Douglas Hill

Here’s a roundup of upcoming Swift/iOS conferences in Europe. UK conference scene is strong!

Hmm that‘s a good point. In the past I’m sure there was a section at the bottom of the Software Update screen that let you install updates to different major versions when available, but I’m not seeing that now (even when moving off the iOS 18 beta track).

Great evening at Engineering Kiosk Alps hosted by Cloudflight. Similar format to NSLondon. Talks:

Anna Larch: Nextcloud is good place to work. Like Nutrient: ~160 people, remote, high trust, no fixed hours.
Beate Öttl: Still good to avoid building the wrong thing fast.

They're good at bringing security patches to older versions. E.g. last iOS 15 update was 20 days ago, so I'm not too worried about that.

This trick from Cult of Mac to disable iOS 26 update nags seems to be working well on my iPad running iOS 18: Enable iOS 18 Developer Betas. Suddenly the OS is “up to date”. No more red badges or notifications that can’t otherwise be turned off.

In 2025, I read 50% more books than in 2024, all DRM-free, mostly audiobooks. I wrote about my reading trends and shared some book picks from the year, featuring Min Jin Lee, Marjan Kamali, Sarah Wynn-Williams and more.

Removed LinkedIn way to follow my posts, since it wasn’t working anyway. The cross posting from Micro.blog doesn’t seem reliable, and I don’t want to look at LinkedIn to check for replies.

iPhone mini simulator home screen screenshot showing a red status bar showing only the text “😳 rdar:45025538”

😳 rdar:45025538

I’ll be away, but London people we have an NSLondon pub evening this coming Thursday 29th on Chancery Lane. This is in coordination with the organisers of the SwiftCraft conference in Folkestone in May, which had great speakers last year and is in a lovely venue by the sea.

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

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.

Not really. From quick research, it sounds like roughly half of people use two or more languages.

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.

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.

Swift Craft : News archive

We are back at the Leas Cliff Hall, May 18-20, 2026! 🌊

Super Early Bird tickets just dropped. Lowest price ever (£249 Indie / £349 Corp). Strictly limited to the first 10 tickets

Grab yours before the price goes up: swiftcraft.uk/news

#iOSDev #SwiftLang #SwiftCraft26

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.

Cross-posting from Micro.blog. The Bluesky API supports rich text: docs.bsky.app/docs/advance...

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.

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.

Screenshot of alert from Xcode: The file

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.

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

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

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.

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."

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?

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

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.

Sketchnote titled "PencilKit" discussing its features and tools for drawing on devices. It highlights challenges in drawing—like erasing, pressure sensitivity, and performance—alongside benefits of PencilKit.

Quick intro to PencilKit from @douglashill.co 🐧 🐧
#sketchnote #SwiftLeeds25

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”.

SwiftLeeds day 2

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.

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

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

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.)