BJ Homer

In 1838, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued the “Extermination Order” in response to rising tensions between incoming Mormon settlers and local residents. It read, in part: The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace. The order authorized violent force in removing Mormons…

The Feb 2019 update to Civilization VI added support for multiplayer “Play by Cloud” games. These are long-running asynchronous games where the save file lives on the cloud and everyone take their turn when it comes up. It’s useful to be notified when it’s your turn to keep the game moving. Steam has desktop notifications…

App developers are increasingly turning to subscriptions to build a sustainable business model. This is understandable; the economics of a one-time-purchase business model favor short-lived apps and games, but building a high-quality app requires ongoing revenue. However, many consumers are feeling “subscription fatigue”. Each subscription may seem reasonable on its own, but subscriptions add up…

Confused about the “Brexit” situation? Here’s how it might go down if the United States were actually the United Kingdom. The Tea Party hates being part of the European Union because they have to pay a bunch of money, the EU gets to make some laws that affect the US, and immigrants can come in…

Update: As of Swift 4, this is supported natively. Just do this: That’s it! Objective-C developers learning Swift often wonder how to represent something like UIViewController. The simple answer is that there’s currently no way to directly represent that construct in Swift as of Swift 2.2. However, it’s possible to work around it fairly easily…

In my mind, these are biggest developer-facing announcements to come out of WWDC 2015: iPad Multitasking UI Testing and Code Coverage in Xcode 7 Swift 2 Swift as an Open-Source language App Thinning Watch OS 2.0 with on-device apps CloudKit Web Services Free iOS provisioning Note that these aren’t changes in the SDK itself. Developers…

Preview: I figured out how to define modules for static libraries, so you can import them into Swift or into other module-defining frameworks. This solves a common build error: “include of non-modular header inside framework module“, as it allows you to turn that non-modular header into a modular one. You just have to define a…

I recently came across this question on Twitter: Hey #swiftlang peeps: How do you create an var that holds an immutable Array? As in a var that you can assign different immutable Arrays to?— Mike R. Manzano (@bffmike) October 17, 2014 This is an interesting question. As a developer coming from Objective-C and the Cocoa…

So, you’ve got an NSScrollView, and you want to add some content that is sized via auto layout constraints. Perhaps you found the “Auto Layout by Example” documentation in the Mac developer library, and discovered that though it contains a section titled Using Scroll Views with Auto Layout, the example is actually for UIScrollView, not NSScrollView.…

A couple weeks ago, my brother was married in the temple in Bountiful, Utah. Temples are an important part of my beliefs as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, so I thought I’d take some time to explain what they’re about and answer some common questions. First, though, a brief…