Sent feedback about the “required reason” APIs that we need to read the system boot time to destroy information about the system boot time that we get from UITouch.timestamp. (And yes, you could use UITouch.timestamp to help with fingerprinting.)

John Gruber:

This trick does not work in Safari on iPadOS, because iPads are baby computers where you can’t select more than one thing at a time.

True, iPad is missing keyboard support in this case, but generally I find multiple selection easier on iPad. Multitouch dragging works fine for Safari tabs. It’s not uncommon I start dragging something on Mac then realise I can’t do what I want because there‘s only one pointer.

Is there a way to have the initialiser of an Objective-C class be migrated into Swift as a required init? This forces subclasses to override the initialiser, which is necessary for copying an instance of a subclass to return another instance of that subclass.

Received a Bluesky invitation code many many months after registering my interest. Now I can finally “join the early conversation”.

Looking forward to seeing people today for an NSLondon pub evening while Chris Eidhof is in London. www.meetup.com/nslondon/…

Accidentally left the iPad Simulator recording the screen for 7h 52m. The file is only 200 MB though. MPEG is efficient when there‘s no difference between the frames.

Back from a terrific weekend seeing friends in Berlin. I worked all day on the train from London over there and back, so it was time-effective without flying. 🚆

Pull to reload in Safari on iPad continues to be a bad feature. I often trigger it accidentally, there’s usually no logical reason why a webpage would reload in respose to this input, and there’s a reload button anyway.

We hit the 10,000 limit on TestFlight testers for PDF Viewer a while ago. Using the new filtering options, I removed the 10% of these that had never installed a build, so it’s now possible to sign up again.

Tip: Filtering within groups was unreliable. Filtering from “All Testers” worked better.

I’m really pleased how well our NSLondon events are going with our expanded organisers team. Great turnout and talks yesterday evening at Onfido.

When you get a new bug B with a description identical to an older bug A, and you can fix B by reverting the fix for A, but that fix didn’t include a test or concrete steps to reproduce.

I miss the Mac behaviour where some apps would quit automatically after closing their last window. Seems excessive needing to close and quit to get rid of an app. Perfect example of why I prefer working on my iPad.

Cool a new Swift conference in England, coming next May. swiftcraft.uk

Any recommendations for a plain text notes/scratchpad app with CloudKit sync? Importance: iPad > Mac > iPhone

Bear 1 hit the sweet spot. The Bear 2 editor is too non-standard. Tot adds angle brackets around pasted links. FSNotes has good UI but iCloud Drive sync works poorly for this.

Compiling an existing iOS codebase for visionOS breaks the deprecation cycle. You end up with deprecation warnings you can’t silence that aren’t actually a problem. We ought to be able to set our visionOS deployment target to -1.0 (two versions back) to match our iOS deployment target of 15.0.

With Xcode 15, is there a way to get rid of wireless options in the run destination picker? This keeps switching back to devices that aren‘t necessarily in the same room as me instead of the one that’s plugged in!

It’s really tempting seeing the try! Swift Tokyo conference announced for 2024. I had an amazing time there in 2019 and stayed in Japan to ski, hike and live in a little village by the sea. But I think I’ll stick with my no flying streak (since Jan 2020) and will ski in Austria instead.

Oh no I just tried turning on Sonoma’s new text size setting for system apps on my father’s Mac. Messed up the arrangement of the 153 items on the desktop. One of the most disruptive things I could have done.

Seeing a situation on our iOS app like this:

• Use memory -> receive memory warning
• Cut our memory usage a lot
• Use memory again -> termination (no warning)

Warnings arrive every time in a sample app. Not sure how to debug this.

➡️ Innsbruck 🚆 Munich 🚆 Frankfurt 🚆 Brussels 🚆 London

Typing auto-completion is really good on macOS Sonoma; I feel more productive. Shame it‘s not as good on the iPad, which I think is because on the Mac this is on top of more robust auto-correction.

Nice surprise from the Apple event is that the OS updates are coming to iPhone, iPad and Mac this month. Xcode 15 RC includes the new SDK for both iOS and Mac. No awkwardness like previous years where the updates weren’t synced. Much credit for this: synced updates are really hard.

