Douglas Hill’s recent posts

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. »

4 June 2025

Mac pro tip: Use option + shift + brightness up/down to change the brightness in smaller increments. The increments seem different on the 2024 MacBook Pro compared to the 2021 model, so indoors I often find 6 bars too dim but 7 bars too bright. 6.25 bars is about right. »

2 June 2025

It’s one decade since I started at Nutrient/PSPDFKit! We’ve grown, and a lot has changed, but not everything: same remote lifestyle, open communication, and drive to improve. After 45k messages and 2554 pull requests from me, we’re still happily using Slack, GitHub and Google Workspace. »

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. »