Matt Gemmell released another Markdown writer’s tool, this time a Python-based pre-processor for generating indexes for books: TextIndex.
TextIndex introduces curly braces in some places to mark words (or phrases) for index generation, like in the following example, piggybacking on what looks a bit like footnotes (which would use square brackets) or links:
Most mechanical keyboard firmware{^} supports the use of [key combinations]{^}.
This would put “firmware” and “key combinations” into the index, so that the index will list the page this sentence is printed on for both terms. Simple as that.
From there, it only gets more flexible as you cross-reference related terms, introduce aliases or handle plurals.
I love the simplicity of this. The syntax introduced is purely additive: curly braces are not used in Markdown for anything else, which means you can both process it like TextIndex does without false positives, and strip it with similar confidence without accidentally removing something you want to keep.
Maybe nobody is suprised that the book “Structure and Interpretation of Classic Mechanics” by Sussman & Wisdom contains code that you can put in any old Scheme/Lisp environment to actually represent mechanical equations.
It’s a good time to update my book for Swift 2: guard clauses improve readability, and do-try-catch error handling shows problem points. Protocol extensions are huge, but I had no use for them in the sample code, yet. The update is live now. If you haven’t bought the book in the past, grab it until August 1st to save more than 50%: use the coupon Swift2Yay. The coupon is good for 10 copies, so be quick.
I have just updates the book Exploring Mac App Development Strategies to Swift 1.2. A few sections were expanded, a few paragraphs rewritten – but the big update is still underway. It’s due this summer, and then I’ll consider the book feature-complete. Until then, check out the current deal for Creating Multi-Process Mac Applications, which is available at a discount right now since it’s an early release version.
This weekend, I have just released my book on Mac software architecture. It’s called “Exploring Mac App Development Strategies”. In this book, I discuss how one can adopt practices for designing clean code and use it in spite of Apple’s rather invasive framework suggestions.
Recently, I took a look at my Zettelkasten to see which Zettel notes would make a good next post in the series. I re-discovered plenty of material, no doubt. Still, it occurred to me that there’s a lot of important things which don’t fit well in short blog posts and which neither do well when split into a series of posts.
I talked to my pal Sascha about my concerns who has plenty of experience as a writer. He’s running a thriving German blog about nutrition and healthy lifestyle called ImprovedEating which I can only recommend because of the genuine research he’s providing. His blog is a platform to get feedback for the vast amount of research material for the upcoming book he’s writing for about a year now.
The point is: Sascha is a blogger, a book author and a Zettelkasten user. Without a Zettelkasten, he wouldn’t be able to manage all the material he’s researched so far. Of course I wanted him to give me some feedback.
We considered the vast amount of notes on maintaining a Zettelkasten both of us collected through the years. In the end, we decided to create an information product together, that is: a book.
Thanks to our efficient note-taking method, the book will be available soon for feedback from early adopters. I’m pretty excited about this project and I’ll definitely keep you in the loop!
