Douglas Hill’s recent posts

10 November 2026

I’ve been on trains from Innsbruck all day and just arrived in Amsterdam for Do iOS. First time at this conference! (I’ll go back by the direct night train, which is nicer than day trains for this distance.) »

9 November 2026

I’m having some trouble accepting these buttons at the bottom of the lock screen on iOS 27. They’re both off.

Screenshot of iPhone lock screen with pure black background. Buttons at the bottom are silent and torch toggles, both with grey backgrounds. The silent button uses a black icon while the torch button uses a white icon. »

3 November 2026

London people, there are a few places left for NSLondon at Depop on Thursday next week. (I’ll be at Do iOS in Amsterdam then.) »

12 October 2026

They should have used DynamicButtonStack for these buttons in Apple Maps.

Screenshot of Apple Maps place detail showing six buttons in a row with truncated labels “We…, Del…, Ad…, Gui…, Fav…, Sh…” »

Looking forward to speaking about Rust for iOS developers at two more conferences this year: Swift Connection in Paris (tickets) and Do iOS in Amsterdam (tickets). Both in November in superb, well-connected cities (direct trains from London). »

Hope everyone at SwiftLeeds and KotlinLeeds this week learns a lot and has a wonderful time. Looks like a great lineup, although I’m not around for it this year. »

I had a fun week in Berlin for next.app devCon 2026, where I hosted a roundtable on Rust for mobile developers. The scale of the conference was impressive. It felt very different from the iOS conferences I’ve been to. Here are my notes on the event. »

29 September 2026

Exciting morning for PDF Viewer with Firebase

Screenshot of Firebase website showing Crash-free users in last 24 hours with a drop from 100% to 50% at about 3am »

Next week, I’ll be hosting a Rust for Mobile Developers round table discussion at next.app devCon. I hope we can learn from each other! It would be great to hear from people coming from Android, Flutter or other backgrounds. Last minute tickets are available until 4 October.

Conference speaker card saying: next.app swiftCon, Douglas Hill, Software Engineer, Nutrient, Rust for Mobile Developers, #nextapp26, OCT 7-9 2026, BERLIN »

28 September 2026

Confusing message reply suggestions

Screenshot in Apple Messages app with reply suggestions “Yes, it’s not too late” and ”No, it’s not too late” »

24 July 2026

Great evening at NSLondon yesterday. Thank you to Flo for hosting us, and to our speakers Harry, Anastasia and James. I really liked the range of talks.

Photo from Anastasia Petrova’s talk with slide showing feature team vs. platform team

Photo from James Coleman’s talk with mesh face »

15 July 2026

lol special announcement on the train from Brussels to London now saying their Wi-Fi is “not the best” and to please stream the football using your own 4G/5G connection instead. »

8 July 2026

Heading to Berlin today for Local First Conference. It‘s a software conference themed around goals rather than technologies. Very interested to see how this goes and what other people there are building. »

3 July 2026

I’m seeing a regression in Apple Shortcuts where “Count Characters in …” says “Unable to decode file contents” when passed rich text. Workaround: Add a “Get text from (rich text)” and count with that instead. (I’m on macOS 26.5 but this might have been there for a while.) »

Limited social connection was always a challenge with remote work, but with AI human-to-human communication is further minimised. We exchange messages with people’s robots, or more likely we have our robots talk to their robots. Efficient, but makes me think it would be nice to hang out with people. »

1 July 2026

Notes from attending the RustWeek conference in Utrecht. »

24 June 2026

Looking forward to being back in Wales in September to talk about Rust at iOSDevUK. Early bird conference tickets are available until the end of this month. It’s my favourite and best-value iOS conference. Also let me know if you’re interested in hiking in Eryri/Snowdonia the weekend before.

Speaker card: Douglas Hill; Rust for iOS developers: more Swifty than Swift; iOSDevUK; 7th to 10th September 2026; Aberystwyth University; www.iosdevuk.com »

19 May 2026

WWDC labs are conspicuously missing from the activities this year. (The private WebEx calls usually with the person who worked on the thing you're asking about.) At Nutrient, we found these the most valuable part of WWDC. »

I’m excited to be learning new things at the RustWeek conference in the Netherlands. »

1 May 2026

We’re trying something new for NSLondon this month: If you’re a woman, non-binary, or otherwise feel underrepresented in the London iOS developer community, you can request an early-access spot by filling in this very short form. General availability opens at 1pm BST this Monday on Meetup. »