The World’s Favourite Open Source RSS ReaderTM has been updated to version 6.0 on iPhone and iPad. I don’t often write about releases, but this one is significant and it’s been almost a year in the making.
The headline features of this release are iCloud syncing, Twitter and Reddit integrations, home screen widgets, and support for a host of new syncing services.
iCloud Syncing
iCloud…
The Distant Past
Before iOS 14, the default email app on iOS was Mail. Of course, you could have had other email apps installed, but they’d never be the app used by the system when tapping on an email address. You’d always end up in Mail.
This made things easy for developers. If you wanted give users the ability to send emails from within your app, you’d use MFMailComposeViewController.…
What’s New?
Singapore Buses now supports Look Around (where available) so you can see the surrounding area of a bus stop.
Singapore Buses+, a new subscription offering, allows you to remove ads and enables support for Live Activities.
Live Activities—next-generation arrival tracking—allows you to track up to five upcoming arrivals from your Lock Screen and, where available, from the Dynamic…
It’s the last day of 2024! I launched this version of Singapore Buses in September 2023, so 2024 is the first full year of statistics I have available. The data below is captured through Firebase and App Store Connect.
Number of sessions: 133,000
Geolocation Alerts (to tell a user when they’ve arrived): 1,600
Live Activities: 627
Crashes: 48 (though 0 since October)
End of Year Ratings:
4.6…
Prior to iOS 16, UISheetPresentationController only supported two detents: medium and large. With iOS 16, we can now create our own detent with a custom height.
sheetPresentationController?.detents = [.medium(), .large()]
In iOS 16, create a detent identifier and then create a detent with that identifier and provide a maximum height.
let smallId =…
NetNewsWire 6.1 is out now on macOS, and custom themes are the tentpole feature. Yes, custom themes, for your RSS reader. It’s not just changing the tint colour or the font, custom themes change the entire reading experience. It sounds nuts. It is nuts. It is also great fun.
From version 6.1, NetNewsWire will recognise .nnwtheme theme packages and install them automatically.
Two of my…
Imagine being next to this when it hit the ground. No thanks.
⚠️ This review reflects the features and fixes introduced in the ELEMNT WG29-300745 firmware, released on 19 December 2024.
My Garmin Edge 530 was a temperamental device. On more than one occasion it would freeze, reboot, and lose portions of a ride. Garmin rarely updated maps. And, for one reason or another, Edge devices have a user interface that is largely inscrutable.
For those reasons, I…
Enabling screen recording requires the installation of third party software. These instruction are for the Mac. Proceed at your own risk.
Here’s what you’ll need:
A Mac (Apple Silicon or Intel will do)
The OpenMTP application
A USB-C cable
First, install OpenMTP. This can be done in two ways:
Download and install the appropriate Apple Silicon or Intel version of OpenMTP from the website;…
Like other developers, I’ve spent a few weeks with Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language. In some areas, I think it’s tremendous: the macOS dock, iOS folders, text selection hover effects on iOS, and the new sidebars are standout elements. In other areas, it’s middling: toolbars and tab bars that don’t update quite in *real-time *as advertised leave the UI looking out-of-sync with the…
Raphael Boyd, The Guardian:
The claim is being brought against the company by Dr Rachael Kent, an academic at King’s College London, on behalf of herself and about 19.6 million other iPhone and iPad users in the UK.
…
“This is the behaviour of a monopolist and is unacceptable. Ordinary people’s use of apps is growing all the time, and the last year in particular has increased our dependence on…
Louie Mantia:
To me, modern UI isn’t getting out of the way, it’s often asserting itself over the content it claims to get out of the way of.
In Liquid Glass, there are obvious places where this is absolutely true—the big Play/Pause button in Quicktime being an example.
We’re only on beta 2, but there’s so much to refine between now and September.
Singapore Buses 2025.6.1 is now available in the App Store. There are no user facing changes in this release, but here’s a rundown of what has changed:
Uses a new version of the Singapore Buses API (which paves the way for a much larger update later in the year)1
Removes Google Firebase
Reduced the download size by approximately 3MB
If you enjoy using Singapore Buses, try the premium features…
Toolbars, Tab Bars, and Search
After around six years dabbling with Ghost and static site builders I’ve migrated back to WordPress.
First impressions of the wp-admin panel were “meh”. It’s not really changed in the last few years and it’s really not as nice as Ghost’s admin panel. It does the job, though.
The Gutenberg editor, however, is amazing. It’s such a massive improvement—at least from memory—over the old WYSWYG…
Mind blown 🤯. I’ve only returned to using WordPress for a few days but *WPFail2Ban *is already proving its worth. Just a sample of the logs I’ve been seeing over the last few hours:
Blocked username authentication attempt for admin2 from
Blocked username authentication attempt for maria from
Blocked username authentication attempt for wordpress from…
A list of current bugs.
Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:
…iPhone 17 Pro:
Black
White
Grey
Dark Blue
Orange
MacRumors concept (the Orange looks like Bellroy Caramel)
Does Apple have an institutional allergy when it comes to giving their Pro* *devices *fun *colours?
A familiar, financial look.
Federation and analytics are standout features.
They are getting there.
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
Apple today provided developers with the fourth betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming two weeks after Apple seeded the third betas.
I am still left with two bugs on iPad that I can’t get to the bottom of.
Sidebar
The first, above, is a sidebar that doesn’t react to light and dark mode changes, always leaving text looking black.…
I love Ghost, but I simply can’t get their ActivityPub functionality to work in a self-hosted configuration.
I have done extensive testing:
using the New Install (i.e., Docker) option
on both Digital Ocean and Vultr
with this domain and fresh domain
using self-hosted and Ghost’s own ActivityPub infrastructure
using a Ghost admin domain at site.tld/ghost and admin.site.tld
proxying and not…
I'm running into similar issues when using Ghost(Pro).
More changes to Liquid Glass and some welcome fixes.
A look at Liquid Glass changes coming to NetNewsWire on iPad and iPhone.
A look at some of the changes coming to NetNewsWire on the Mac.
A more detailed map for Singapore.
A new start with a new design, Fediverse connectivity, membership, and private analytics.
