iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

install_app tool: your agent can install .app or .ipa files into the simulator

open_simulator tool: your agent can now boot up Simulator on your mac if it isn't already running on your computer

launch_app tool: your agent can now launch different apps to switch gears or try newly installed apps

Joshua Yoes @joshuayoes.com · 07/07/2025

🚀 iOS Simulator MCP v1.5.0 is here! Now your agent has more iOS powers. 🛠️ New Tools: open_simulator → Launch the Simulator app install_app → Install .app / .ipa bundles launch_app → Start apps by bundle ID Release notes and demos in 🧵

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Now Cursor can actually see what's going on in your iOS Simulator for you 👀🤖 The new `ui-view` tool in v1.4.0 inputs image data into your conversation context automatically so you don't need drag and drop images manually into your conversation.

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Joshua Yoes @joshuayoes.com · 06/06/2025

Know a React Native dev (~2 yrs experience) looking for a new job? A small but growing team at a mature startup in the pet health space is hiring — remote on EST, looking for someone who is excited to both teach & learn from teammates. If you think you are a good fit, send a DM.

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Joshua Yoes @joshuayoes.com · 21/03/2025

An iOS QA agent is coming to a Cursor near you 🍎🤖👷 Announcing ios-simulator-mcp, a Model Context Protocol server for interacting with the iOS Simulator github.com/joshuayoes/i...

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Joshua Yoes @joshuayoes.com · 13/02/2025

The same E2E tests on web AND mobile?? It might not be hard as you think I got an Ignite Cookbook recipe for you to cook it up at home ignitecookbook.com/docs/recipes...

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Joshua Yoes @joshuayoes.com · 14/01/2025

I'm glad that Apple has finally come to their senses

Apple system dialog: "Docker" will damage your computer. You should move it to the Trash. This file was downloaded on an unknown date. "Move to Trash" button. "Cancel" button. "Report malware to Apple to protect other users" checkbox, checked.

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Joshua Yoes @joshuayoes.com · 30/12/2024

You know the article is going to be good when it’s got this header

Joshua Yoes @joshuayoes.com · 23/12/2024

December finances be like:

207 new transactions notification in a budgeting app

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And last but not least: authentication! This is perhaps the most clever: it piggy backs off the same system that domain names use. An App View has an ID tied to a profile and then it checks to see if a domain actually has that ID, which shows proof of ownership.

3.5. User Identity

The DNS-based user identity in atproto is decoupled from hosting and indexing. Anybody owning a domain name can issue subdomains as atproto handles, and this does not require running a PDS or any other service besides DNS.

To prove ownership of a handle, the user must have a bidirectional link between their DID and their domain name handle, as shown in Figure 2:

• A link from the handle to the DID is established either by storing the DID in a DNS TXT record on that domain name, or by returning the DID in response to a HTTPS request to a /.well-known/ URL on that domain name (Liu, 2023).
• A link from the DID to the handle is established by including the handle in the DID document that is returned when the DID is resolved

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Then there is Labelers and Feed Generators: servers look at the data and decide what is interesting to users! People can do this already with feeds in the app kinda like follow lists, but people can build more sophisticated ones, such as labeling and generating feeds of entirely cat photos

3.4. Labelers and Feed Generators

Relay and App View aim to provide a mostly “unopinionated” service: they compute indexes over repositories in a neutral way, without attempting to rank or classify content. However, a good user experience also requires “opinionated” judgements for the purposes of content filtering (e.g. detecting sexually explicit images or spam) and curation (e.g. selecting posts on a particular topic).

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Another interesting part is that if people don’t like how Bluesky, the company, does moderation or indexes the data, they can build their own. Normally all of this data or algorithms are privately held by companies, but the AT Protocol makes it fundamentally public and remixable by other parties

The App View is also responsible for enforcing moderation controls: for example, if one user has blocked another, and one of the users’ repositories contains a record of an interaction that should not have been allowed due to the block, then the App View drops that interaction so that nobody can see it in the client apps. This behavior is consistent with how blocking works on Twitter/X (X Help Center, [n. d.]), and it is also the reason why blocks are public records in Bluesky: every protocol-conforming App View needs to know who is blocking who in order to enforce the block (Bluesky Social PBC, 2023h; Newbold, 2023). If users are unhappy with the moderation rules applied by the App View operated by Bluesky Social PBC, it is always possible for third parties to operate alternative App Views that index the same firehose and present the data in a different way.

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This data is consumed by an App View, which takes all of the data and arranges it into useful structures, like threads, profiles, and lets other service query for it.

3.3.2. The App View

The App View is a service that consumes the firehose, and processes the records that are relevant to the Bluesky social app (records in the com.atproto and app.bsky lexicons). For example, the App View counts the number of likes on every post, and it collates the thread of replies to each post.

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Then there is a concept called the Relay, which indexes all the data and shoots it out in the “firehose”: a flurry of updates of user data as it happens

3.3.1. The Relay

The first component is the Relay, which crawls the user repositories on all known PDSes and consumes the streams of updates that they produce. The Relay checks the signatures and Merkle tree proofs on updates, and maintains its own replica of each repository. From this information, the Relay creates the firehose: an aggregated stream of updates that notifies subscribers whenever records are added or deleted in any of the known repositories.

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All of the data is hosted in user repositories. Possibly the most interesting part of Bluesky is the fact that ALL the data is public: anyone can index it like Google does with the web. Currently Bluesky the company does this, but users can host their own user data for cheap as well

3.1. User Data Repositories

All data that a user wishes to publish is added to their repository, which stores a collection of records. Whenever a user performs some action – making a post, liking another user’s post, following another user, etc. – that action becomes a record in their repository.

The AT in atproto stands for Authenticated Transfer, which reflects the fact that repositories are cryptographically authenticated. The records in a repository are organized into a Merkle Search Tree (MST), a type of Merkle tree that remains balanced, even as records are inserted or deleted in arbitrary order (Auvolat and Taïani, 2019). After every change to a repository, the root hash of the MST is signed; the public verification key for this signature is part of the user identity described in Section 3.5. This enables an efficient cryptographic proof that a given record appears within a given user’s repository. Moreover, when a user updates or deletes a record, the MST enables a proof that the old record no longer appears in the repository.

3.3. Indexing Infrastructure

On the web, websites are crawled and indexed by search engines, which then provide web-wide search and discovery features that the websites alone cannot provide. The AT Protocol is inspired by this architecture: the repositories hosted by PDSes are analogous to websites, and the indexing infrastructure is analogous to a search engine. User repositories are primary data (the “source of truth”), and the indexes are derived from the content of the repositories.

At the time of writing, most of Bluesky’s indexing infrastructure is operated by Bluesky Social PBC (indicated by a shaded area in Figure 1). However, the company does not have any privileged access: since repositories are public, anybody can crawl and index them using the same protocols as our systems use. If Bluesky Social PBC were to violate users’ expectations – for example, by censoring (omitting from the index) accounts that users wish to see – other parties would be free to provide their own indexes that do not perform this censorship. Client apps could switch to reading from a different index, or even use a combination of multiple indexes.

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The AT Protocol allows for multiple social networks, which they call social modes. Functionally, it’s like how Facebook can use their own infrastructure to post multiple social media networks like Facebook and Instagram

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