turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef
I mostly write about Swift, Objective-C, iOS, open source, and other software development topics. Sometimes I write about the ethics of tech, labor, and politics. I also write satire pieces, personal essays, and notes on what I'm currently reading.
I was reminded today of Apple’s ‘Get A Mac’ ad campaign from the early 2000s (thanks to Jeff Johnson’s recent post). Now well over a decade old, those Mac vs PC commercials depicted a “Mac” played by Justin Long and a “PC” played by John Hodgman. They were incredibly popular and entertaining — and successful. I remember getting my very first MacBook around the time this campaign started.
After upgrading to macOS Ventura, I decided to upgrade my Ruby version and ran into issues trying to build my site locally.
I finally upgraded to macOS Ventura recently — about a month ago. As usual, I waited until the first point release, 13.1 (22C65). Although I have experienced few severe issues with upgrading over the past few years, a couple of bad experiences and others’ reports of bugs leave me skeptical and apprehensive each year. I miss the old days of OS X when I would upgrade on day one without any concerns at all.
If you have ever worked on an iOS app, you have definitely used UINavigationController. It has been around since iOS 2 and is a fundamental component in UIKit. Yet, there is one very powerful API that you might not know about.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve likely noticed that my blog posts are automatically tweeted for me. There are multiple services you can use to do this, like Zapier and IFTTT. I use both services for various automations. Each has built-in actions for listening to an RSS feed and then tweeting new items as they appear. Sadly, neither service has a built-in action for Mastodon. However, we can achieve the same results with a generic webhook action on both platforms.
I finally decided to create an account on Mastodon. You can follow me at @jsq@mastodon.social. I put this off for so long because I was skeptical and I did not want to manage another social account, but it has turned out to be pretty fucking awesome.
The main appeal of building apps in SwiftUI is being able to share UI code across platforms, in particular iOS and macOS. It is not perfect and you often have to do some #if os() checks, but when it works it is truly great. Before SwiftUI was around, you could already share a lot of (non-UI) code between iOS and macOS. Many of the system frameworks are available on both platforms, for example Foundation and Core Data. Occasionally there are API differences, but they rarely impose a significant burden.
On iOS the operating system employs a watchdog that monitors for and terminates unresponsive apps. If your app is blocking the main thread for too long, the system will kill it. In crash reports, you can identify watchdog terminations via the termination reason code 0x8badf00d (“ate bad food”).
One of the most important parts of software development is tracking changes. Documenting what is going into a release is necessary not only to simply know what changed and inform your users by writing good release notes, but also to track down issues when something goes wrong. If there’s a new bug or a new crash in your latest release, you need to be able to quickly find the change that introduced the problem.
This is a follow-up to my previous post regarding my website getting de-indexed by Bing, and thus DuckDuckGo. (Sorry for the delay, I’ve been away.) It turns out that a number of sites were experiencing this issue, including my friend Jeff Johnson. While I do not have concrete data on how widespread the issue was, anecdotally it appears to have been a significant problem.
I have been mostly offline for about two months. Or, at least I have not been writing here like usual, nor posting on Twitter. I have been very disconnected, particularly from work but also the internet in general, starting right before WWDC this year. I still have not watched a single WWDC video, not even the keynote. I have hundreds of unread posts in my RSS reader. And, I am a month behind on reading iOS Dev Weekly.
I wrote an essay in 2018 reflecting on the 15-year anniversary of my sister’s death. I still think it’s one of the most beautiful pieces I’ve written. Today is her birthday. Amy would have turned 35.
I’m happy to share that Nimble 10.0 has been released. It includes a number of fixes, improvements, and new features. It joins the latest release of Quick. For both of these libraries, these are the first releases in almost a year.
When I first wrote about DocC, I lamented the fact that it was incompatible with static hosting on GitHub Pages. Much has changed since my last post, so let’s take a fresh look. While there have been many welcome improvements to the tool, there are a few remaining issues that prevent me from adopting it for my open source projects.
According to various reports ([1], [2], [3], [4]), GitHub is suspending accounts of Russian developers and organizations linked to or associated with organizations sanctioned by the US government over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it appears that GitHub did not think this through entirely, because these account suspensions are fucking up my projects.
