Just stumbled onto Itsycal, a menubar calendaring app. Spend a few minutes on the site and it's obvious how much the author cares, cares about making something nice that people will enjoy. There's such warmth in something like this! Wonderful to see. www.mowglii.com/itsycal/

I've been working on so many different projects at once—Retcon updates, a tiny app, blog posts, more—and really can't wait to publish them all. It seems I work better when frequently switching focus, but then there's the frustration of not having anything to show!

lovely photo of four-toed feet at my local podiatrist's office

The world feels quite precarious right now—and sometimes we forget what it feels like to pursue happiness. @alv9n.com digs into a study that asked more than 10,000 people to share their joy. From personal growth to friends and family, here’s our happiness mapped. pudding.cool/2026/02/happ...

PSA Outer Wilds is 50% off on Steam till Thursday! This is the biggest discount it's ever gotten; usually sales max at 40%. store.steampowered.com/app/753640/O...

On the topic of resizing windows: you can actually enlarge the (exterior) clickable area. Just run this and log out and back in. defaults write -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize 8 (Seems to default to 4. You can revert the change with `defaults delete -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize`)

A high-quality video about some low-quality code. Maybe seeing how a masterpiece like Portal is built on spaghetti code will help cure your perfectionism? Or maybe the video's polish will make it worse. (warning, this fully spoils Portal's ending!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax7Ab...

So, with @eidhof.nl we spent January making Pancake: an app for creating your own blog. Write posts then publish them, all from within the app. It’s both very rough and pretty neat! It’s out as a closed beta, and we have a short video of the one-minute setup process: chris.eidhof.nl/post/buildin...

WORLDWIDE release times for Relooted’s launch tomorrow!

Just had to force-quit Xcode because it was swallowing up memory. After relaunching it, its icon turned to this. I think it's depressed now?

The Apple indie dev community is undergoing an identity crisis. For decades, whatever Apple said was good, was good. People mostly agreed with their ethics, design priorities, way of doing business. Now that all of that has, well, severely degraded, it leaves us in the dark. The north star is gone.

The popup's title: "We Care About Your Privacy" The popup's very first sentence: "We and our 56 partners store and access personal data"

Look, you shouldn't do this. But turns out subscripts can have default values, meaning empty brackets are valid syntax. Why not use this to check types in a way that'll be confusing to everyone?

Trying a small design update to tabs: changing the design of both the "3 changes" and "paused" suffixes. Now they're badges: much clearer, and much more compact, so more info is shown (nice!). But they're also a bit more prominent; does it feel like the dot is nagging you about these  changes?

It's pretty funny reading update notes for apps with unusual purposes. Like this very serious description of the "enhanced gust frequency" in Let It Snow, an app for adding animated snow to your Mac screen.

Suddenly realizing that virtually every image on the Web is Retina, now. Boy did that take a long time! It's nice to see.

Welcome to Mothership. ✨ mothership.blog

via wiktionary

Retcon 1.5.3 changes the Rebase shortcut from ⌃⌘R to ⌥⌘R. Hopefully that doesn't break too much muscle memory (sorry!), but makes more sense, given than ⌥⌘M is for merging. And this frees up ⌃⌘R for (eventually) being used for Reset, which is certainly a less common operation than Rebase.

New short note on the blog! It's about caching computing properties, on SwiftUI views. pending.design/swiftui-memoiz...

Current bug: sometimes the "d" key on my Mac suddenly stops working. Goes inert. But as soon as I bring up the Keyboard Viewer, the bug goes away. Such mystery! (this feels like an app's global shortcut going wrong, but who knows. maybe related, the Dock's ⇧⌘D shortcut has a multi-hour delay)

The navigation mesh in the game prototype we're working on with a friend. I love how that sort of visualization is automatically super pretty! (it defines the areas in which computer-controlled characters are allowed to move. it's automatically generated as a patchwork of polygons) #gamedev

This tiny little filter menu took hours of investigating/fighting AppKit quirks. It's so cute, though!

Voice Isolation is excellent. It's very effective: I literally shattered a glass while on a call and my friend heard nothing. But it's also delicate: it'll let through sighs, some throat clearing, "huh" sounds. So it filters out distracting noises, while preserving non-verbal communication—perfect!

In December 2024, I bought the Raspberry Pi USB 3 Hub, on this recommendation by @felixschwarz.bsky.social. I’ve since had virtually no sudden disk disconnections—which is so refreshing, after struggling with external drive issues for years and years. A happy purchase! mas.to/@felix_schwa...

Wrote a quick tool that shows CPU usage history, per process. Already it's showing something strange: Time Machine backups seem to cause significant spikes for SystemUIServer, even though that process is only supposed to manage menu bar extras. Might be because I've hidden the TM icon using Ice?

