One of the benefits of being a developer is being able to go 'F**k it, I'll just fix it myself!' when your computer is being annoying. In this particular instance, it was my Mac's media keys (play/pause, rewind, fast forward) doing either the right thing, the wrong thing, some random thing, or… nothing.
I'm an old Mac-head at heart, and I've been using Macs since the mid 1990s (the first Mac I used was an LC II with System 7.1 installed on it). I don't tend to think that the computing experience was better in the olden days — sure, there's a thing to be said about the simplicity of older software, but most of my fondness for those days is nostalgia. An exception to that, however, is Apple's…
On June 17th, 2025 I happened to — for whatever reason — scroll to the bottom of Cascable Studio's version history page. Ten years! My wife and I shared a toast that evening, I made a snarky comment about it on Mastodon, and life carried on as normal. It's hard *not* to reflect on it, though — ten years is a long time to be doing any one thing.
The most important thing about visiting France is finding the best pastries. I'm particularly fond of the pain au chocolat, and Guillestre (like any French village) has multiple options to choose from. Since they must be earned, I don't want to waste my time with anything but the best pain au chocolat the village has to offer!
I’ve been shipping apps to the App Store for well over fifteen years now, and although there are App Review horror stories aplenty, I’ve always hoped I’d never be in a position to write one myself. Fifteen years isn’t a bad run, at least. Another post chock-full of technical snippets and stories from the app’s development over the past year is coming very soon, and will be a lot more positive than…
Note: If you got here via a web search for handling UIKit menus or responder chain actions in SwiftUI and don’t need/care about the context here, you can jump straight to my GitHub repo containing the sample project , which has a much more succinct readme. We’re currently in the process of bringing my indie company’s main app, Cascable , to the Mac using the Mac Catalyst technology. An early build…
Recently, on a trip to the USA, I bought an Apple Vision Pro. This wouldn’t usually be worth a blog post, but the Vision Pro isn’t available outside the USA at the moment and it’s rather complicated to buy, especially if you need corrective lenses (and my particular instance was even more complicated, as you’ll see below). I thought I’d share my experience and initial impressions, largely for…
There are many ways to write “cross-platform” apps - ranging from going all-in on the cross-platform idea and writing a web app in something like Electron, to writing two completely separate apps that happen to look the same and do the same thing. And of course, the internet is full of… let’s say “vibrant” discussion on what’s the best way to do things. My personal preference is to write the UI…
This year at iOSDevUK , I gave a talk on using Swift on the Server with Vapor to build an app’s backend in Swift. You can download the slides here . This post contains some links to additional resources. The Basics Vapor is the Swift framework used in the projects mentioned. Photo Scout is the app used in most of the examples. Technical When deploying a Swift/Vapor app to Heroku, you’ll need to…
I’m really excited to announce Photo Scout to the world! It’s going into a prerelease TestFlight period starting from today, with a public release sometime in spring or early summer. The tagline of Photo Scout is “You tell us where. We tell you when.” It’s an app for anyone that likes to take photos — give it a set of criteria, and it’ll tell you (with push notifications, if you want) when you can…
Prologue This post is less of a “blog post” and more of… I dunno, a chapter of a memoir (were I important enough to have such a thing). It was originally written over several weeks in the latter months of 2022 as a way to unjumble the last few years of my life and to have it down somewhere , at least — one of the largest regrets I have of my Dad passing (other than the fact that he, er, died in…
Back in February, just before the world went entirely to shit, I went on holiday to Saudi Arabia. The experience was pretty incredible, and one I’ve decided to write about alongside some of my favourite photos from the trip. You can read the post in full over at Vacation In Saudi Arabia on my photos subsite. Enjoy!
As the COVID-19 social distancing settles in, the novelty of working from home is starting to wear off and, even worse , we’re starting to realise that instead of the awesome feeling of “I’m always at home!”, we’re starting to suffer from… “Which also means… I’m always at work!” Working from home can very easily end up eveloping our entire lives, making it feel like there’s no escape. It starts…
This question comes up every year, and I’ve seen it floating around Twitter today. When should I head home from WWDC? WWDC runs from Monday morning to Friday afternoon, but it’s mostly “done” by lunch time on Friday, with a few labs running into the afternoon. Most answers I see debate between heading home on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning. I imagine it’s too late now since most people have…
For the first time in this blog’s history, I am going to try my very best to write, edit, polish and deploy a post using only an iPad (sort of). I’ll let you know if I was successful at the end! Unfortunately, the power button on the iMac G3’s keyboard does nothing on an iPad. The unfortunate reality of the iPad right now (in early 2019) is that for many workflows, it simply isn’t viable as a…
I’m sitting here at 2am, the glow of my laptop screen illuminating my hands as I type. My wife is upstairs, worried about me but powerless to soothe my mind. She can’t sleep either. Most of the time, it’s fine. It’s fun. I write an app and ship it to the world. I don’t make a huge amount of money from it, but topped up with a little bit of income from part-time consulting, I have a nice little…
For well over a year, I’ve been talking about doing a podcast. In fact, in late November 2017 I made a handshake promise with a friend that we’d both get the first episode of our podcasts out “by Christmas at the latest!”, so I’d already been going on ab-out it for far too long a year ago. (She hasn’t released hers either, so we did at least do the same thing!) The thing is, I have lofty plans for…
Don’t care about programming and just want to see some pretty photos of colourful trees? Check out Autumn From The Air on my new photos subsite. Enjoy! A few months ago, I bought a drone with the idea of expanding the horizons of my photography hobby a little. I even had a dream photograph in mind - a rolling shot of my car driving along a mountain road. A few weeks later, I was standing on the…
For the average iOS developer, implementing App Store subscriptions is easily the most legalese-filled part of the entire process of making an app and shipping it to the world. What makes this more difficult is that right now, App Store subscriptions for “normal” apps (i.e., those that aren’t content services like magazines or Netflix) are reasonably new, and Apple appears to be finessing the…
Back in 2001 I had a G4 Cube that I loved dearly, and a then state-of-the-art iPod that plugged into one of its two Firewire ports. Unfortunately, that Cube loved to fry its Firewire ports — several trips to the repair centre meant walking miles to my friend’s house so I could rip my CDs to his second-generation iMac and then onto my iPod. Since then, I’ve had great luck with Apple products. Apart…