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Xcrypt v2.0 is Live

I should've mentioned in the last post: Xcrypt v2.0 is live! You can acquire it from unluckycricketgames.com/software.html It's rich with features compared to the first version and it's much easier to use. Encryption is faster, the user has more options for customizing their experience, and it's streamlined. Also, by a happy accident, I made Xcrypt slimmer, even though I expected it to be a little bit bigger. If I recall correctly, it was about 20KB smaller, which may not seem like a lot in this era of HDDs that hold numerous terabytes, but when it comes to an application that runs entirely in the console without any graphics, audio, or other form of media, 20KB is a lot, considering all of that is coming from compiled code. That means less code to achieve the same thing, which means faster execution, though with modern-day processors, that difference will be impossible to notice to our eyes. What won't be impossible to notice, though, is the increase in speed due
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Wrapping Up--Full Tutorial Series

As the internship comes to a close, I've got one last project to wrap up: the full tutorial series for integrating the AdAdapted SDK into an iOS application. All of the video capture is done and all that remains is to record the voice-over and edit the clips. There's not a lot of heavy editing, so I'm not expecting that part to take very long. It's been a wild time. I've learned how to use Android Studio, I learned basics of Swift and Xcode and made an app in Android Studio and Xcode. I've learned a ton and it's been a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to finishing up this project to have a very tangible thing to point at and say, "Look at what I made for this company."
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iOS App Update (& No More Popping!)

At AdAdapted today, I finished the functionality of my example app I'm making for iOS, into which I will integrate their SDK. It was fairly frustrating as I'm new to Xcode and Swift and I was running into problems I felt I shouldn't have been having, but it's finished now, so I'm happy about that. Now, I have to integrate their SDK. It seems fairly straight forward and like there's actually less project preparation involved compared to the Android version, and I expected the Android version to be easier. However, now that I've said that, I'm sure I'll find some roadblock that will take me days to get past. In other news, I perfected my smoothing algorithms for my little side project that produces sound files entirely programmatically. It's smooth as butter and quite a joy to listen to.
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Xcrypt is Nearly Done

Again, since nothing's new at AdAdapted, I'll share some of my spare-time programming ventures. Xcrypt, my encryption software, is nearly finished (again). I'm hoping to push out the new version this weekend, and it has a load of new features that weren't in the original, my favorite of which being support for multi-core CPUs. Xcrypt can now utilize more cores and it allows the user to specify how many cores it can use. The interface for Xcrypt is also vastly improved, with better organization, presentation, and the ability to track any number of processes at a given time. In Xcrypt, every potentially time-intensive operation is timed and the time taken to do it is reported at the end of the process' lifetime. In the previous iteration, if a process started, it was the only one that could be recorded. Now, times can be reported for any number of processes as they're completed. Xcrypt also handles its encryptions much more differently. Less burden is put on t
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Fun With Waves

Since I'm still working on the iOS app at AdAdapted, not much has changed on that front. In other news, though, I have started playing around with audio programming in my spare time. It's a lot of fun, if not frustrating at times. I've gotten it down to where I can program entire songs with relative ease and let my data-writing algorithms handle any music I throw at it. I've gotten the audio pretty clean, but there are still some artifacts that I don't like. Because I'm writing the sin waves that represent the musical notes programatically, they're written immediately at maximum volume, which produces are small popping sound because of the rapid change in air pressure. Now, I've written some algorithms that clean this up by introducing fades, but it's not perfect. If I'm mastering multiple tracks, some pops still remain, but I can't tell what's allowing them to stay. They should be gone, but they're just not. Most curious. It's
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Passed the Google Analytics Exam!

For my internship, I needed to earn a certification and about six weeks ago, I chose to earn the Google Analytics exam. Today, I passed the exam! I've spent the past six weeks lazily studying for it, but this week I really pumped out the last handful of videos in the Google Analytics academy. I finished the exam a few minutes ago, and now I have the certification! Success!
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Catch-up (Pt. 4 of 4)

For iOS development, it used to be you had to learn Objective-C. If you've never coded in the more traditional C languages, Obj-C looks like an absolutely horrendous syntactical mess. It's littered with characters that have absolutely no intuitive justification, and the fact that it's a hybrid language doesn't help the messiness. Obj-C, like C++, is a PPL that was modified over time to include aspects of OOP. I've never liked languages like this, as they tend to resemble a garbled, messy mixture of two fundamentally different things, somehow co-existing. But, maybe I'm a little biased, having learned object-oriented programming by coding in purely object-oriented languages (my favorite's C#, in case you were wondering). I digress, you no longer have to learn Obj-C to develop for iOS/macOS. Now there's a magical language developed by Apple called Swift, that doesn't look extremely messy and includes some pretty neat features. To me, Swift looks like R
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