After the milestone of ‘shipping’ Thoughts for EPOC 0.01, I decided to take something of a day off for day 10 of my December Adventure, tidy up a few things, and address one or two of the frustrations I’ve encountered on the way. I worked on my website, Thoughts for EPOC, and Reconnect—as one of my readers pointed out, this is starting to look more like a developer diary than a December Adventure, offering a bit of a peek into how I develop and maintain my own little ecosystem of software.

Website Tweaks

Updating my website every day has given me ample opportunity to notice a few rough edges that I wanted to tidy up, focused almost entirely around the symbols and icons I use to identify the different sections of the site.

Support

A couple of months ago, I set up a GitHub Sponsors page and, ever since, I’ve been slowly working out how to talk about it, how to integrate it into my website, and how to make room for one-time services like Buy Me a Coffee. I’m not good at asking for money even though it’s necessary—doing so has always felt somewhat gauche. With that in mind, I’ve tried to surface it in subtle ways. For the time being, I’ve settled on a Support page where I can give a quick overview of what I do and link to places to send me money. To try to gently nudge people towards the page, I’ve added the now-fairly-common heart symbol at the end of the site’s navigation.

The hope is that using a colored symbol instead of text helps it stand out, but also hopefully makes it clear it’s not part of the main content of the site.

I’ve also selected a suitable heart for the 2004 theme from the GNOME 2.8.0 icons I used back in the day. (You can try the theme out yourself by selecting the little paintbrush in the bottom-right of this site.)

I’m really quite pleased how this one turned out.

More Symbols

In the process of adding the heart, and testing it out on my 2004 theme, I noticed I was missing icons for the style guide and drafts sections and, perhaps more importantly to this December Adventure, missing symbols for the pdavision and PsionStyle links on the main theme. So, I ferreted around the GNOME icons for the 2004 theme, and then broke out Inkscape to create a couple of symbols:

Thoughts for EPOC

Tracking Issues

With Thoughts for EPOC growing, I decided it was time to move my task list out of Obsidian and into GitHub Issues (which I much prefer for larger projects). When working with GitHub Issues, I use Taska which offers a great workflow for raising issues and I find makes everything significantly more manageable.

Taska turns GitHub Issues back into a lightweight todo list

Continuous Integration

It turns out I successfully nerd sniped Tom and he updated OpoLua’s OPL compiler to add support for generating AIF files. Needless too say, I immediately had to adopt this and update Toughts to automatically create .app and .aif files using GitHub Actions. 🙏🏻🎉

Reconnect

Writing OPL every day and documenting the process means I’m relying heavily on Reconnect, my plptools-based Psion connectivity suite for macOS. Needless to say, I’ve encountered a few frustrations with it over the past few days, so I took some time to focus on a few quality of life improvements.

Working with SwiftUI always goes slower than I think it should for a declarative UI framework, but I managed to make some progress on improving the file transfer workflow. Specifically, the Transfers window now shows a small magnifying glass alongside downloads allowing you to reveal completed transfers in Finder—a small but significant UX optimization:

The ‘Clear’ button is also new and, just like the Safari downloads popover, clears any completed and cancelled transfers. I’ve also added support for automatically converting files with the .mbm extension, and not just image files with the relevant UID headers.

It’s been surprisingly fun to return to Reconnect and tidy things a little. Given that, I have a few more visual and functional improvements in mind for day 11.