inessential
inessential
Brent Simmons
Writes NetNewsWire, a free and open source RSS reader for Mac and iOS.
Latest Posts
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
Our family in Minnesota knows we worry about them, and so yesterday they sent a family-wide email. This is surely one of many thousands like it. Maybe you’ve written one of these. Maybe you will write one of these. Below is the email...
On the NetNewsWire blog I’ve just announced NetNewsWire 6.2 for Mac and iOS. This release is almost entirely bug fixes — but it does add a couple small features and one potentially interesting one: it now supports Markdown in RSS (via...
Tim Bray writes, on Mastodon, I think correctly: The canceling of ICEBlock is more evidence, were any needed, that the Web is the platform of the future, the only platform without a controlling vendor. Anything controversial should be...
In the ’90s and early 2000s I worked for UserLand Software — Dave Winer was founder and CEO — on a Mac app called UserLand Frontier. The app was a scripting system and hash-table-oriented database that powered the early blogging and...