2019-04-23 ISO date on macOS

To print the current date in ISO 8601 format on macOS:

  $ date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S
  2019-04-23T14:44:46

To print it with the timezone information, append %z.

  $ date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z
  2019-04-23T14:44:42+0200

Note that in the last case, you're missing the colon in the timezone bit. To correct this, we'll need to do some bash wizardry:

  $ zone=$(date +%z);datetime=$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S); echo $datetime${zone:0:3}:${zone:3:2}
  2019-04-23T14:44:42+02:00

2018-12-29 Firefox extensions I can not live without

My current list of Firefox extensions on my Mac is as follows:

• Dark Reader
• Disable WebRTC
• I don't care about cookies
• uBlock Origin

Plus I use the Shadowfox to style Firefox a bit more to the liking of macOS Mojave's Dark theme.

And finally to fit things in perfectly, put this bit in your userChrome.css to move the tabbar close button to the left:

    .tabbrowser-tab .tab-close-button {
        display:-moz-box!important;
        -moz-box-ordinal-group:0!important;
        margin-right:3px!important;
    }

2018-08-27 Two useful Xcode shortcut keys

I found out about two extremely useful Xcode shortcut keys: Ctrl+Cmd+[ or ] to cycle through the active target, and Ctrl+Option+Cmd+[ or ] to cycle through devices.

2018-05-15 Non-existing dates

One William Woodruff wrote a blog entry in 2015 about non-existing dates: https://blog.yossarian.net/2015/06/09/Dates-That-Dont-Exist

I'm sad to say that Foundation allows you to construct these supposedly illegal Gregorian dates :(

    import Foundation

    var dateComponents = DateComponents()
    dateComponents.day = 6
    dateComponents.month = 10
    dateComponents.year = 1582
    dateComponents.timeZone = TimeZone(abbreviation: "UTC")

    if let date = Calendar(identifier: .gregorian).date(from: dateComponents) {
        print(date)
    } else {
        print("Not a date")
    }

The above Swift code can be pasted into a playground. Supposedly, it shouldn't print the date but it does. This is a pretty obscure corner case of course.

2018-03-16 overview of font sizes when using Dynamic Type

If you want to support Dynamic Type in your iOS app, and I think you should, then one possible route is to roughly map the built-in text styles to the point sizes that your design specifies. The following page on the Apple website lists all text styles along with their point size:

https://developer.apple.com/ios/human-interface-guidelines/visual-design/typography/