My Books
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SwiftUI for Mac 2025
Read More »Almost every year, I write an article and a sample app, exploring the new features of SwiftUI, with particular emphasis on Mac app development. This year, it feels like the operating systems are becoming more uniform, so there is not a lot that's Mac-specific, but there are several new features that I am keen to explore.
Usually, I write an app that downloads images from HTTP Cats as well as demonstrating other features. This year, navigation hasn't really changed, so the HTTP Cats app didn't seem relevant. Instead, I've created a sample app that features some of the new aspects of SwiftUI for macOS 26.
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WWDC 2025
Read More »Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is over for another year. As I wrote in an earlier post, I am not happy about Apple's management and their attitude to third-party developers, but there is no doubt that their own developers are doing some amazing work. I've been away and was then busy launching my new book, so I have not caught up with all the new announcements yet, but here are my initial impressions...
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New Book: Escape from Tutorial Hell
Read More »I've written a new book, and this one is quite different from my previous books. Instead of being a coding guide, this one is a guide to designing, building, shipping and maintaining real apps. It does include some coding, but the emphasis is on the process, not the code. As usual, I concentrate on macOS but the core principles apply to all Apple platforms.
I wrote this book for people who have done some tutorials, read books, watched videos, and who know some Swift and SwiftUI but are finding it difficult to make the leap from there to working on their own apps. It's also for more experienced developers who want to learn how to design and structure their projects to make them easier to maintain.
You can buy the book from Gumroad and you can read the introduction and first chapter for free at Escape from Tutorial Hell Sample.
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Apple Developer Relations
Read More »Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference is just weeks away, but I'm sensing a lot of apathy in the community. The company's relationship with third-party developers is at a low point.
We all know that Tim Cook and his senior people will stand up at WWDC and say how much they value their developers and boast about how much money they've paid out to them. Being so enthusiastic about the money is very strange - it's like a rent collector bragging about how much money he has given to the landlord when all he's doing is collecting the rent and taking his cut. And it's difficult to take Apple's apparent enthusiasm for their developers seriously given their behavior over the rest of the year.
Trust is a hard thing to gain. Apple used to have the developers' trust but now they've lost it. It's much more difficult to regain lost trust than it is to gain it in the first place. I have read many reports of talented developers leaving the Apple ecosystem because they can't take it any more. This is bad for all of us, but particularly bad for Apple.
I don't imagine that anyone at Apple reads my blog, but I have thought of some things I think they could do to improve their relationship with their developers.
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Man Reader 2.1
Read More »I've just released Man Reader 2.1. Visually, this is very similar to the previous version, but there are a lot of quality of life improvements under the hood.
The most important feature of this release is that the app no longer crashes when typing fast into the search field. Sorry it took me so long to fix this, which was due to the way the app communicated between the AppKit list in the sidebar and the SwiftUI search field. SwiftUI lists have become a lot more performant, so I put a lot of effort into trying to make the entire app SwiftUI but in the end, it was just too sluggish so I reverted to AppKit, but with added traps to avoid crashing.