Updated my reading app for compatibility with iOS 17. In addition, the app now has an archive to keep articles around for easy reference.

Self-sizing table view cells were introduced in iOS 8 in 2014. No need to truncate lines of text! Took a few years for them to work well. I wrote some practical tips in 2018. Obviously this is the expectation with SwiftUI.

Apple Mail in 2023: One line for the subject should be all they need. 😐

Auto-correction with a hardware keyboard on iPad doesn’t seem better on iOS 17. Still need to manually accept suggestions for obvious typos, and as far as I can tell you still can’t accept suggestions with a keyboard. You can at least do it with a mouse now; previously only possible with a finger.

Wow Xcode 15 beta 8. I don’t recall there being an 8 before. Looking in Xcodes, I see Xcode 11 went up to beta 7.

Updated KeyboardKit to support iOS 17 and Xcode 15. Xcode 14 is still works too. No functionality changes.

Good turnaround on documentation Feedback I sent to Apple. They added the bold text to clarify CKRecord.encryptedValues:

When you enable Advanced Data Protection, the encryption keys are available exclusively to the record’s owner and, if the user shares the record, that share’s participants.

Since Apple removed the device support files that everyone used, did anyone find a way run an app linked with the iOS 16 SDK on an iOS 17 device? (Other than TestFlight, which is a very slow iteration loop.)

Edit: Using defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode DVTEnableCoreDevice enabled as suggeted further down that thread worked for me. Presumably there’s a reason this isn’t enabled by default though.

If an Apple Bluetooth Magic Mouse/Trackpad/Keyboard normally paired to an iPad is paired to a device you no longer have access to, you can pair it back to the iPad like this:

1. Plug the peripheral into a Mac
2. Forget the peripheral from the Mac
3. The peripheral will now be discoverable for the iPad

My first time managing to crash RealityEnvironment in the Vision Simulator. The world fades to black, and it makes a sad noise.

The new .inspector modifier for trailing sidebars is not available on visionOS 😢

Hard to get a sense at this stage how “desktop-class” Vision apps should be.

That narrows things down.

The following API for accessing user defaults requires reasons for use. […]

• UserDefaults

From Describing use of required reason API

I thought I heard it was possible to upload Vision apps to TestFlight (even though not many people would be able to install app yet) but it doesn’t seem to be allowed for me.

visionOS is quite strict. “Spatial presentations are not permitted from popovers.” 🧑‍🏫

visionOS “upcoming events, testing opportunities, and other programs” are still “Available in July”. Are we there yet? developer.apple.com/visionos/…

Mac quarantine seems a bit eager. Shows these scary alerts when opening files with the quarantine flag that are set to open with anything except the default app (the com.apple.quarantine and com.apple.LaunchServices.OpenWith extended attributes). This is macOS 13.4.1.

iOSDevUK ticket booked. Thinking about going hiking in Snowdonia the weekend before. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

I feel I must be missing something, but I can’t find any info saying Apple Volume Purchase Program (VPP) for education and businesses is available for in-app purchases and subscriptions. Are there even any paid-up-front apps anymore?

Not fully understanding the new beta installation flow. I’m signed into my personal account (not my developer account) and given the option to change accounts, but not sure what difference this would make.

I noticed this WWDC session (and probably others) never says “Vision”. Always “this platform”. Secrecy at work! developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10…

If the new product line is called  Vision, will AirPods be renamed to  Hearing?

New text selection magnifying glass is bold.

Looking back at old photo albums, for some reason I have one called “WWDC highlights” containing only these three photos, one each from 2019, 2018 and 2017. Because of course the vegetarian boxed lunches were… the highlight of the week?

We have a few spaces left at our NSLondon WWDC keynote viewing party at Deloitte Digital in London. This Monday from 17:30.

The readability problems with forms in Ventura are also a problem at narrower widths with iOS menus aligning the images away from the text. Less severe, but still harder to scan. blog.viditb.com/redesigni…

My top wish for WWDC: Spotlight on iPad to be as fast as it was on iOS 14. (Ideally as fast as Alfred was a decade ago on slower hardware.)

