The README in general is inspired. It explains perfectly what it does and the issues it has while making it very clear that it was just a fun side project and does so with quite a bit of humour.
It’s a fresh break from those dry READMEs that talk as if their side project will revolutionise they way you use x.
A note for the privacy-conscious: binaries built in debug mode may contain more personally identifiable information, including full paths and names. Looking at his profile page, he does not seem too worried about concealing his identity, but it's just something to keep in mind if you want to release something (pseudo-)anonymously.
Indeed, this information often even makes it into the app store. You can sometimes decompile (or run strings on) an app and see a developer's home directory, for example.
There is a pitch on the Swift forum to encode only the file name in a binary instead of the entire path, or hash it. The OP there makes some points about file size, even.
> Because error handling is boring, and when my wife says "what have you been up to today" there needs to be more for me to say than "well, I wrote this converter".
I want to hire this guy. I need to build a company first.
Somebody recently asked a question on a forum that if you had $100m dollars would you still be coding? I think this project definitely answers the kind of coding I'd be doing :)
>Animated GIFs are converted on a one-frame-per-worksheet basis, so you have to step through the worksheets to animate them. I was originally intending using conditional formatting and iterative calc to display these, but unfortunately the Excel team* seem to have single-threaded the calculation of conditional formatting and it was far too slow to render.
* I used to work on the Excel team so one could argue that this is partly my fault.
This aspect of many Microsoft products is pretty under-appreciated. Many of them are immensely programmable from the outside, and expose pretty decent object models on top of which to write programs. First money I ever made with my coding was writing VBA in MS Access for some warehouse which wanted to keep track of tens of thousands of different train parts. It was so easy I couldn't believe how much I got paid.
Cute, Confirms my experience though.
Conditional Formatting in Excel is a nightmare, they got me excited at first, but I wasted so much time and got so frustrated with them - I gave up and have never used them since.
As the article says performance is abysmal in large spreadsheets, also they do not play well with Excel tables, (which I use a lot) you end up with thousands of CF formulas in tables, they keep breeding and mutating and you cant stop them!
Someone in the demoscene used Excel a while ago to similar effect, although I suspect that wasn't automatically generated: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53021
> Be grateful for what you have.
I loved the FAQ overall. But something about this at the end made me bust out laughing.