A toot by my friend Casey brought back some frustrating memories about expired subscriptions that haven’t expired (yes, really). This blog post will hopefully help you avoid having these same recollections. It all begins when a customer contacts you with a screenshot that looks something like this: Your code and the App Store don’t agree about when a subscription expired. The cause of this is Apple’s StoreKit sample code. It’s likely that you have some code similar to line 246 of Store.swift: subscriptionGroupStatus = try? await subscriptions.first?.subscription?.status.first?.state That co ..read more

Last week’s 40th anniversary of the Mac got me thinking. I’ve also been contemplating this week’s release of Apple Vision Pro. It feels like we’re at a crossroads for platforms, but one that’s impossible to pass. I was one of the folks who bought a Mac in 1984. At the time I was a member of a team building a Unix workstation from the ground up. We had bigger displays, better networking, faster processors, more memory, and larger disks. But we were all jealous of what the team at Apple had done. That first Mac and its system software was brimming with new user interface ideas and techniques. Be ..read more

The new visual appearance and functionality of watchOS 10 is a welcome change. There was clearly a lot of design and engineering effort put into this new interface and the improvements are tangible for most apps. Unfortunately, the app that I use the most on the Apple Watch has lost much of its usability, both in functionality and accessibility. I’m talking about the Timer app. The team designing watchOS clearly knows what it’s doing. Using the infinitely large corners of the Apple Watch display to leverage Fitt’s Law shows remarkable insight. The new gestures, while unfamiliar at first, feel ..read more

There’s a new “feature” in Sonoma, and no one besides Apple is quite sure what it is. Alerts for deprecated APIs are now appearing frequently. Sometimes when you launch an app, and sometimes at random. Here are three I got the other day after waking a MacBook from sleep: Mysterious Alerts. From a UI point-of-view, these alerts have serious issues: They are scary and not actionable. The only unique information is the title. The name, however, is not something I recognize. I know what a deprecated API is and how its removal can be a bad thing, but ordinary users won’t. There is no mention of wh ..read more

Have you ever added code like this to your app? print(Bundle.main.resourcePath!) print(FileManager.default.urls(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask).first!.path) Or maybe you’ve been frustrated that you can’t add that code because you’re in the middle of debugging? Yeah, me too. Many times. The locations show above, and many others, are available from Xcode using the xcrun simctl command. Every application on every device on every platform can be queried. But these lookups are difficult for developers because the information is structured around automatically generated GUI ..read more

Beginning with Xcode 14, the Simulators for watchOS and tvOS are available as separate downloads (iOS and macOS are still “built-in”). This reduces the app download size significantly, but it also means that you now have to manage these large (3-4 GB) components yourself. When you launch Xcode 14 the first time, you are prompted to download additional platforms. Another prompt is displayed when you try to run a target for a platform without a runtime. But what are these downloads and where are they stored? The first hint is when you look at Disk Utility. You’ll see a bunch of new “Simulator” v ..read more

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And as we approach WWDC 2022, there’s a lot of smoke around AR and VR. In some ways, this is going to be a huge inflection point, in other ways, it’s probably going to be a letdown. Remember when the iPod was announced? Some folks called it lame because it didn’t meet their expectations. The same thing will be true of anything Apple wants us to put on our face. It’s going to less impressive technically than any of the currently shipping products. And that’s good, because you don’t make fundamental changes by tweaking existing technologies. A Nomad audio playe ..read more

This past summer we narrowly avoided a major user interface regression on Apple devices. The story ended well, but I think it’s important to look back on the situation and ask a simple question: Why did this happen in the first place? My answer is something I call “consistency sin”. Understanding the cause lets us avoid similar situations in the future. Your first reaction to this nomenclature may be, “Isn’t consistency a good thing in user interfaces?” Absolutely! Colors, fonts, and other assets should be similar within an app. Combined they help give the user a sense of place and act as a gu ..read more

I have a long history of writing about code signing in macOS. When Big Sur was released, I thought “Finally!” I was wrong. This time around I was tripped up by Safari, of all things. It doesn’t open app archives like other parts of macOS. This story began with customer reports of xScope being a “damaged app” on Big Sur. This was surprising because I had been downloading and testing the app on Big Sur for several months without issue. I was also doing all this work on Apple Silicon using the DTK. And since Google Chrome wasn’t yet working on this device, all my testing was limited to Safari. Sa ..read more

We recently started updating our macOS apps for Catalina: so far there have been very few issues with APIs and frameworks. The biggest hurdle has been the new notarization process that’s required for apps signed with a Developer ID: customers will be unable to download and launch your product easily until this step is completed. Notarization involves an extra step in your build process: you upload an archived binary to Apple’s server with Xcode’s Organizer window and a short time later, you can export the binary. If you’ve automated your build process, you’ll need to make changes to your scrip ..read more