20150623 All problems solved!?

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+---
+title: "All problems solved!?"
+date: 2015-06-23T21:47:07-07:00
+date-display: June 23, 2015
+---
+The project I've been working on intermittently over the past month, [`pyonedrive`](https://github.com/zmwangx/pyonedrive), a OneDrive API v1.0 API/CLI client, is now quite satisfactory in terms of its feature set[^1], so today I'm thinking about what I should work on next. Of course there's [a lot more I can do](https://github.com/zmwangx/pyonedrive/labels/enhancement), but what is done already encapsulates 95%+ of my daily usage; moreover, as everyone knows, refining an existing project is not as exciting as starting a new one and making something happen that is previously tedious or impossible.
+
+[^1]: In fact it already exceeded my original expectations — `pyonedrive` started out as a [bare bones batch uploader](https://github.com/zmwangx/pyonedrive/blob/4d21308545ec1462c3892b9ca25300042f1ccb81/README.rst).
+
+To my surprise, *I can't think of anything*. I now realized that I don't have many peculiar computing needs. I needed a storyboard generator which I couldn't find anywhere, [so I wrote one](https://github.com/zmwangx/storyboard), and got an [elegant FFprobe wrapper](https://storyboard.readthedocs.org/en/latest/metadata-cli.html) for free. I hated the crappy CLI shipped with [`python-onedrive`](https://github.com/mk-fg/python-onedrive)[^2] that constantly fails and dumps, so I [rolled my own](https://github.com/zmwangx/pyonedrive) around the new API. In the process of coding up these two things, I learned quite a bit of Python — the kind of things I would never learn by reading tutorials or references alone. Other than these two, I need to interact with a few Web services and scrape a few Web sites, which are easily taken care of in bash/zsh/python (node might better serve some, but they ain't broke, so why rewrite). I also need some other CLI tools but those have been solved by existing projects, probably started by people with similar needs. Some of them need some clean-up and feature boost, e.g., [`you-get`](https://github.com/soimort/you-get), but I'm not inclined to refactor or submit substantial PRs to other people's projects, so I usually just write my own wrappers to bypass their limitations.[^3] What else? Basically nothing.
+
+[^2]: I never bothered to look at the API.
+
+[^3]: E.g., for `you-get`, I wrote a wrapper with concurrency support and much more surrounding `you-get`'s `--url` option. (But honestly, for whatever reason, links provided by `flvcd.com` for Chinese video streaming sites are much better than those parsed by `you-get` in terms of download speed, so these days I almost use `flvcd.com`'s `BigRats` exclusively, except when it similarly can't pick up a reasonable speed, in which case I would grind with my `you-get` wrapper, which was designed exactly for grinding.)
+
+So I'm in a strange situation that I feel like writing software for fun and profit, but don't have anything exciting to lay my hands upon (other than improving existing things). Of course I could learn my next language, but language learning without real world usage is likely to be futile. For instance, I would like to learn some Go or Rust, but why do I need a compiled, C/C++ replacement these days, when scripting takes care of all my personal needs? Not clear. Maybe it's a good time to concentrate on the real important things in my career.
+
+---
+
+Update: Whilst writing this post, I came up with a project after all. I always had the idea of keeping an encrypted journal — real encryption, not the fake "password protection" of DayOne.[^dayone] The journal should be decrypted — probably only into memory — upon entry (after securely typing in password), and each text/image object should be encrypted separately to ease syncing (so using an encrypted sparseimage won't work).
+
+In principle an Emacs package should be able to do this, but going forward Elisp is a pretty horrible choice of language for anything substantial (think of, for example, threading, which there is none). Therefore, I'm inclined to write this in ObjC/Swift with Cocoa. This will be my first attempt at Cocoa programming, and my first serious involvement with Xcode (other than CLT, of course) after quite a few years[^xcode]. Actually I've always been looking for an excuse to learn some Swift.
+
+Oops, am I falling into [prematurely announcing my plans](https://sivers.org/zipit)? Hopefully not.
+
+[^dayone]: And DayOne's Markdown engine sucks, among other limitations, like the ridiculous one-image-per-entry.
+
+[^xcode]: I used to use Xcode as a C++ IDE before I was introduced to the brave new world of command line wizardry.