Recent content on Christian Selig
One day there will hopefully be a house on this land Over the last year, I admittedly haven’t used my Vision Pro a ton, but fairly recently I discovered a super handy use that it’s absolutely incredible at, provided you have the right tools. After years of apartment life my girlfriend and I have recently begun the process of building our (first! exciting!) home, which is an absolute…
Hard to believe, but it’s been over 9 months since the current crop of iPhones came out, and I elected to grab the (apparently not super popular ) iPhone Air, a new model of iPhone introduced for the first time. Rumor season for the new iPhones is in full swing, so it seemed like a good time to jot down my thoughts on the current model. Immediately, it’s really something to behold when…
The Apple Watch is one of the most fascinating pieces of modern technology for me. A gorgeous screen, an abundance of sensors, and a bonkers amount of computational power in a tiny little package that fits on your wrist. It reminds me of the Vision Pro in that a good amount of the time I put it on I can’t help but smile at how far technology has come. But it’s also weirdly something…
After 7 years with a Tesla Model 3, we picked up a gen 2 Rivian R1S in April of 2025. We still have the Model 3 as a second vehicle, but it’s been really cool experiencing a new electric vehicle from a very passionate new company. 2026 is a really exciting time for Rivian, as in the first half of this year they’re launching their R2 vehicle - a smaller, less expensive SUV offering that…
I didn't know what to put as a header so here are some iClouds (interesting clouds) in Maine I’ve had a lot of fun working with CKSyncEngine over the last month or so. I truly think it’s one of the best APIs Apple has built, and they’ve managed to take a very complex topic (cloud syncing) and make it very digestible and easy to integrate, without having to get into the weeds of…
One trick doctors hate that will make your iPhone… Sorry. I’ve been loving my iPhone Air. A week in I think it’s my favorite iPhone since the iPhone X. It has that indescribable feeling that the original MacBook Air had. That, “Wow, computers can be like this?” feeling that’s hard to quantify when you’re just looking at a spec sheet. Picking it up still makes me…
Okay, I have to be doing something astronomically stupid, right? This should be working? I’m playing around with an App Clip and want to just run it on the device as a test, but no matter how I set things up nothing ever works. If you see what I’m doing wrong let me know and I’ll update this, and hopefully we can save someone else in the future a few hours of banging their head!…
While the GIF format is a little on the older side, it’s still a really handy format in 2025 for sharing short clips where an actual video file might have some compatibility issues. For instance, I find when you just want a short little video on your website, a GIF is still so handy versus a video, where some browsers will refuse to autoplay them, or seem like they’ll autoplay them…
My favorite memory of my M1 Pro MacBook Pro was the whole sensation of “holy crap, you never hear the fans in this thing”, which was very novel in 2021. Four years later, this MacBook Pro is still a delight. It’s the longest I’ve ever owned a laptop, and while I’d love to pick up the new M4 goodness, this dang thing still seems to just shrug at basically anything I…
I upload YouTube videos from time to time , and a fun comment I often get is “Whoa, this is 8K!”. Even better, I’ve had comments from the like, seven people with 8K TVs that the video looks awesome on their TV. And you guessed it, I don’t record my videos in 8K! I record them in 4K and upscale them to 8K after the fact. There’s no shortage of AI video upscaling tools…
Recently there’s been very exciting developments in the Godot game engine, that have allowed really easy and powerful integration into an existing normal iOS or Mac app. I couldn’t find a lot of documentation or discussion about this, so I wanted to shine some light on why this is so cool, and how easy it is to do! What’s Godot? For the uninitiated, Godot is an engine for…
Spoiler: 3D printed! The colored ports really sell the effect If you’re anything like me, you’ve found the new, tinier Mac mini to be absolutely adorable. But you might also be like me that you either already have an awesome M1 Mac mini that you have no real reason to replace, or the new Mac mini just isn’t something you totally need . While that logic might be sound, but it…
Hey I'm a developer not an artist Following my last blog post about difficulties surrounding UserDefaults and edge cases that lead to data loss (give it a read if you haven’t, it’s an important precursor to this post!), I wanted to build something small and lightweight that would serve to fix the issues I was encountering with UserDefaults and thus TinyStorage was born! It’s open…