My website is still missing from DuckDuckGo’s and Bing’s search indexes. And now other sites are reporting similar issues.
If you develop for Apple platforms and use a third-party testing framework, you are very likely using Quick and Nimble. Otherwise, you have probably at least heard of them. I don’t use any third-party testing frameworks in my personal projects, but I have worked on teams that do. And I currently work on a team that uses Quick and Nimble, which is why it was important for me to get a recent critical bug fixed in Quick.
If you are using fastlane to automate your release process, you might be using the increment_version_number and increment_build_number actions to bump your version and build numbers, respectively. However, if your Xcode project is configured to use xcconfig files, then you are out of luck. Shockingly, fastlane does not seem to support projects that use xcconfig files and there is a surprising dearth of information online about how to make fastlane work with Xcode build configuration files.
My previous post sparked some questions and discussion around release branch strategies. There are two main strategies that I know about that I’ve used on different teams and projects. I think it’s worth elaborating on the differences between the two, especially when considering different types of automation for managing releases, which was the topic of my previous post.
A typical release process for Git workflows involves creating a release branch, performing various tests on that branch, and applying any necessary fixes or changes to that branch. Once stable and ready to release, you create a build from the release branch, create a git tag, and finally merge the release branch changes back into your main branch.
I discovered earlier this week that my website is no longer being indexed by Bing and DuckDuckGo. In fact, it appears that it has been deliberately removed from their search indexes. On Bing, rather than display a “no results” message, it displays a “Some results have been removed” message, which is very concerning. Notably, however, Google search is working fine.
I previously wrote about writing a custom shell command to quickly switch between Xcodes. But recently, I needed to determine the version of Swift that is bundled with Xcode — specifically the version of Swift that is shipping with the current Xcode 13.3 beta. I was pretty sure that it is Swift 5.6, but I wanted to know for certain.
I have been experiencing bizarre kernel panics with my Mac lately. I have a 2020 Intel MacBook Pro, the last Intel model before the M1 debuted. It has generally been working fine. Despite poor software quality and numerous bugs lurking around in macOS, I rarely see kernel panics anymore. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a kernel panic before this issue. There have been no major changes on my machine and I’m on the latest version of Monterey.
In Swift there are 13 numeric types. Like most other programming languages, Swift provides signed integers of various sizes, corresponding unsigned integers, and a few floating-point types. But if you’ve been developing apps for Apple platforms for any amount of time, you’ll recognize another numeric type — Decimal (aka NSDecimalNumber). When we build the model layer of an app, it’s important to choose the right type for the task we want to accomplish. For example, if we are counting ticket sales for an event, then Int (or possibly UInt) would be the most appropriate type. But if we are calculating sales tax, then we’ll need to use a floating-point type. You likely know that Double is more precise than Float, but what about Decimal? When should you reach for Decimal instead?
A recent post from Tom Harrington explores the issues with optional and non-optional values in Core Data regarding how the framework interacts with Swift. It’s a good overview. You should read it. The post shares some workarounds to improve the situation, but I want to share how I solve these issues in a more robust way.
As a user, the recent issues with iCloud are extremely frustrating — especially if you’ve paid for iCloud and paid for apps that use iCloud. It seems like the iCloud team is having a difficult time preventing and avoiding clusterfucks. The lack of reliability should be a concern to everyone.
You may have heard that Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh passed way on January 22. A true loss. I started reading Thich Nhat Hanh a few years ago. I have especially enjoyed the Mindfulness Essentials Series, which I continue to re-read. It’s nice to read one or two passages a day as I drink tea or coffee in the mornings. His writing has had a profound impact on me, and has been incredibly helpful over the years.
Speaking of drunk software and not being in service to our possessions, Screen Time on iOS and macOS has been shockingly buggy for me lately. It reports that I spent over 22 hours on my devices in a single day last week, and nearly 10 hours on another day this week. In both instances, a significant portion of the usage is supposedly occurring after midnight.
After reading Moxie’s post about web3, I looked around and found another piece of his writing from 2012 titled, The Worst. It’s also worth reading.