TOKYO (Tom Bluewater) – I heard a few weeks ago that it was extremely hot in Paris. It’s been unusually cool here. The highest temperature has been around 22 celsius (or 71.6 fahrenheit) for the past one week or two. It may be even cooler than Anchorage, Alaska. I haven’t seen a sunny afternoon for a while, though.

macOS gives software developers a great tool in storing and retrieving data. The SQLite library allows them to programmatically create a database. The question is how do they read the database that their app has created. FireSQLView 2 is an essential tool in reading the content of an SQLite database table. If you have a record with a field containing blob data and another with its data size, FireSQLView 2 even lets you see the data content as a picture.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (Tom Bluewater) – The CodeBlue series is the software title that I use most frequently. Unfortunately, the last release, CodeBlue 3, is bug-infested. One of the most serious bug is that it will be driven to crash after you list code snippet titles many times. And its within-code search isn’t so reliable. So I’ve decided to work on a major overhaul with CodeBlue. Finally, I submitted CodeBlue 4 to Mac App Store several minutes ago.

We live in a confusing world where there are many different programming languages to develop software. Even when you work with the same language for several years, things can change from time to time. Take Swift as a programming language for example. We have seen so many deprecated classes although it’s been around for just four years as of July, 2019. The way you deal with the NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver classes are different since iOS 11 was introduced. And Cocoa and UIKit don’t share all the same classes. So you probably want a bank system where you can keep track of your programming code snippets under different groups.

CodeBlue 4 (hereafter, CodeBlue) offers one of those centralized systems to which you can go back and find an important chunk of code you have written in the past. It is now more than six years old. And this major release is No. 4. It’s been designed such that you can classify code snippets into different groups.

If you have used CodeBlue before, there have been some changes since the last major release. For example, you can now run a search with up to three keywords in order to find what you are looking for. Secondly, you can highlight the title of an important code snippet with three different color levels to choose from.   Continue reading →