Excuse the alarmist title, but I think it’s justified, as it’s an issue that’s caused me a ton of pain in both support emails and actually tracking it down, so I want to make others aware of it so they don’t similarly burned. Brief intro For the uninitiated, UserDefaults (née NSUserDefaults ) is the de facto iOS standard for persisting non-sensitive, non-massive data to…
For those not aware, a few months ago after reaching out to me, YouTube contacted the App Store stating that Juno does not adhere to YouTube guidelines and modifies the website in a way they don’t approve of, and alludes to their trademarks and iconography. I don’t personally agree with this, as Juno is just a web view, and acts as little more than a browser extension that modifies CSS…
iOS 17.2 gained the capability to start Live Activities from a server, which is pretty cool and handy! I’ve been playing around with it a bit and found some parts a bit confusing, so I thought I’d do a little write up for future me as well as anyone else who could benefit! (For the uninitiated, Live Activities are the cool iOS feature that adds a live view of a specific activity to…
I designed my own keyboard and it’s freely available! I’m calling it the Caldera, and it’s basically my dream wireless split keyboard. I’ve been using it for months, and I love it. Video overview If you’re a visual person, I made a fun little video showcasing the creation process as well as an overview of the keyboard. It serves as a nice tutorial too if you’re…
Juno is an app I built for watching YouTube on the Apple Vision Pro, and it’s been such a fun project to build. It’s also been so great hearing how other people have been enjoying Juno since its launch, as well as providing awesome feedback and input to improve it. Today I’m releasing Juno 2.0, which incorporates a ton of that community feedback, and truly brings the app to the next…
I love the “carry-on only” traveling style, it’s cheaper and you don’t have to worry about airlines losing your stuff. Outside of requiring a bit more planning, what’s not to love? Turns out this is a beloved product category with a passionate community behind it, and as a result a lot of manufacturers are making really awesome bags. As a result you see different bags…
People were really kind and seemed to enjoy my 3D printable Apple Vision Pro stand , a stand I designed in Fusion 360 with the goal of being visually appealing and compact as it stored the headset vertically so it wouldn’t take up too much space on your desk. Turns out there were quite a few folks requesting a similar style stand for their Meta Quest 3 so this weekend I set aside a bit of…
Using MagSafe for portable battery packs has so many niceties versus Qi1: Increased communication with the device, allowing for better efficiency due to better thermal management and charging Easily view the charge percentage of the external battery when first attaching it, and at any other point right from the OS Reverse-wireless-charging, so if you charge your phone while the pack is attached,…
Disclosure: Waterfield sent this in exchange for a review. Yeah, that probably colors something on a deep-down, subconscious level, but I won’t say anything that I don’t truly believe. Unlike a phone or laptop, the Vision Pro is one of those products that is particularly tricky to take around without a case. I’ve got around this by wrapping it in a hoodie and throwing it in my…
Many of Apple’s own visionOS apps, like Music, Safari, and Apple TV, have a handy search bar front and center on the window so you can easily search through your content. Oddly, as of visionOS 1.1, replicating this visually as a developer using SwiftUI or UIKit is not particularly easy due to lack of a direct API, but it’s still totally possible, so let’s explore how. First…
In building Juno, a visionOS app for YouTube , a question that’s come up from users a few times is whether it supports 360° and 180° videos (for the unfamiliar, it’s an immersive video format that fully surrounds you). The short answer is no, it’s sort of a niche feature without much adoption, but for fun I wanted to take the weekend and see what I could come up with. Spoiler:…
I want somewhere to put my Vision Pro when not in use. Many people use the original box, and there’s beautiful stands that exist out there , but I was looking for something more compact and vertical so it would take up less room on my desk. So I opened Fusion 360 (which I am still very much learning), grabbed my calipers, and set out to design a little stand. There was interest when I showed…
If you’re new, Juno is a visionOS app for YouTube ! Juno’s initial launch blew my socks off. It was such a cool feeling to release an app on day one of the Apple Vision Pro’s launch, and having people be so excited about it and have such great feedback made it that much better. After coding like crazy all week to get it submitted, then driving 10 hours to New Hampshire from…
