An Alerting Vista of Sonoma

There’s a new “feature” in Sonoma, and no one besides Apple is quite sure what it is. Alerts for deprecated APIs are now appearing frequently. Sometimes when you launch an app, and sometimes at random. Here are three I got the other day after waking a MacBook from sleep: From a UI point-of-view, these alerts […]

Announcing Blank

I’m happy to announce the release of a new tvOS app called Blank. It turns your screen black and keeps it that way until you press any button on a remote. Seriously, that’s all it does. Here’s the screen you see when you launch the app for the first time: That second paragraph hints at […]

SimBuddy – Your Simulator’s BFF

Have you ever added code like this to your app? print(Bundle.main.resourcePath!) print(FileManager.default.urls(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask).first!.path) Or maybe you’ve been frustrated that you can’t add that code because you’re in the middle of debugging? Yeah, me too. Many times. The locations shown above, and many others, are available from Xcode using the xcrun simctl command. Every application on […]

Managing Xcode Downloads

Beginning with Xcode 14, the Simulators for watchOS and tvOS are available as separate downloads (iOS and macOS are still “built-in”). This reduces the app download size significantly, but it also means that you now have to manage these large (3-4 GB) components yourself. When you launch Xcode 14 the first time, you are prompted […]

Behind the App: Wallaroo

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these deep dives on what goes on behind the scenes during the development of an Iconfactory app. There’s a common thread to each one: I feel the need to document our work when there’s a major change in how we build user interfaces. The first one was […]