Up and running!

Although I registered with GitHub nearly two years ago, it was only today that I started using it. I’ve been rummaging around with both blogging and programming for many years without any great sense of direction; but the conjunction of three things has led to this blog.

The first thing was the need to write my first proper OSX app (of which more, perhaps, in a later post), happened to come shortly after Apple introduced the Swift programming language in the Summer of 2014. As a consequence Swift was a natural choice for writing the app.

The second thing was accidentally coming across GitHub Pages and Jekyll - a simple way of publishing static web pages, particularly blogs.

The third thing was receiving a Christmas gift of a blink(1) - a programable twin LED mounted on a USB connector. This comes with much open source software and classes for various programming languages, but doesn’t yet have anything in Swift. Now I know that Swift is specifically designed to link easily with Objective-C modules (and therefore with the C modules provided), but the devil in me wants to write as much as possible in Swift.

Putting all these things together meant “I’m going to try and write a Swift class/module/library (I’m always a bit sketchy about terminology) to control my blink(1) and I’m going to blog on my progress in GitHub Pages using Jekyll”.

I had one or two false starts, but I then found this wonderful post from Barry Clark, which I followed absolutely - this is the result.

Posted in Blogging with : Jekyll, GitHub Pages, Swift, Objective-C, blink(1)