Brent Simmons's weblog.
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 James Dempsey and the Breakpoints Jam — More Details for the full scoop (including…
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 phone. Here’s the thing: iOS app development (and Mac, but to a lesser extent) is just…
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 pay-off, and bug fixes. People were asking for features, but the foundation…
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 around to everybody — because that would actually be kind of weird, like giving them…
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 cutting-edge features in long-standing apps (that may still have a legacy bug or two).…
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 evidence against. I’m the guy who got rid of Objective-C — with glee and (oops,…