Jamie Balfour

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Jamie Balfour'sPersonal blog

Jamie Balfour'sPersonal blog

ZPE 1.11.12 is available to download as of today. The last release of 2023 brings a few improvements and features, a fix and one new and very useful function. 

The features and improvements that come to ZPE are the new -h changes feature which will display the ZPE changelog, and the array_get_data_type function is now the list_get_data_type function and works on lists as well as arrays. 

The new function added to ZPE is the string_compare function, which can be used to compare strings and see which comes first or last alphabetically. 

2023 has been a pretty decent year for me, albeit there have been a few bumps. 

Firstly, it was the start of my second year working at my school, somewhere I enjoy working. There have been one or two times when I have wondered what I am doing working here but generally, I enjoy my job and want to continue to work here.

My mental health has been great this year again, leading to my fourth year in a row where I haven't struggled with any form of depression! 

Let's talk about ZPE. ZPE 1.11 has been another incredible release of ZPE with inline iteration, type casting, and compiler directives, the build version has finally returned to ZPE, and improvements to the editor; particularly the editor area now being public, YASS Unfold, powerful new list reference functions, the new string_compare function, which is very useful for sorting lists of strings and finally, more public features through ZPEKit.

ZPE 1.11.12 was released today. You can download it from my Download Center or run the update command on current ZPE installations.

Next, let's talk about what I have managed to do with teaching. Further to what I said last year, I have made major improvements to my slideshow engine and DragonDocs Engine. My slides are now all in 16:9 format which took an absolute age to do, but I have finally done it. My slides underwent another style transformation and look even better than before. I cannot forget to mention my new Apple Watch app that I developed for this too! The app allows me to control the slides using my Watch - pretty cool!

I cannot forget that I also got my car in June after a six-month delay and I've loved every moment with it! I'm planning on doing a review of it when it gets to 9 months with it, so keep an eye on my reviews for that.

I also started my Master's Degree which is going well. I'm excited about the next part of my degree! 

To finish the year off, I got myself an iPhone 15 Pro (which is great and the phone I've been waiting for for a long time), an Apple Watch Ultra 2 (which is an amazing Watch) and a new MacBook Pro 14" with an M3 Pro (which has replaced my M1 MacBook Pro, which itself was a very capable machine).

2023 has been a fantastic year for me and I'm hoping that 2024 is just as good if not better!

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