We’re trying something new for NSLondon this month: If you’re a woman, non-binary, or otherwise feel underrepresented in the London iOS developer community, you can request an early-access spot by filling in this very short form. General availability opens at 1pm BST this Monday on Meetup.

To help address existing imbalances in attendance, we’re offering a limited number of early-access spots to women, non-binary people, and others who are currently underrepresented in the iOS developer community Request a space 👉 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

SwiftConnection seems to be announced on November 2-3. swiftconnection.io

TIL about the ContactProvider framework on iOS (not Mac). Sounds like a way to build an end-to-end encrypted replacement for iCloud/CalDAV contacts sync if you can get your head around the difference between ContactItemEnumerating and ContactItemEnumerator.

Interesting evening yesterday at Rust London learning all sorts. Dan Groshev spoke about picking a dominant colour from an image. (I used a similar approach in Jamie Oliver‘s Recipes in 2014.) Jérôme Étévé gave a talk on Mokaccino and Evadne Wu on sandboxing AI agents.

At NSLondon we’re meeting for coffee on Sat 18th followed by a stroll in Hyde Park if the weather is fine. Bring a laptop and show your coding project. I’ll be there with non-iOS projects.

I hope everyone going has a fantastic time at NSLondon at Apple Battersea this evening. Beautiful space, and both talks sound really useful. Bit of a shame I’m away.

One day I assume there will be a Mac with Internal Headphones to explain the need for this precise copy writing.

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

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.

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.

😳 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

That’s some long overdue cleanup. Ask your parents about [email protected].

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.

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

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.

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.)

We’re hosting an NSLondon pub evening tomorrow in conjunction with the Server-Side Swift Conference. Sign up on Meetup or just turn up. (I’m away but back in the UK next week for SwiftLeeds.)

Our PDF Viewer update for iOS 26 and macOS 26 is out on Apple’s app store. It’s glass time.

Update of our PDF SDK ready for the new design on iOS 26 is out. Hard designing for Liquid Glass without having many examples of other apps yet. It was an amazing team effort getting this out during our company retreat! Read more in the Nutrient iOS SDK 26 release notes.

On iOS 26, I don’t understand how having every toolbar button jiggle when navigating between screens helps “bring focus to the underlying content”.

Excited about this new book. The sequel to my favourite book of last year.

We’re running another NSLondon coffee and code morning tomorrow. Meet at 11 at WatchHouse Marble Arch by Hyde Park. I’ll be there.

For some reason, Xcode 26 beta is reverting our swiftpm/Package.resolved file from the version 3 format to version 1. I guess it‘s fine, just annoying diff noise as the whole file changes. I’m concerned it‘s going to want to go back to version 3 next week.

We released Nutrient iOS SDK 14.12 (formerly PSPDFKit). The release notes aren’t really about this release, but instead about what’s happening next month. Apple’s big UI update needs navigating carefully, as using the wrong version of Xcode will lead to trouble.

Trying to use dictation more at work to give my wrists a break, but end up with nonsense like “Revenue cat five switches to stalk it too”. (It’s about this.)

I wrote a detailed article reviewing the range of NotificationCenter APIs (selector, closure, Combine, async sequence), leading up to MainActorMessage and AsyncMessage. Also covers some API design considerations and bridging between messages and notifications.

We have a new blog post from Shadrach going deep with new App Intents API in iOS 26 for interactive snippets, which can used to add steps in Shortcuts that dynamically receive input from the user.

Had to look up a thing in a project in CLAUDE.md because it was more comprehensive than README.md. Humans usability is now a secondary concern.

🚀 NEW SPEAKER 🚀 We are super excited to confirm our next speaker as @douglashill.co. Douglas is invested in the iPad as a developer and user. He’s an organiser of the @nslondon.com and enjoys travelling while working remotely. We can't wait to welcome Douglas to SwiftLeeds. swiftleeds.co.uk

Today’s lesson: With Foundation Models, use the same beta of Xcode and iOS. Any use of Tool calling using Xcode 26 beta 4 running on iOS 26 beta 5 crashes at launch with dyld: Symbol not found: _$s16FoundationModels16GeneratedContentV10propertiesACs13KeyValuePairsVySSAA013ConvertibleTocD0_pG_tcfC.

For our iOS team at Nutrient, WWDC is a very special week, so I wanted to share how we make the most of this exciting occasion. We do remote WWDCs like we used to do in-person WWDCs: We set aside other work and focus on labs, learning and experimentation.

Interesting email in my inbox. I’m thinking about purchasing Greenland next.