Douglas Hill’s recent posts
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22 May 2025
Registration for our NSLondon WWDC25 keynote viewing party at Ford opens at 13:00 today. I expect it will fill up quickly. Note: With Meetup, there’s a two step process of first requesting to join the NSLondon group and then RSVPing (registering) for the particular event. »
21 May 2025
Before yesterday, the Apple developer website wasn’t using the word keynote in reference to the video at the start of WWDC week. The calendar event called it a kickoff. This has been updated so it’s now called a keynote like in previous years. »
19 May 2025
Heading off to the Swift Craft conference. Now I have 24 hours to work out my lightning talk about developing across Apple platforms. »
4 May 2025
My reading app will become unavailable on Apple’s app store in five days, because I’m letting my paid Apple Developer membership expire. As I understand things, if you “Get” the app now, you’ll still be able to download it after that point. »
28 April 2025
Here’s a quick roundup of upcoming iOS conferences in Europe. I’ll be at Swift Craft next month and hopefully at least one more in the autumn. »
24 April 2025
Thank you superstars at Apple for iOS 15.8.4. Great to see security fixes for products released nearly a decade ago. I’m still living the one-handed phone life with the 1st-gen iPhone SE. »
16 April 2025
Looks like Xcode 16.3 has introduced new (incorrect) upload warnings:
Your app, or a library that’s included in your app, uses Apple Push Notification service (APNs) registration APIs, but the APS Environment Entitlement isn’t included in the app signature’s entitlements. »
1 April 2025
Reminder that calendrical calculations are hard, so you should always use Foundation’s Calendar and DateComponents APIs.
30 March 2025
With European summer times starting this weekend, I’m tactically moving from France to England today to (except for a few hours) go straight from Central European (Winter) Time to British Summer Time, which are both UTC+1. Take that silly clock changes. »
25 March 2025
The Xcode 16.3 release notes list some interestingly named C++26 features, including Poison Pills are Too Toxic, The Mothership has Landed, and Symmetry for spaceship. »
18 March 2025
After reviewing five job applications in a row with the phrase “perfectly aligns”, I updated my Life on the iOS team at Nutrient post to use plainer language to set the tone better. We don’t need to achieve, align on, thrive on, and foster when we can have, talk about, enjoy, and provide. »
17 March 2025
Given that multiple stores for apps exist and Apple chose to name theirs in a generic way, I’ve changed all posts on my website saying “the App Store” to “Apple‘s app store”. (While doing this, the earliest post I found regarding the lack of competition in this space is from 15 years ago.) »
13 March 2025
Most of my career making software with Apple’s SDKs has prioritised iPad over iPhone, which was always a bit of a niche. It doesn’t bring me any joy to say this since I love the polish and consistency native apps can theoretically provide, but I increasingly feel like the web is the way forward. »
Federico Viticci writes about how desktop-class experiences are found in web apps rather than native iPad apps. I’ve had a similar experience: I spend much of my work time in Slack, GitHub, Jira, Notion, and Google Docs. These all have iPad apps, but I use the websites on my iPad instead. »
Cool, I managed to make Nintendo Music play from two points in the track concurrently, with the audio streams overlaid for extra energy. iOS devs, this might be my one chance to say this: They should have used a singleton! (I removed the audio in the recording because only one of the streams was picked up.)
12 March 2025
🏔️ Innsbruck 🚄 Vienna 🏙️ for a few days »
7 March 2025
Our newest release, Nutrient iOS SDK 14.6, adds AI Assistant. Another thing I like in this update is that we’re following my recent advice to prefer mailto links to MFMailComposeViewController (by default — it’s an SDK so of course we made this configurable). Also our changelog has an RSS feed.
»
6 March 2025
I’m (partially) sorry about the negative tone of my posts recently. Text autocompletion with advanced models is relatively new, and will improve with iteration. I wish I was as confident about improvements to encryption laws and software distribution on iOS (and global cooperation/peace etc). »
With this example, it’s hard to believe the iOS/macOS text autocompletion uses a transformer language model or whatever given that if you take a correct English sentence containing “in” and replace “in” with “interviews” you most likely don’t end up with a correct sentence. »
Apple’s aggressive text autocompletion cleared a new bar. After spending most of this week doing interviews for our open job (which is great but it’s a lot!) I was texting friends about weekend plans and when I typed “in” it was replaced by “interviews”. Not cool. »
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