Last month I gave a short talk on some of the optimizations in Retcon 1.4. It's really nothing groundbreaking, but hopefully it's fun to watch; a bunch of attendees did tell me they liked it, although maybe they were describing the meetup's free pizza. Watch it here: www.youtube.com/live/UtpTct_u...

Here’s something different! Making an icon is a super interesting process of problem solving. I recorded an overview of some of the various iterations the Retcon icon went through for its Tahoe update, and the reasoning for everything. Please tell me what you think! pending.design/retcon-icon-...

Alongside today's small bugfix update, a neat addition to the release notes: badges, that indicate what version you currently have installed, and which versions are new. Previously the solution was to filter the list to only show newer versions; this is much clearer, I think!

If people are right about Dye, and his successor, I'm really looking forward to seeing things steadily improve. Small improvements, one by one, over the years. Things being fixed, clever touches of usability appearing in dot updates. It'll be so healing—quite the contrast to the past few years.

Did you know that in 2025, Apple wrote some quality conceptual documentation about AppKit, that walks you through two thirds of implementing system services support? (okay this is a slight mischaracterization. but still!) developer.apple.com/documenta...

I just got phished! Fell for a breathless "95% off rail cards, 48h only". Shared it with my mom, too. Feeling ashamed, but also, the site was actually really well made? It featured this (sadly realistic) inane captcha, an age check (cards are age range-specific), and even my real name in the email.

I've been working on a game prototype with a friend, and it's such fun. Even in our very simple setup, tweaking anything is instantly gratifying. A game is a collection of systems, so any change has ripple effects. You can play with your code: not just see the change, but get a visceral feel for it

Not going to make any friends saying this, but in just one year and two months, the iPhone will be 20 years old 🫣

Wanted to make a simple change a friend requested (a default selection in Retcon's Welcome window), and ended up: fixing the drop rectangle on Tahoe, making sure the selection gets preserved, fixing focus performance, and fixing a total freeze in a totally different area. Love that sort of cascade 😃

Ohh: in Apple Notes, you can tag a note by right-clicking on it, and choosing a tag in the submenu. Importantly, this does NOT update its modification date! As someone who’s unnaturally fixated on preserving correct dates for things, this is a very good find.

The new icon makes the most of the new style and constraints. It pairs well with Xcode's own icon, but remains true to its predecessor, expanding on its design. Hopefully, Retcon will still feel right at home in your Dock!

Retcon 1.5 releases today! It brings an updated UI on Tahoe, a redesigned icon, and an assortment of improvements and fixes. Update from the Retcon menu, or get the app from retcon.app. (please also update to macOS 26.1, which resolves many system bugs, some of which impact Retcon)

Has anyone seen this? It seems like on the Watch, Live Activities sometimes show up as an overlay, on top of the current app. (rather than showing up just in the Smart Stack) But last time it happened, for a different app, I swiped it down, and it never came back for that app.

My blog posts have share images now! They're drawn by a SwiftUI script that I manually run offline. The text size is picked automatically using ViewThatFits; the clouds are randomly cropped from a wide screenshot of the web page itself, so that each thumbnail is different pending.design/making-retc

Now available: Retcon β47, a bugfix beta. It fixes a few things, including a longstanding annoyance where Retcon would cause other apps to get confused about the Git stage. It's something I'd often hit with Xcode so I'm happy to see it go! Please do report back if you find something unexpected.

Working on Retcon's design update for Tahoe (it can't be avoided) and finding it really hard to put my heart into it. Like many, I dislike the design in the first place, so I have no love for the small details I'm trying to sweat :(

Tried this rough diff highlighting tweak on a whim, and it feels like there's something to it? Lines which Retcon managed to match (a delete with an add) are gray, with only the inline highlights in color. Makes it easier to spot the highlights, and also to know when there's none. Thoughts?

My HomePod mini would erratically play/pause music on its own. Turns out, the screen was detecting phantom touches—eventually it even got into a reboot loop, as if touch was constantly held down. A friend came by and *unplugged the touchscreen* as a fix. Radical buttttt I use Siri anyway!

A really cool accessible map of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, at La Vilette in Paris. It's not just usable by people with low vision, it also looks super rad!

New blog post! Retcon 1.4 got a lot faster. Much of that speed is owed to caches. Straightforward caches, oddly-specific caches, hard-to-invalidate caches, the works. Here's some details about them! pending.design/making-retcon-...

Added a small callout animation to pending.design/ for when you click a footnote backlink! (doesn't seem to be working on iOS, though. weird)

I love that there's an (abandoned) Twitter client called Retcon: github.com/JGRennison/retcon @retcon's codename was Bluebird, because I kept calling commits "tweets" by mistake. I envisioned a "bird mode" setting, that would play Apple's cheerful tweet sound whenever you committed. Tweet tweet!

Just tweaked my blog so that Safari's toolbar blends into the page. Look at that expansive sky 😌 pending.design (only on Mac and iPad, because that made the bottom bar look strange on iPhone)