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weichselon Apple workers deserve iDorms as good as the technology

Olivetti had a work & live campus, starting in the 50s of the last century: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/t-magazine/olivetti-typew...

weichselon Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

Over the years I created several released and unreleased tools to scratch my own itches.

Software: Swift library to read and modify ZIP archives: https://peakstep.com/claquette/ Screen recording/video/GIF creation app for macOS: https://github.com/weichsel/ZIPFoundation A small CMS to maintain my websites (unreleased)

Hardware: A Time Machine compatible NAS based on a Raspberry PI (PoE powered, 3D printed mountable enclosure)

weichselon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://thomas.zoechling.me/journal/

I mainly write about developing for the Apple ecosystem in general and Swift development in particular.

weichselon Ask HN: Are there legal limits for filename extensions for proprietary software?

Hi, I am one of the engineers working on MindNode. We don’t register MindNode as the owner of “md”, but as an app that can open and save to this file type. If we don’t do this we are unable to import and export Markdown files. You can change the default app anytime in Finder by using “Get Info (cmd+i)” and choose an app in the “Open with:” section of the Info window. If you need further assistance, please contact us via "Send us an Email" on https://www.mindnode.com/support

weichselon Apple’s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 15

If you are still looking for a pure Swift ZIP handling library, you can check out ZIPFoundation: https://github.com/weichsel/ZIPFoundation

weichselon Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?

Wrote an implementation of the ZIP specification in Swift: https://github.com/weichsel/ZIPFoundation Main motivation back then was a side project of mine, but since I open sourced the library, the project is also well received by the iOS and server-side Swift community.

weichselon Ask HN: What are you working on?

A long running side project of mine is a lightweight GIF & video utility for the Mac: https://www.peakstep.com/claquette/ It can perform a handful of often-needed video tasks like cropping, trimming or re-encoding.

It is a fully native Mac app that also comes with a nice screen recording tool to record either the Mac's screen or iOS devices connected via Lightning cable.

weichselon Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

Finished and released the 2.0 version my Mac video utility Claquette. It steps in where QuickTime Player is too basic and using video editing software like Final Cut is too cumbersome: https://www.peakstep.com/claquette/

weichselon Show your projects in motion with animated GIFs

This is an interesting blog post about creating high quality Animated GIFs with ScreenFlow: https://framer.com/blog/posts/how-to-create-high-quality-gif...

weichselon Show your projects in motion with animated GIFs

While Animated GIFs are very inefficient by todays standards, they still have several advantages over all modern video formats:

  - GIF lacks audio support so it's guaranteed to be silent
  - The crappy compression forces creators to keep their clips short
  - GIFs can often be uploaded/attached on platforms that only support images but no video for some reason 
    (like GitHub issues for instance)

Some of those features are actually limitations but IMO there are a lot of use cases for a format that sits between still images and full blown video.

I maintain a screen recording app for macOS that has a very efficient aGIF exporter: https://www.peakstep.com/claquette/

The GIFs on the product page are between 130 and 400 KB.

weichselon Ask HN: What are you currently self hosting?

- Exim, MTA (https://www.exim.org)

- Dovecot, MDA (https://www.dovecot.org)

- Nginx, HTTP(2) Server (https://nginx.org)

- Gogs, Git service (https://gogs.io)

- Coldsweat, RSS aggregator (https://github.com/passiomatic/coldsweat)

weichselon RSS is undead

I am also still using RSS - Preferably consumed via well-made, native apps on macOS and iOS. Since Google Reader went down, I am using the self-hosted Coldsweat: https://github.com/passiomatic/coldsweat. It provides a web based aggregator but also can be used to sync native clients.

weichselon Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

I open sourced a ZIP library written in Swift for macOS/iOS/tvOS/watchOS and Linux: https://github.com/weichsel/ZIPFoundation and wrote an article about it here: https://thomas.zoechling.me/journal/

Also improved my Mac app to record and export Animated GIFs: https://itunes.apple.com/app/claquette-animated-screenshots/...

weichselon Show HN: ZIP Foundation – A libcompression-based Swift framework for ZIP files

I wrote an accompanying blog post about the performance characteristics of the framework here: https://thomas.zoechling.me/journal/2017/07/ZIPFoundation.ht...

weichselon Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

I added an animated GIF exporter to my lossless screen recorder Claquette (macOS, https://www.peakstep.com/claquette). The project got some traction when Apple featured me in the Mac App Store this August. It also entered the Product Hunt front page and finished in the top 3 on launch day. Revenue is nothing spectacular, but it's a nice additional income.