Grammerjack

After weeks of research and thought, I bought a iPad Pro 12.9" 3rd Generation. My impressions, based on a week's use: It's too expensive, especially once you include the pencil and keyboard case. It's a significant improvement over the 1st generation iPad Pro 12.9". It's physically much smaller. The new keyboard is nicer. The new pencil's magnetic charger makes it much more useful than before, because now it's always charged when I want to use it. Flaws The magnets holding the pencil to the iPad are too weak. It's easy to knock the pencil off the edge of the iPad when picking it up or carrying it. When the keyboard case is folded back, your hands touch the keys. This feels weird at first. The hardware is held back by iOS 12 and Apple App Store limitations. FWIW I think for most people the ordinary 2018 iPad, with a Logitech Crayon, would be a better purchase. But I do enjoy using it!

Botanicula is a whimsical graphical adventure game for the iPad and other computers. One of the puzzles near the end of the game requires a bit of thinking to solve. When I came upon it, after a couple of hours of play, I was too tired to think. So I wrote some code to brute-force the solution. I'm unreasonably pleased that it worked the first time. Here's the code, cleaned up and commented:

The Computer History Museum Oral Histories are a wonderful project. They are deep, long, interviews with many different programmers. Lots of never-before-made-public details about important projects. For example, this oral history by Oral History of Kenneth Kocienda and Richard Williamson goes into details of how iOS was designed: Or if you prefer PDFs: Oral History Part 1 Oral History Part 2 One of the interesting things I found out was that there was an attempt to use HTML/Web APIs to write iPhone apps, and that for the first two or three iOS releases some of the apps, including the Stocks and Weather apps were implemented as HTML/Web apps.