Douglas Hill’s recent posts

5 January 2026

Vivaldi tip: The setting to disable autofilling previously entered text in any form field is mislabeled as “Save and Fill Addresses”. Also note that disabling then enabling this setting will suggest text from before you disabled it.

Screenshot of Vivaldi browser showing suggestions in Nutrient API documentation search: beta, aiassistantview, scope, aiassistantbutton, changetag, v1/betaGroups/{id}/relations »

3 January 2026

For me, Apple’s dictation (including Voice Control) really, really doesn’t want to recognise the words ergonomic, ergonomics or ergonomically. After dozens of tries, every time except once it instead wrote economic, economics, or economically. »

28 December 2025

Fantastic to see the Swift Craft conference coming back next year with tickets now available. Great talks last year in a nice setting. It’s the closest Swift conference to London after the Server-Side Swift Conference. »

15 December 2025

After complaining earlier this month about Xcode’s handling of branch changes, I found an older post/tweet about nearly the same thing from 9 years ago, although I don’t know what that was replying to. So many old tweets are gone. Times change, but not so much Xcode. »

12 December 2025

SwiftUI in iOS 26 adds equivalents of UIBarButtonItem.SystemItem.done and UIBarButtonItem.SystemItem.cancel to get standard Done and Cancel buttons. Here’s the code we're using to wrap this new API with fallbacks for older versions. »

4 December 2025

The app icon is green because I happen to often use Xcode and Simulator at the same time. Two apps with icons that are the same shape and same colour and so are terrible at their main purpose of distinguishing the app. »

Is there any way to hack Xcode to skip the “The file “whatever.xcodeproj” has been modified by another application” alerts? Xcode writes project changes to disk immediately, so obviously after changing branch I always want the version on disk.

Screenshot of alert from Xcode: The file »

We’re seeing a UIKit crash introduced in iOS 26.1: NSInternalInconsistencyException -[UIPencilInteraction _handleHoverGestureRecognizer:]: Received updates from an unknown hover gesture recognizer (FB21266941) Full post »

27 November 2025

I was impressed by all three talks at NSLondon yesterday evening. I learned a lot from each one. It was a proper mini-conference. Thank you Google/Firebase for hosting us.

Photo during Peter Friese’s talk — Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: Hybrid AI with Apple Intelligence and Firebase AI Logic

Photo during Hannah Downey’s talk — Compose Yourself: SwiftUI and its Android Counterpart

Photo during Giordano Scalzo’s talk — AI-Accelerated Mobile Development: From idea to build, faster than ever »

25 November 2025

Since iOS 17, we saw logs about “Abnormal number of gesture recognizer dependencies”. We never observed an actual issue, and it seemed like lot of work to add ‘gate’ recognisers to silence some logging. Good news is this logging was removed in iOS 26, so it was worth holding out. Full post »

Looks like lawyers are writing the AppKit documentation:

Methods specific to the NSTextInputClient protocol are intended for dealing with text input and generally aren’t suitable for other purposes. »

22 October 2025

That’s some long overdue cleanup. Ask your parents about Default-568h@2x.png.

Screenshot of a GitHub pull request. Title: Remove Default-568h@2x.png. Commits: 1. Files changed: 4. Comment: You used to have to add these files to support the iPhone 5. Remember that? »

16 October 2025

We’ve released an early preview of our new AI Assistant, which uses Apple Intelligence to answer questions about PDF documents. This is using Apple’s Foundation Models, so documents and questions are processed on the device without being sent anywhere. Try it on TestFlight (iPad/iPhone only). »

8 October 2025

SwiftLeeds day 2

Photo of Adam on stage at the conference with some guy sketchnoting on screen behind.

Photo of Sash on stage at the conference.

Photo of Oksana on stage at the conference. Slide says “But at workæ 10 year old project, VIPER, Storyboards”.

Photo of Ekaterina on stage at the conference. Title is “I am not here by mistake”. »

7 October 2025

SwiftLeeds day 1

Photo of Adam on stage at the conference.

Photo of Daniel on stage at the conference. Slide says “Be here”.

Photo of Adam introducing Chris on stage at the conference.

Photo of Cyril on stage at the conference sitting using lldb in a demo. »

5 October 2025

Now I’m in Paris catching up with some Swift Connection people but confusingly not attending this conference, because I’ll take the train onwards to the UK tomorrow for SwiftLeeds. Both are quite nice conferences. »

I was lucky to be in Tirol for the ski season opening on Friday!

Photo of snow on mountains with ski runs and lifts. Rocky ground not covered with snow in places. Blue sky above. »

2 October 2025

The schedule for Pragma conference just went up. Looks fabulous. Looking forward to it! (I’ll be taking the train down through the French Alps. The Paris-Milan route reopened this year after a landslide in 2023.) »

1 October 2025

We’re hosting an NSLondon pub evening tomorrow in conjunction with the Server-Side Swift Conference. Sign up on Meetup or just turn up. (I’m away but back in the UK next week for SwiftLeeds.) »

12 September 2025

Our PDF Viewer update for iOS 26 and macOS 26 is out on Apple’s app store. It’s glass time. »