Andrew Mackarous 🇨🇦

10 July

Signed up for iOS 27 Beta 3 mostly to get ahead of the Siri AI waitlist before the public beta. Got approved in about 3 minutes. I'm actually incredibly surprised by how good it is.

1 July

Anybody have any idea how ChatGPT is doing this popover menu that is similar to iMessage? I am stumped.

One of the hardest parts of building iOS apps isn't learning the HIG. It's knowing when to ignore it.

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The best apps I've worked on feel native first. But they also have enough personality that you'd recognize them without seeing the icon.

The challenge isn't deciding whether to follow the HIG. It's figuring out which rules are helping your product—and which ones are getting in the way.

One of the hardest parts of building iOS apps isn't learning the HIG. It's knowing when to ignore it.

The HIG is a great set of guidelines. It takes years of lessons around usability, accessibility, consistency, and platform conventions and distills them into something actionable. But if every app follows every convention perfectly, it's hard to build something that feels distinctive.

MVC. MVVM. VIPER. TCA. After spending years chasing architectures, I’ve found myself moving in the opposite direction. A lot of it feels over-engineered in hindsight. The best #SwiftUI code has the fewest layers.

22 June

Interesting trend with the Xcode agent: It often seems to prefer shell scripts and `xcodebuild` over its built-in tools. I've started explicitly asking it to use tool calls first.

22 June

One thing I haven't figured out in Xcode 27 yet: Clicking the new AI conversation button opens the chat in a full tab. Is there a way to open it side-by-side with the editor instead? Feels like I might be missing something obvious.

19 June

Experience as a developer: At first: "How do I write this?" Later: "Should I write this?" Eventually: "Can we avoid writing this entirely?"

19 June

Nothing dates code faster than a WWDC keynote. Last week: "This is the future." This week: "Please migrate to the future's replacement." #iOSDev #WWDC26

18 June

Supporting iOS 18, 26 and 27 at the same time is slowly turning my codebase into an archaeological dig. #swift #iosdev

18 June

Every June I learn about a framework I didn't know existed. Every July I discover I've been using it accidentally. #iosdev #wwdc26

17 June

Nothing makes code feel older than a WWDC keynote. #wwdc26 #iosdev

17 June

Looking forward to the iOS public beta. Taking bets now on the over/under for how long my iPhone spends indexing before Siri knows my entire life story. #iOSDev #WWDC26

16 June

13 years into iOS development and a surprising amount of the job is still: > “Interesting. I wonder why Apple did that.” #iosdev #swift

16 June

This year's #wwdc has taught us that we have to add yet another #availability check if you are supporting iOS 18+

13 Sept 2025

Threads: Influencers and content creators Bluesky: People who fled X X: Musk lovers Mastodon: Computer nerds and software engineers Nostr: Backpacking bitcoiners

12 Sept 2025

Anybody got a good recipe for Quesabirria tacos?

8 Sept 2025

Just had to file some Apple feedback about an imessage bug in iOS 26.  Friend of mine installed 26, set a background then switched to android. Now I have an iMessage chat with a background and I can’t change or remove it. #applefeedback #ios26