iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 29/09/2026

Exciting morning for PDF Viewer with Firebase

Screenshot of Firebase website showing Crash-free users in last 24 hours with a drop from 100% to 50% at about 3am

Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 29/09/2026

Next week, I’ll be hosting a Rust for Mobile Developers round table discussion at next.app devCon. I hope we can learn from each other! It would be great to hear from people coming from Android, Flutter or other backgrounds. Last minute tickets are available until 4 October.

Conference speaker card saying: next.app swiftCon, Douglas Hill, Software Engineer, Nutrient, Rust for Mobile Developers, #nextapp26, OCT 7-9 2026, BERLIN

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 28/09/2026

Confusing message reply suggestions

Screenshot in Apple Messages app with reply suggestions “Yes, it’s not too late” and ”No, it’s not too late”

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 24/07/2026

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.

Photo from Anastasia Petrova’s talk with slide showing feature team vs. platform team

Photo from James Coleman’s talk with mesh face

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 15/07/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 08/07/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 03/07/2026

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.)

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 03/07/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 30/06/2026

Notes from attending the RustWeek conference in Utrecht.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 24/06/2026

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.

Speaker card: Douglas Hill; Rust for iOS developers: more Swifty than Swift; iOSDevUK; 7th to 10th September 2026; Aberystwyth University; www.iosdevuk.com

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 19/05/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 19/05/2026

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

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 01/05/2026

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.

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Reposted by Douglas Hill

NSLondon @nslondon.com · 30/04/2026

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...

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 14/04/2026

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.

protocol ContactItemEnumerating: A protocol to provide enumerators for collections of contact items. protocol ContactItemEnumerator: A protocol to provide enumerations of all contact items and changed contact items.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 03/04/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 01/04/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 12/03/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 11/03/2026

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

Screenshot of macOS volume change notification showing the title External Headphones

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 20/02/2026

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

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 19/02/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 12/02/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 31/01/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 30/01/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 23/01/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 05/01/2026

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.

Screenshot of Vivaldi browser showing suggestions in Nutrient API documentation search: beta, aiassistantview, scope, aiassistantbutton, changetag, v1/betaGroups/{id}/relations

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 03/01/2026

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 28/12/2025

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.

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Swift Craft @swiftcraft.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

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

swiftcraft.uk

Swift Craft : News archive

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 15/12/2025

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 12/12/2025

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 04/12/2025

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 04/12/2025

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.

Screenshot of alert from Xcode: The file

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 04/12/2025

We’re seeing a UIKit crash introduced in iOS 26.1: NSInternalInconsistencyException -[UIPencilInteraction _handleHoverGestureRecognizer:]: Received updates from an unknown hover gesture recognizer Full post

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 27/11/2025

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.

Photo during Peter Friese’s talk — Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: Hybrid AI with Apple Intelligence and Firebase AI Logic

Photo during Hannah Downey’s talk — Compose Yourself: SwiftUI and its Android Counterpart

Photo during Giordano Scalzo’s talk — AI-Accelerated Mobile Development: From idea to build, faster than ever

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 25/11/2025

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

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 25/11/2025

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."

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 22/10/2025

That’s some long overdue cleanup. Ask your parents about Default-568h@2x.png.

Screenshot of a GitHub pull request. Title: Remove Default-568h@2x.png. Commits: 1. Files changed: 4. Comment: You used to have to add these files to support the iPhone 5. Remember that?

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 16/10/2025

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.

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Feli @felibe444.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

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

Sketchnote titled "PencilKit" discussing its features and tools for drawing on devices. It highlights challenges in drawing—like erasing, pressure sensitivity, and performance—alongside benefits of PencilKit.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 05/10/2025

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 05/10/2025

I was lucky to be in Tirol for the ski season opening on Friday!

Photo of snow on mountains with ski runs and lifts. Rocky ground not covered with snow in places. Blue sky above.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 02/10/2025

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.)

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 01/10/2025

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.)

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 12/09/2025

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

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 11/09/2025

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.

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Douglas Hill @douglashill.co · 23/08/2025

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

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