Around we go again. Today is my 8th PSPDFBirthday. 🎂

Registration is now open for our server-side Swift NSLondon event at AWS during WWDC week.

Really excited to have two NSLondon events during WWDC week:

• Mon: Keynote viewing party at Deloitte Digital
• Thu: Server-side Swift special at AWS

Stage Manager on the Mac never sounded interesting to me so I never tried it. Then yesterday I stumbled across this setting, and thought I’d take a look. I think I really like it! It makes the Mac more iPad-like and fits how my brain works.

Fantastic to see the Text Size setting on Mac. Hope at WWDC we see this extended automatically to Catalyst and iOS apps on Mac (this feature has been on iOS for 9 years). SwiftUI/AppKit API support would be extra cool.

Mac Dictionary app is having trouble parsing the Wikipedia page on strikethrough, resulting in most of the article being crossed out.

I’m looking for ways to remove inactive TestFlight testers because we’ve hit our 10000 people limit for PDF Viewer. Can’t see install info exposed by the App Store Connect API. There’s this fastlane plugin, but it’s giving me ASC API errors.

If Apple allowed iOS apps to use payment methods other than App Store IAP, the UX could be improved by using Apple Pay to prevent sometimes needing to approve payments in your bank app (with 3-D Secure).

Following up on my post yesterday about iOS version usage stats, here’s data aggregated from three of Mixpanel’s graphs:

• iOS 16: 84.52%
• iOS 15: 11.87%
• iOS 14: 2.49%
• iOS 13: 0.22%
• iOS 12: 0.88%
• iOS 11: 0.00%

Wonder if the Unsubscribe link in TestFlight email notifications will ever, you know, just unsubscribe them, rather than sending an email to the developer asking us to remove them, which requires at least App Manager role. (Users can already self-unsubscribe in the TF app.)

If we were only making an app, we could use the metrics on iOS version usage from our app on App Store Connect, but we make an SDK and don’t collect device analytics from our SDK customers.

What’s the best resource these days for checking iOS version usage stats? Apple’s numbers aren’t updated often and don’t say the percentage on iOS 14, which would be the most useful value for deciding when to drop iOS 14.

How best to handle “pencilling in” on a calendar? I end the event name with ? if the date is uncertain and/or wrap the name with () if my attendance is uncertain.

We’re hiring for an experienced iOS engineer on my team at PSPDFKit. Our iOS team is 5 engineers making an SDK, so expect varied tasks including public API design that will affect hundreds of apps. Fully remote. ➡️ More info and how to apply

I just found out you can press Q while using the iPad cmd-tab app switch to remove an app from the switcher, but it doesn’t terminate the app. Could be useful to clean up before a demo, but otherwise I’m not sure why you’d do this.

I didn’t receive the UK government test emergency alert because at home my iPhone is always in airplane mode, but I suppose a life-threatening event the government could warn me about is more likely to happen outside of home.

Busy week for iOS in London with NSCoder Night tonight and NSLondon tomorrow.

Is it just us, or were app status change email notifications not sent by App Store Connect in the last couple of days? Notifications are enabled. Nothing in spam.

Quick Look has been broken on my Mac for a while, but today I realised it works fine from Alfred, and was actually a Finder-specific problem. Amazingly, quitting and relaunching Finder fixed it. It’s like updating to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard all over again! Such a great feature.

Managed to leave Handoff turned on for 1 hour before the constant shifting of the Mac dock was too much. It’s strange that Universal Clipboard requires Handoff, and Universal Control says it requires Handoff but actually sometimes works when Handoff is off.

Innsbruck 🚆 Vienna

The use of the terms parent and child for hierarchies isn’t that good a metaphor given the principle (for hierarchies) that parents always outlive their children.

We track downloads with Progress (NSProgress) and add that as a child of the Progress shown in the UI. Trouble is, Progress can only be added a child once, but the user can pop and push UI many times while downloading. Wondering if this is just not appropriate use of addChild.

I would have let my Tweetbot subscription renew in early February. I guess it was removed from sale, but weirdly Apple shows the wrong error: payment method declined. The payment method is fine (other stuff has gone through since).

