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  • A Stupid-Simple Automated iOS Build Script

    July 27, 2019 4 min read

    I’ve worked with a bunch of different automated iOS build systems over the years at the various companies I’ve worked for and with my own apps. In the early days of the App Store, many of these were completely home grown. As the toolchain matured, I’ve dealt with Xcode bots as well as dedicated SaaS […]

  • More Apple Photos Fuckery

    July 6, 2019 3 min read

    Back in May I posted a Twitter rant about how iCloud Photos was fucking up videos I shot on my phone after upgrading to iOS 12.3. I’m happy to report that hasn’t happened again. But now I’m running into this… Every two months I upload a bunch of photos to Shutterfly and mail physical prints […]

  • Reviving an Old Mac App

    June 22, 2019 3 min read

    A long time ago, on a Mac far, far away… In 2011 I had an idea for a tiny little Mac app called CommandQ. I’m a terrible touch-typist and it just so happens that on U.S. style keyboard layouts, the Q and W keys are right next to each other. That means I’d often press […]

  • The Mac Won’t Be Sherlocked

    June 10, 2019 7 min read

    With last week’s WWDC news announcing that Catalyst (Marzipan) is now an official thing, there have been a metric crap-ton of Twitter Hot Takes™ declaring UIKit the one true way forward. I’m not going to debate that. Instead, I just want to point out that not everything in computing revolves around a 44pt tap target […]

  • My Favorite Email Spam Filtering Rule

    June 9, 2019 3 min read

    All of my email is hosted at FastMail across two domains: And across those two domains I basically have just three email addresses. [email protected] is my primary email address that I migrated to when I switched away from Gmail five years ago. And then there’s [email protected], which was originally my customer support address but has […]

  • Automatically backup up the full contents of your Pinboard (and Pocket) bookmarks in DEVONthink

    June 7, 2019 3 min read

    This is a followup to my post last week about archiving your existing Pinboard bookmarks into DEVONthink. I wanted to clarify two points and also explain the new workflow I’ve setup to automatically archive any new websites I bookmark – whether in Pinboard or Pocket. Anyway, here’s what I’m doing now. With all of my […]

  • How to Import Your Pinboard Bookmarks Into DEVONthink and Convert Them to Searchable Web Archives

    May 30, 2019 2 min read

    Pinboard is a web-based bookmarking service that can optionally crawl the websites you save and store a complete copy of how they appeared at that time. Because Pinboard is a good web citizen, they allow you to request an archive of all of your bookmarks and their saved contents as a tar.gz file. I recently […]

  • My One Feature Request For iOS 13

    May 27, 2019 3 min read

    With WWDC fast approaching, it’s the time of year when everyone posts their hopes and dreams and predictions for Apple’s upcoming software release. There’s tons of great ideas out there, and I certainly have my own feature requests both as a developer and as a consumer, but I just want to write today about one […]

  • Creating a Permanent SSH Tunnel Back to Your Mac at Home

    May 26, 2019 5 min read

    Today’s post is a bit more technical than what I’ve been writing about lately, but it’s also partly for my own reference to save me some googling when I forget everything again in the future. I was always a big fan of Apple’s Back to My Mac service. I found it incredibly useful to be […]

  • Apple Asked For Feedback

    May 24, 2019 2 min read

    Apple asked for feedback from developers today in an email survey. I try to keep this blog positive and restrict most of my snark to Twitter, but I figured I might as well post it here, too. If you can’t see that image for some reason, here’s what I wrote: I’m a long-time, independent Mac […]