2024 was a bit of meh year for me. A lot of time away from working, which was necessary but a process that I find difficult as I’m at my best when I’m creating. Here’s to 2025!
Two viral blog posts dwarfed all other writing: Emoji history: the missing years (10 May, 15K views) and Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app (10 Aug, 14K views) which heralded the start of me trying other things development-wise. I’ve created macOS and iOS apps using Swift and SwiftUI, tools using Python and Qt, blog extensions using Ruby, text editor extensions using JavaScript, games in Lua for Playdate and PC, and I ended the year writing a game for the Sega Dreamcast.
How many posts?
- 32 posts (down from 40 in 2023)
Most popular posts
According to Google Analytics, my 10 most popular posts in 2024 were (most popular first):
- Emoji history: the missing years (10 May)
- Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app (10 Aug)
- Taking command of the Context Menu in macOS (30 Jul)
- PSA: Internet Archive “glitch” deletes years of user data & accounts (1 Aug)
- Mouse Support for Playdate (11 May)
- This behavior is by design (28 Aug)
- Automating the most annoying aspects of blogging (11 Oct)
- Emigre typography and graphic design magazine (1984–2005) (24 May)
- Interview: Kenta Cho (Japanese indie game developer) (10 Feb)
- A year in the life of a Playdate game developer (7 Mar)
Best of the rest
My personal favourites from the year (most recent first):
- Music recommendations (2024) (31 Dec)
- New 3D Golf Simulation (video game series) (9 Nov)
- Extensions for Nova editor (17 Oct)
- Shibuya Pixel Art Contest 2024 (14 July)
- Adding your own multi-channel audio to Music app (9 May)
- Per-game skins in the Delta classic video game emulator for iOS (18 Apr)
- Barbara Nessim at The Ginza Art Space (1986) (15 Feb)
- JINZO Paint: vintage mobile drawing app (22 Jan)
Blog changelog
- Optimise SASS compile once in plugin rather than header of every page (23 Feb)
- Multi-carousel support (14 Jul)
- Rewrote the main page of my non-blog website (3 Aug)
- Optimised all includes and templates to reduce build time (19 Aug)
- Automatic transformation of local images urls to CDN urls (19 Aug)
- Automatic smart quotes in post titles (19 Aug)
- Improved replacement of “nouns” which are automatically-emphasised words (3 Sep)
- Better YouTube embeds using lite-yt-embed (11 Sep)
- Added OpenSearch to allow searching blog from address bar (15 Sep)
- Created Markdown File Linker to make linking easier (8 Oct)
- Created YAML Tag Picker to make tagging easier (8 Oct)
- Embed Gists using custom gist tag plugin (12 Oct)
- Improved noscript experience (12 Oct)
- Auto-migrate SASS to use its module system (17 Oct)
- Migrate from EasyEngine to Caddy server (1 Dec)