I set up a basic help page for my reading app, linked from the top-level nav in the app. It’s odd having an app that displays webpages and then jumping to the browser, but I want to be able to update this easily. douglashill.co/reading-a…

An annoying little thing since Xcode 14 is sometimes the editor loses keyboard focus when jumping between files. The insertion point can end up in the find navigator search field. I’m getting good at instinctively pressing cmd-J to re-focus the editor.

Fantastical subscription just renewed after a 54% price increase. It’s a terrific app (one of the best) but to be honest I wouldn’t mind splitting this with someone. 😅

Switch over to ActivityPub/Mastodon name @douglas@pub.douglashill.co is complete. I want to write more about the new setup soon, but now it’s time to hit the slopes. ⛷

I’ll switch my ActivityPub (Mastodon) address from @_@blog.douglashill.co to @douglas@pub.douglashill.co in ~8 hours. Not changing host; just a better name. The new name won’t work until I switch, and then the old name will disappear. Couldn’t think of a better way.

Spent a bit of time updating my reading app’s lists to use more standard UI. Cut the code down by 300 lines. Had in mind to rewrite lists in SwiftUI to dramatically trim the code so I could focus more on the core reading experience, but so many details weren’t right in my POC.

We have a review of PDF Viewer for Android comparing the precise temperature their phone gets when running our app vs. a competing app. I appreciate learning new ways to see the world.

In around 48 hours, I’ll change my ActivityPub (Mastodon) address from @_@blog.douglashill.co to @douglas@pub.douglashill.co. Unfortunately the transfer won’t be automatic so if you’re following already you’ll need to follow again.

Rotating an iPad home screen without widgets is the worst of both worlds: icon spacing is uneven AND the number of icons per row changes. Adding a widget magically fixes the first problem, and by strategically positioning widgets, you can fix the second problem too.

Naming an ActivityPub server (mostly Mastodon) with “social” in the domain name is missing a trick by not going for “pub” instead:

• Pub for ActivityPub
• Pub is a place to socialise 🍻

Switching my Safari search engine from Ecosia back to DuckDuckGo. Number and size of ads with Ecosia reached the point where I often don’t see any results without scrolling.

I’m intrigued how Pages on iOS displays localised font styles. I guess it might have an adjective parser (e.g. to know that “Ultra Light Italic” is two terms) and a long list of translations for common adjectives (regular, book, roman, italic, oblique, etc).

An update to my reading app is out that adds Shortcuts actions to automate and integrate with other apps. You can filter/sort based on many properties, including word count. There are also new lists for “Short Articles” and “Long Articles”.

Ostensibly proving I’m not a robot, but actually practising my French vocab.

A bit icy but otherwise great conditions in Ischgl/Samnaun today. AKA Expensive Swiss Lunch Day.

Realised a couple of recent articles showed up on Micro.blog and Twitter but not in feeds. For the record:

NSPredicate: an old API with new surprises

Using JavaScript in a Swift app

I didn’t notice this Reload Organizer command before. You can use to force Xcode to fetch new crash reports etc. from App Store Connect.

We have a PDF Viewer app user who updates their 1 star review after most updates to express disappointment we don’t translate our release notes into German. It’s amazing having such dedicated users.

There’s something up with the language model in iOS dictation that resulted in it transcribing “strawberry moose” instead of “strawberry mousse”. I guess homophone resolution is still tricky. 🍓🦌

Mixed conditions in the Zillertal to start my ski season. I understand it’s been dry until recently so this a huge improvement.

App Store ads are still keeping it classy. (To be fair, “meetup” could be interpreted this way, but the difference in tone is jarring between the ad and Meetup, the event management platform I’m looking for.)

I just found iOS 16 added viewing/copying the password of a known Wi-Fi network. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi > tap the (i) by the network > Password > auth with Face/Touch ID.

I used to use Keychain Access on my Mac to copy a password to Nintendo Switch. Much nicer from iOS.

⚡️🚙 London ➡️ Innsbruck, over two days. It’s time for mountains and skiing.

Just testing my micro blog. Here‘s some recent baking.