Douglas Hill’s recent posts

20 June 2025

Here’s another roundup of Swift/iOS conferences in Europe later this year. I’m planning to be at SwiftLeeds and #Pragma. »

19 June 2025

There are still a few hours to sign up for Apple’s WWDC highlights event in London this Monday. I’ll be there. There are also events at many other locations around the world in the coming weeks. »

We launched a Nutrient company podcast with our CEO Jonathan. The first episode is a chat with Nick, who’s an incredibly thoughtful and productive engineer on our AI team. Feed, Castro, Overcast, Spotify, or if you really want YouTube. »

17 June 2025

We’re trying an old idea again at NSLondon. If you’ve watched some WWDC sessions now, come and put it into practice coding together at a cafe on Sunday 29 June. Location TDB. Tell me if you know a great cafe we should meet at! I’m planning to use the time to test and update KeyboardKit for iOS 26. »

16 June 2025

Mac dictation just produced “There's a floor in the plan”. Classic homophone issue with flaw vs. floor, but surprising the language model doesn’t rank flaw as more likely. Maybe the term “floor plan” confuses it by marking these as two words often used together. »

15 June 2025

Very excited to be taking trains from London to the Norwegian fjords around Bergen next month for hiking and kayaking. I’ll stop in Copenhagen and Oslo on the way up. This will be my first time in Denmark and Sweden. 🇬🇧🇧🇪🇩🇪🇩🇰🇸🇪🇳🇴 »

Never thought this day would come: installed the native WhatsApp app on my iPad. Since their web app worked pretty well the last few months and Apple doesn’t allow web apps to live only in App Library, the biggest practical change with the native app is removing WhatsApp from my iPad dock. »

13 June 2025

And that’s WWDC labs wrapped up. Putting Webex away for another year. Only did 5 labs this year, but very useful as always. Thank you Apple people for the help! »

12 June 2025

Apple are running an in-person session in London covering their WWDC highlights. It’s only just over a week away. I applied. »

10 June 2025

Looks like registration for WWDC labs tomorrow already closed, presumably at 10pm BST since I submitted one fine at 9:57pm. The submissions for today’s labs were still open after midnight. How can I know when the submissions close each day? »

9 June 2025

Highly sceptical of this new windowing system on iPad. Looks messy. I'd use a Mac if I want a Mac. But we'll see. I think Stage Manager is a pretty good design, just very buggy. »

This looks interesting for our PDF Viewer app. »

What I want in macOS are more stunning aerial photographs as backgrounds like we had for Catalina and Big Sur. »

How is liquid glass going to look with reduce transparency enabled (which I use)? »

Hopefully they‘re saving the best until last for iPad. (Based on the order in the list of platforms shown near the start.) »

There was always a question of whether the ‘slides’ in WWDC keynotes were real or added digitally, but now it’s clear these are secretly visionOS windows. »

Is it just for me that typing into a Shortcuts “Ask for Input” action no longer works on Mac? Key events always go to the main Shortcuts window, so the only way to enter text is by pasting from the context menu. »

8 June 2025

Gah just booked an unchangeable train ticket an hour too early because of time zones like an absolute novice. You wouldn’t guess I work with a team where everyone is in a different time zone. At least it’s the first train of the day so I just have to be up a bit earlier. »

Since I might want real-time posting during Apple’s keynote tomorrow, I made my site build a bit quicker on GitHub Actions. My key finding is that calling swift has a high startup cost here. Even swift --version can take 9 seconds. I went with caching the compiled Swift build script. »

6 June 2025

Here’s a written version of my impromptu lightning talk at Swift Craft 2025 about the available options for codebases that work across Apple platforms. »