The latest macOS is a nice step toward a good-looking Mac UI, but I do wish it had gone farther. I am in particular not a fan of how Mac toolbars look. I don’t like the full-height sidebars and I especially don’t like the Liquid Glass buttons. I looked around at what other Mac apps are doing. I asked on my microblog...

Fixed ’em. Fixed ’em all. Well, almost all — down to 10 bugs on the NetNewsWire bug tracker. (See the Mac 7.1.3 release notes and iOS for the big list of just-fixed bugs.) This means I’ve gotten the app to the place I’ve wanted to get to for a long time, where the bug count is manageable and close to zero. So it’s...

Of course it’s okay to criticize people for their tech choices — for returning to X, for instance, as MacStories recently did. I’m not on X and there’s no way I would return. Fuck that place and fuck Elon Musk. (Yes, there’s a brentsimmons there, but it’s not me. I deleted my account.) But it’s not like my tech...

One of the highlights of any year for me is when I get to play in a James Dempsey Breakpoints Jam — and we’ve got one coming up in a few days! It’s this Thursday Aug. 20 at Stoup Brewing in Ballard. Start gathering around 6 pm to hang with fellow Apple nerds. The show will start around 7 pm. See the Xcoders post...

I returned from a lovely summer vacation (family, beach) to find that iOS 27 beta has fucked up the transition between split view and compact — I’ve got a boatload of crashes, mostly on Pro Max devices and a few on iPad. Here’s a representative crash log. The feedback in TestFlight all talks about rotating the...

It’s been a year since I retired — my last working day was June 6, 2025 — and I like being able to say that I’ve spent the year adding nothing, not one penny, to shareholder value. 🌴 * * * My hope for retirement was to get a lot of work done on NetNewsWire. A year ago it was in sore need of modernization, tech debt...

I’m psyched for @incanus Justin Miller’s presentation tonight at Xcoders on “Swift Result Builders Case Study: Parsing.” I like writing parsers, and I’m very curious about Swift result builders. Should be a good one! See this post on the Xcoders blog for more details about the talk and for when and where to be.

I’ve known for decades that most of family and friends (except for family and friends in tech) have no idea what I do — they just think it’s math-heavy and mysterious. Well. It’s definitely not math-heavy and it shouldn’t be mysterious. So I figured I’d write up What I Do. Even if I never actually send this page...

The title is a little over the top, but barely — we have two fantastic talks this Thursday (March 5) that you should go to. (I’ll be there!) Laura Savino will present “Learn Out Loud”: As devs today, we’re supposed to demonstrate immediate skills in tools whose configs change once a fortnight, while shipping...

In my previous post I talk about how I got rid of hundreds of thousands of lines of Objective-C code while at Audible and I explain why keeping Objective-C code around is a terrible idea. And I explain that… I’m not stuck in the old ways; I’m not the guy insisting on the supremacy of Objective-C despite the obvious...

At my last job, at Audible (hi Audible folks, if you’re reading this!), I led the effort to port our remaining Objective-C to Swift. When I started that project, Objective-C was about 25% of the code; when I retired it was in the low single digits (and has gone even lower since, I’ve heard). Why do this? It was...

I’ve been working on my blog software (a static site generator) and I managed to screw things up enough that random old posts got published on the site and in the RSS feed. As soon as I saw the issue I fixed it, but I’ve been getting email from folks about some of the posts, so I know they got picked up by some RSS...