Great evening at NSLondon yesterday. Thank you to Flo for hosting us, and to our speakers Harry, Anastasia and James. I really liked the range of talks.

lol special announcement on the train from Brussels to London now saying their Wi-Fi is “not the best” and to please stream the football using your own 4G/5G connection instead.

Heading to Berlin today for Local First Conference. It‘s a software conference themed around goals rather than technologies. Very interested to see how this goes and what other people there are building.

I’m seeing a regression in Apple Shortcuts where “Count Characters in …” says “Unable to decode file contents” when passed rich text. Workaround: Add a “Get text from (rich text)” and count with that instead. (I’m on macOS 26.5 but this might have been there for a while.)

Limited social connection was always a challenge with remote work, but with AI human-to-human communication is further minimised. We exchange messages with people’s robots, or more likely we have our robots talk to their robots. Efficient, but makes me think it would be nice to hang out with people.

Notes from attending the RustWeek conference in Utrecht.

Looking forward to being back in Wales in September to talk about Rust at iOSDevUK. Early bird conference tickets are available until the end of this month. It’s my favourite and best-value iOS conference. Also let me know if you’re interested in hiking in Eryri/Snowdonia the weekend before.

WWDC labs are conspicuously missing from the activities this year. (The private WebEx calls usually with the person who worked on the thing you're asking about.) At Nutrient, we found these the most valuable part of WWDC.

I’m excited to be learning news things at the RustWeek conference in the Netherlands.

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...

NSLondon@nslondon.com · 4mo ago

🚗💚 Join us for an exciting evening hosted by JustPark in Kings Cross! 📅 When: Thursday, 14th May, 6:30pm Talks by Raphael Velasqua, Paul Shone, and Vadim Popov ✍️ RSVPs open Mon, 4th May at 1pm www.meetup.com/nslondon/eve...

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

Swift Connection Conference

Swift Connection, previously FrenchKit - The French Conference dedicated to iOS, Swift and other Apple Technologies. Paris, November 2026. The first French conference entirely dedicated to the communi...

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

Swift Craft : News archive

swiftcraft.uk

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.