YouTube is probably one of the parts of the internet I consume the most, so I was more than a little sad when YouTube announced that they don’t have plans to build a visionOS app, and disabled the option to load the iPad app. This leaves you with Safari, and the website is okay, but definitely doesn’t feel like a visionOS app. Couple that with visionOS not having the option to add…
Autonomous was nice enough to send me one of both their Smart Desk Pro standing desks and ErgoChair Pro chairs in exchange for posting about them on Twitter, and I wanted to cover them in more detail on my blog as well so I could give my full thoughts on them for anyone in the market for a standing desk and chair. I care a lot about a quality, ergonomic desk set up and have tried a lot of…
If you’re like me, you often have multiple versions of Xcode installed. One or two beta versions, a stable version, and maybe another version in case the most recent stable version has something weird about it. I also really like mapping my Caps Lock key to something more useful, and after reading Brett Terspstra’s excellent article on making a Hyper key many years ago, I’ve…
Apple has a really awesome WWDC 2018 video called Designing Fluid Interfaces , and one of the key takeaways from the videos that one of the presenters, Chan Karunamuni, said is “Look for delays everywhere. Everything needs to respond instantly.” (6:28) A really great example of this is a scroll view on iOS. If you flick through your contacts and touch your finger to the screen,…
Converted the blog over to a new Hugo theme! Hopefully everything here sorta works. Test post will remove. This goat’s name is apparently Gubgub, and very cute.
Theming apps (the ability to change up the color scheme for an app from say, a white background with blue links to a light green background with green links) is a pretty common feature across a lot of apps. It’s one of the core features of the new “Twitter Blue” subscription, Tweetbot and Twitterific have had it for awhile, my app Apollo has it (and a significant subset of users…
I wrote a new little view for a future version of Apollo that makes some changes to the default iOS version (that seems to be a weird trend in my recent programming, despite me loving built-in components). Here’s some details about it! It’s also available as a library on GitHub if you’re interested! Are you familiar with UITableView ’s sectionIndexTitles API? The little…
Skip to the ‘Juicy Code 🧃’ section if you just want the code and don’t care about the preamble of why you might want this! Finding the average color of an image is a nice trick to have in your toolbelt for spicing up views. For instance on iOS, it’s used by Apple to make their pretty homescreen widgets where you put the average color of the image behind the text so the…
I think it’s safe to say while the iOS custom view controller transition API is a very powerful one, with that power comes a great deal of complexity. It can be tricky, and I’m having one of those days where it’s getting the better of me and I just cannot get it to do what I want it to do, even though what I want it to do seems pretty straightforward. Interruptible/cancellable…
Lately users have been emailing me with a few odd things happening with their Apollo iOS 14 home screen widgets, and some well-placed logs can really help with identifying what’s going wrong. iOS has a sophisticated built in logging mechanism, os_log , and now with SwiftLogger in iOS 14, but unfortunately they don’t provide an easy for users to provide you with the logs so…
PHPickerViewController is (in my opinion) one of the more exciting parts of iOS 14. We developers now have a fully-fledged photo picker that we can just use, rather than having to spend a bunch of our time creating our own (much like SFSafariViewController did for developers and having to write in-app web browsers). Similar to SFSafariViewController it also has terrific privacy benefits, in that…
Apollo 1.9’s a massive update to Apollo that’s taken months and months to complete, but I’m really happy with the result, and it brings together a ton of ideas from the community to make Apollo even nicer to use. The update includes a variety of features around crossposts, flair, new app icons, translation, and quality of life improvements. Thanks to everyone who writes in via…
I tweeted today about how I think TestFlight review should become a thing of the past and many developers seemed to agree, but some had questions so I wanted to expand on my thoughts a little. TestFlight’s awesome. But like App Store submissions, TestFlight betas also require a review by Apple. At first blush, such a review sounds sensical. TestFlight can distribute apps to up to 10,000…
I’m really excited to unveil a project I’ve been working on for the last year or so. It’s called Apollo and it’s a new Reddit app for iPhone. I’ve been a Reddit user for about four years now, and the site is a constant source of interesting discussion, hilarity and news for me every day. I’ve never been completely happy with the current Reddit apps out there today, so I set out to scratch an itch…