imageprep, my command line tool for batch-processing picture files, had a big update a week or so back — and now it has another one. With the second update imminent, I didn’t announce the first, 6.1.0, which I released to coincide with my post on writing command line utilities in Swift. That done, it’s time to shout about imageprep 6.2.0.
I’ve spent a lot of time of late working on several macOS command line tools written in Swift. So I’ve gathered together the key points I’ve learned while creating and updating pdfmaker and imageprep: some best practices and ways to deliver many of the features common to programs the run at the command line.
I’ve just posted updates to a couple of applications. Both can be grabbed from my website or installed using Homebrew.
I’ve just released version 6.0.0 of imageprep, my macOS command line tool for processing batches of images. Born a shell script, imageprep has now not only finished school and graduated from college, but also has gained employment as a fully compiled application. It’s written in Swift so it’s quicker these days.
You have to take your hat off to Apple: it knows how to transition from one processor architecture to another, completely incompatible one. It did it in the mid-1990s with the switch from the Motorola 680×0 series to PowerPC, then again a decade or so later when it put Intel inside new Macs. Now we get ARM.
The package manager I use on macOS is Homebrew, Brew for short. This is a great open source tool for installing command-line apps and utilities, and keeping them up to date. It’s essentially the Mac version of the Raspberry Pi’s apt. So much of the software I use on a regular basis — the nano text editor, Node.js, Python 3, the shellcheck shell script linter, the hugo website builder, the sass CSS wrangler and a whole load more — were added and are maintained using Brew.
Another day, another update. This time it’s PreviewMarkdown, my macOS utility for providing QuickLook file previews and icon thumbnails in Finder. It runs under Catalina and above, and this version makes some adjustments to support Big Sur.
You can read more about using PreviewMarkdown — just run it once to register its app extensions, and that’s it — it the product page here. You can download PreviewMarkdown from the Mac App Store.
The latest version of MNU, 1.4.0, can be downloaded from my software site. The focus of this update is to support the changes brought in by Big Sur’s updated, iOS-esque UI: in this case, no more roll-down sheets, and iOS-style dialogs and square icons.
I’ve been messing around with the I²C Mini from Excamera Labs for a week or so. It’s a tiny, 19x19mm I²C breakout designed to to let you connect a wide array of components — displays, sensors, controls and such — to your computer.
smittytone messes with micros 