be necessary.

I guess we're having explosions again tonight.

Power came back on at the shop. I arrived just in time for Internet service to also come back.

Closed the shop early. Power outage expected to last through after close so we let a few people buy stuff that doesn't require mains power and waited for people to get tired of sitting in the dark. I'll come back in the evening to do a proper reset for tomorrow morning.

Ran into another case of can't just re-use the old code because it relies on stuff that's been removed in newer versions of a dependency. The required functionality is still there, it just needs to be accessed in a slightly different way.

For any martians wondering where the kaboom is, it's apparently here.

Today's coffee is one that I didn't have any direct involvement in. It's pretty good.

Today's code is another case of taking a step back from the idea I started with and coming up with something better to do instead.

Continuing to make progress with the Typica 2.0 rewrite. Today I'm working on the Batch Details report. To start with this is just minor enhancements over what was in 1.9.1, but I've left myself some notes on what I think could be significant improvements some time after a preview release.

Went back to work on a half finished feature where the first way I wanted to implement it turned out to be non-viable. Deleted the files with code that was never going to work and replaced them with code that is confirmed to be doing what I wanted.

If FedEx really lost a package they wouldn't be sending me a notification from a domain ending in .lol

I suspect that the average age of people using my software skews older anyway (this is at least true of people who have told me in person that they appreciate what I'm doing) so they might even find such things more familiar/intuitive than what I did last time around.

Thinking about UI changes for features that still need to be ported over to a new code base (if I have to rewrite anyway, this is the time to make such changes) and I'm thinking that UI patterns I first encountered on 1980s era Macs might be a more appropriate choice sometimes. Definitely not saying they got everything right, but there's some stuff that's fallen out of favor that maybe shouldn't have. It won't take me long to mock something up and I can decide if I hate it after that.

No cat sightings, but lots of small birds.

Good coding day today. Finished up a feature, tested everything, simplified, retested.

Today there was a big cat hanging out in the back yard.

Helped my mother with some Computering. I'm assuming there are settings I don't know about to tone down all the Apple trying to be helpful but really just getting in the way crap, but it makes me sad. They used to have taste. At least I was able to make it so she'll have an easier time with printing stuff now, but I probably need to spend more time on a current Mac to get more familiar with what settings need changing to make things easier for her. I'll also need that for upcoming sw releases.