www.Vanille.de – Blog

For quite a while now, every screenshot of my iPhone went through a little shell script called iphone-screenshot.

I’ve been spending the last couple of days on my forthcoming app Vehicle, M.D., the completely new successor to my popular OBD2 Expert, and recently I got distracted by the pictures in its garage.

True readers of this column may remember the previous installment — all 66 words of it, written in February 2020, a few weeks before the world went sideways.

A note for my international readers: this post is in german, because the book is — eight short stories of the fantastic, out now as paperback and ebook (amazon.de, but the ebook travels).

I recently made the mistake of asking GitHub and GitLab what I had worked on during the previous twelve months.

The iOS Simulator is a wonderfully fast place to build an app — right up to the moment the app needs something that belongs to the physical world.

Some tools begin with a roadmap.

Some years ago, over the course of a weekend, a big public internet radio provider went offline — and with it, a major part of my hand-curated directory broke.

There is a short list of apps every developer is contractually obliged to build at least once: a to-do list, a Markdown editor, a podcast player, and — the final boss of clichés — a weather app.

I have been polishing Wellenreiter — my streaming-radio app for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and CarPlay (and the successor of Volksradio, which some of you might remember — “only a bare minimum of features, but those supersolid” was the plan back in 2015, and it…

Scanning a barcode is the happy path.

I’m late with this one, I know: at the end of 2023 Dream Property GmbH, the company that made the Dreambox, went into liquidation, and I never wrote down what I think about it.

Something has changed for me at the bench in the last few weeks, and I want to write it down before it stops feeling new.

In October 2020 I wrote that I had decided to go all-in on Swift.

I have been writing a macOS userspace driver for a CAN bus adapter.

For a while, Bluetooth Low Energy in the iOS Simulator was one of those things that half-worked often enough to be useful.

CANcorder, my CAN bus logger and analyzer, is built with Tauri 2 and React 19.

I’ve spent the last couple of days optimizing the iPhone companion app for CANcorder (forthcoming), my CAN bus logger and analyzer.

This website has been running on Lektor, a Python-based static site generator created by Armin Ronacher (of Flask fame), since I moved away from WordPress back in 2019.

For the last couple of months I have been spending more time on the Linux side of my automotive setup again.

Back in 2016 I fell deep into the rabbit hole of automotive diagnostics (long-time readers may remember OBD2 Expert).

True readers of this column know how much I adore the C64 sound aesthetics — I’ve been going on about it in previous installments more than once.

Long before the endless scroll of release notes and automatic updates, software came packaged in physical media: floppies, CDs, DVDs.

I learned C++ in the late 1990s, back then with Microsoft’s Visual Studio C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes (and, as documented in 2000, lost the occasional saturday to a stray ==).

When activating an Apple Watch eSIM, the process is usually pretty straightforward.

Converting an existing Objective-C/Swift framework to Swift Package Manager I’m a big fan of the database library YapDatabase, which is a collection/key/value store for macOS, iOS, tvOS & watchOS.

While I never got much into natural languages (beyond my native tounge, a halfway solid english, and some bits and pieces of french), I have always been fascinated by (some) programming languages – I even wrote books about some of them.

For some years now, I have been feeling like Don Quixote fighting against windmills.

Here’s the new decade. 2019 went by as an important year where I regained some of my health, discipline, and motivation.

I’m enjoying creating music since 1981.

When I started this blog in 1999, it contained mostly personal stuff.

As promised in the previous installment of this column, I have now imported all my old blog posts from Wordpress.

Every five to six years I’m revamping my website.

And another year has passed – pretty quickly, if you ask me.

Once and then I try to sneak work on my pet projects into my daily routine.

Salut!

For the 10th anniversary since the legendary OpenMoko announcement at the “Open Source in Mobile” (7th of November 2006 in Amsterdam), I’ve been meaning to write an anthology or – as Paul Fertser suggested on #openmoko-cdevel – an obituary.

In the good tradition about writing a blog post on my way back from a FOSDEM (see earlier installments e.g. for 2012, 2010, 2008, and 2007), here is this year’s take.

‘Tis the season to let the year pass by and make plans for the next one. 2015 was what I’d call a “transitioning” year.

I’m absolutely relying on working with issue trackers for managing features, bugs, and releases.

Hi fellow readers, this time we’re talking music.

After the outage of the VM where freesmartphone.org has been hosted on, we are now almost fully back.

This is a post about the state of Sid-, Mod, or PokeyPlayer on iOS.

Thanks to the fabulous wayback machine, I have imported my blog from between 1999 and 2006.

I have pondered a long time whether to learn web programming for my customers’ services app, so that they can access their user & device statistics, crash logs, manage service messages, push messages, etc.

After 6 years being co-director and CTO of LaTe App-Developers, I feel it is time to make some changes.

Every 6 years or so I’m revamping my website.

So 2013 is finally over and it’s been an energy-sapping year, business-, baby-, and building wise.

Salut!

Hi folks!