I was hoping to do a dev log this past weekend, but my progress slowed down, and I wasn’t in the mood to write what I wanted to write until today. If you follow me on Twitter, there is only a minor update from what you’ve already seen.
Thank you to everyone who reached out and checked in on me when I seemingly vanished offline. It truly means a lot to know that others are thinking of me.
A few words about my dog, Cocoa
This past weekend, my wife and I said goodbye to our black lab, Cocoa. He was roughly 15 years old, although because he was a shelter dog, we only knew he was around 5 or 6 months old when I adopted him on January 9, 2006.
He was named after the project I was passionately working on at the time: an experimental attempt at writing a Cocoa runtime for REALbasic written in REALbasic itself. It was actually my wife’s idea to name him that, despite him not being a chocolate lab. He never cared, of course.
As someone who has worked from home since 2008, Cocoa has been a constant companion of mine. He would regularly be lying near me while I worked. A couple of years ago, he started not being able to make it up-and-down the stairs; he’d sometimes miss a step and fall. My response was to move my office downstairs so that he’d not be alone all day. I even started sleeping on the couch some nights to be with him. Sadly, there was a continued decline in his health after that.
I’m at peace, but it’s still such a strange feeling having an empty house. I am looking forward to resuming streaming on Twitch. I’m not quite ready yet, but based on how I’m feeling today, I am pretty confident I’ll be ready for some streams next week.
User Interface Updates to Kludgine
In the meantime, I’ve tackled a few small things for Kludgine, including adding support for modal dialogs and toasts, adding a scroll component, and I’ve been slowly making progress on a List component. These are some of the final building blocks that feel “fundamental” to designing a full-featured user interface. Sure, I need individual components such as sliders and checkboxes, but those are easy problems to solve. Lists require scrolling a grid layout, but a checkbox needs no external components.
I might create a UI framework overview video when I’m done with the next chunk of work. Each little accomplishment never felt video-worthy, but once I have the new UI example I’m working on creating, it will showcase the framework’s ease-of-use and flexibility. That would be a good topic to create a video showcasing.
Thanksgiving
Thank you to everyone who has offered their kind words and condolences. As someone who doesn’t have children, Cocoa was as close to a child as I’ve ever known.
My next update will probably be after Thanksgiving, so I’ll take this time to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. I know for many that it will be trying not to spend time with family due to the rising COVID rates. But, the positive vaccine news makes me hope that next Thanksgiving will be almost back to normal.
Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US. And to everyone, I’m thankful to have you reading about me, Cocoa, and my projects.
Until next time.