Connected Again

As of last night, it had been two weeks since I had heard from my programming/study partner.  That was the Monday right before the election.  Between his interview scheduled on Wednesday and the results of the election, I figured he might be struggling and needing to regroup, so I let him know I was here when he was ready to reach out and to take care of himself.  I finally checked on him again via text to ask for proof of life and again let him know I was here for him.  He called me right back and, as I suspected, he was really hurting after the election results.  We chatted for a while and then agreed to work together tonight.  

After I got totally sidetracked the previous weekend tracking down an Apple bug, I made relatively slow but steady progress through the following week and weekend.  I am currently on day 40 of 100 Days of SwiftUI.  While way behind my original schedule, I have made some solid progress.  I especially like my resulting Word Scramble game, project 6.  

I made a great many tweaks, along the way and really have just one more major bug to resolve.  I generate all possible words that are makable from the source word with length 3-8.  I then run that list through Apple's UITextChecker() to determine actual legitimate English words.  This can take a couple of seconds at the start of every new game.  I need to make sure that happens completely in the background so I don't block the main thread.  Also, for the record one more time, UITextChecker() sucks.  It is reasonably fast, but it is really really bad at doing its one purpose, determining if a word is an actual word.

Anyway, after Word Scramble, I had great fun with the animation module.  SwiftUI is pretty amazing at generating some truly attractive effects with very little code and Paul Hudson does a great job highlighting that strength.

(LU6)