Douglas Hill’s archive
This page lists longer, more considered articles. You can also see recent posts or use the year heading links to see all posts in each year. Follow/subscribe for updates.
2024
Nutrient iOS SDK 14.2: A new name, system text selection and a big clean up. This was an ambitious release for our three-person iOS team.
Dark and Tinted Alternative App Icons: Updating how we implemented alternative app icons in PDF Viewer to support iOS 18’s new dark and tinted app icons.
Migrating KeyboardKit to Swift 6 language mode: KeyboardKit is a small UI framework that runs only on the main thread, so was a simple test case to try out strict concurrency. I wanted to share three interesting situations that came up in the migration.
NSCopying in a Swift World: An exploration into how a modern Swift programming mindset clashes with Objective-C’s NSCopying protocol.
Zoom transitions: A detailed, illustrated guide to my favourite addition in the iOS 18 SDK.
London to Athens by train and ferry: Photos and notes from my three-week trip to Greece to attend a wedding without flying.
2024 iPad Pro impressions: Initial thoughts on the new 13-inch iPad Pro after trying it in the Piazza Liberty Apple store in Milan.
Five years with the 2018 iPad Pro: Reflecting on many thousands of hours using the 2018 iPad Pro and considering what hardware a new iPad should have to last until 2030.
Grounded adventures: Four years without flying: My journey from flying around the world as a digital nomad to not flying at all.
2023
Vision is an exciting addition to Apple’s lineup: Considering how Apple’s newly announced Vision platform could fit in with its existing platforms.
Conditional compilation for Apple’s yearly updates: How to smoothly transition an iOS and Mac Catalyst app for Apple’s yearly updates between June and October.
NSPredicate: an old API with new surprises: Discovering an inconsistency in how NSPredicate handles matching inequality with nil values, and implementing something better.
Using JavaScript in a Swift app: How I used JavaScriptCore to add a JavaScript dependency to my iOS app to remove tracking parameters from URLs.
2022
Download failures with Swift Package Manager binary targets: A tale of how reading an error message more carefully allowed us to work around an issue with our tooling.
2021
What is a deprecated API on iOS? A look at Apple’s API evolution strategy and the effect of the deployment target and base SDK Xcode project settings.
2020
What’s new in KeyboardKit for iOS 14? Some details about KeyboardKit’s new support for Swift Package Manager, sidebars and lists with UICollectionView.
The case for lists in UICollectionView: Exploring the power and flexibility offered by creating lists using UICollectionView.
Breaking down the remote WWDC experience: A breakdown of how well WWDC 2020 went compared to previous in-person editions.
iPad-focused WWDC 2020 wish list: New stuff I’d like to see on iPad.
Level up your trackpad support using UIInteraction: How to make your iOS app work well with scrolling, secondary clicking and dragging on a trackpad or mouse.
DynamicButtonStack: Motivation and design details
Improving iOS menus by putting icons on the left with swizzling: How I improved the usability of iOS contextual menus and the share sheet with some swizzling fun.
Localisation using Apple’s glossaries: How I localised KeyboardKit into 39 languages without needing translators.
Moving a Git repository into its submodule: How we improved our Git repository setup by moving our PDF Viewer for iOS repository into our PSPDFKit repository.
2019
Page Up, Page Down, Home and End in Catalyst apps: Apple didn’t add support for scrolling with Page Up and Page Down in UIKit: They added this in WebKit/Safari.
Open links in Safari, not Safari view controller: Why we changed our default for opening web links from SFSafariViewController to the Safari app.
Open source advent: The creation of KeyboardKit: From 1–24 December 2019, I published open source code every day. Most days, these efforts focused on hardware keyboard control in iOS apps, which came together as KeyboardKit. This article collects my daily updates.
FB6185896: App unexpectedly terminates instead of receiving application:didDiscardSceneSessions:
2018
Self-sizing table view cells in practice: A look at self-sizing table view cells for apps supporting iOS 10, 11, and 12, covering three implementation approaches and some pitfalls I encountered supporting these across our UI in PSPDFKit.
Smart grid sizing: How PSPDFKit is smart about choosing thumbnail sizes.
2017
How to use iOS Data Protection: How apps can use iOS Data Protection to secure their files.
Making the most of remote work: At PSPDFKit, we strive to hire the best people for the job, regardless of where they are in the world. Here, I want to share how I’ve been making the most of remote work.
2016
Preventing popovers on popovers: Some unexpected things found when looking into presenting action sheets and activity view controllers.
iOS 10 and OS X 10.12 wish list: Here are some changes I would like to see in the next versions of Apple’s major platforms.
Why I made Magic Spell: I found myself fixing a lot of spelling errors in source code, so I made a Mac app to check spelling in many files at once.
2015
Presentation controllers and adaptive presentations: Our problems with UIPresentationController and adaptive presentations at PSPDFKit.
2014
2013
2012
Clear: Clear is exciting. It pushes the boundaries of how we think software interfaces work and is full to the brim with delightful interactions. Here are some thoughts on the app.
2011
Greg Joswiak at SVC2UK: I attended Silicon Valley comes to the UK, where Greg Joswiak from Apple gave a talk.
Camera Plus: A review of TapTapTap’s Camera Plus app.
My lab report process: I’ve developed a somewhat unusual process for writing university lab experiment reports.
Tab Bar in the iPhone Photos App
2010
Some Thoughts on the Instapaper App’s Interface: An unsolicited redesign of my favourite app.
Report From My Time in Germany: A write up about my DAAD RISE internship at the University of Lübeck’s Institute for Signal Processing.
Deleting from the iPhone Home Screen
My iPhone Background Processes List
iPhone OS 4 Developer Preview Event
Instapaper 2.2: When you use an application as much as I use Instapaper, small changes can make a big difference. Here are assorted thoughts on the 2.2 update.