Month: October 2025

Archiving old course materials

Returning back to this post from two years ago, I am archiving here the course material which was last updated in March 1999. Course was on programming a multiple document interface Windows app with C.

The material, written as a short booklet, instructs the student to implement, step by step, an app to draw simple shapes. The app also uses components as the drawing code is placed in a dynamic library (dll).

The material ends at the point the app can be used to draw simple lines in multiple windows.

Students are supposed to extend the functionality to draw other simple shapes, filled or not, and saving and reading the drawings to/from files.

Unfortunately I think I’ve lost the code and the .doc file for this material. Don’t even have a Windows PC anymore so… Could try out if the code still works, using Windows in virtual machine on my Mac. Would this still be compatible with current Windows API:s, don’t know.

OhjelmointiympäristöDownload

Slippery Weather watchOS app retired

Years ago I developed a watchOS app Slippery Weather (Liukkaat kadut in Finnish) displaying pedestrian slippery weather alerts to users. I sold it at the App Store, and later lowered the price to zero, offering it as a free app.

Slippery weather app on Apple Watch
Apple Watch displaying an alert in a Slippery Weather app widget about slippery weather notification given two hours ago in the city of Oulu.

However, I didn’t have time to maintain it, so I took it off the App Store recently. That was a good decision, since I’ve now learned that the service providing the alerts API has ceased to operate.

The service got the slippery weather condition alerts from the participating cities (road maintenance folks) in Finland. It seems that the cities have switched to using Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) weather model based alerts instead.

I do have a prototype watchOS app using Apple Weather service local weather data. The prototype attempts to predict slippery weather for the next 12-24 hours, based on recent and forecasted temperature, precipitation and humidity. But haven’t had time to work on that either. Doesn’t work so reliably that I would want to publish the app.

Learned a lot while developing the app though. Everything lasts for their allotted time, nothing is permanent.