David Smith

Independent app developer. Independent in general. Maker of Widgetsmith, Pedometer++, Sleep++ and Watchsmith.

Blog: https://david-smith.org
Widgetsmith: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/widgetsmith/id1523682319
Pedometer++: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pedometer/id712286167

Last Notes

2025-05-01 16:46:00 GMT

I've been mulling over the Apple injunction today. I increasingly think that the root of the problem here is that Apple doesn't view developers as its customers. Over the last 17 years I've paid Apple an eye-wateringly large sum of money for the services they provide me, and I don't begrudge them that at all. We are likely the highest revenue per customers group, but reading this it is clear that at the highest levels we are viewed as a resource to be extracted from not a customer to be served.

2025-03-26 09:46:24 GMT

- reply

Often you would, in this case what I needed to know was how many “days" into the future one date was from another. So the simplest way to do that is to take the difference in timestamps (in seconds) and divide by (24*60*60)...which works fine unless you happen to be on the two daylight savings days when there are 23/25 hours in a day. So I have to use higher level calendar functions which can take that into account.

2025-03-26 09:41:17 GMT

It has been “0" days since I discovered a daylight savings related calendar bug. 😔
What I really need in my AI code editor isn't all these fancy LLMs which can write all my code for me…I just something which watches out for anytime I foolishly use 24 * 60 * 60 (or similar) as the number of seconds in a day, and prevent the project from compiling until I do it properly. 🤪

2024-12-16 18:03:39 GMT

This is your periodic reminder that you almost certainly never mean “YYYY" in a date format string, you probably mean “yyyy”.
I’ve made this mistake many times, most recently back in 2020, but apparently I'm a very slow learner and made it again in my last update (😔).
You know you've really messed up when checking your understanding leads to one of these super vintage iOS documentation pages, and they specifically call out your mistake. (🤦🏻‍♂️)
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/663/817/532/426/969/original/2b60f06bc349cdb0.png

2024-12-16 15:40:36 GMT

One of the less obvious skills needed to be a long term indie developer is dauntless optimism.
Every time I launch a new feature I get the feeling that “this is gonna be awesome, folks are gonna absolutely love this”...even though history has taught me it is actually not really true. Most feature launches are greeted more with a “meh” or “hmm, that's interesting"
...which is fine and goes with the job but nevertheless we keep on building, waiting for the “OH WOW!”s which do eventually come.

2024-11-19 16:50:45 GMT

It was around this time last year that Apple flipped the “roll out iOS 17 to everyone bit”, before that it was hovering around 30%.
This year seems to be following a similar pattern where after an initial surge the adoption has stalled out at a more steady state (45% for Widgetsmith, 35% for Pedometer++).
I really hope they hit the 'push it to everyone’ button soon (maybe with iOS 18.2?), it is frustrating to having iOS 18 features which are still unseen or explored.
https://mastodon.social/@_Davidsmith/111442265683318863
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/510/648/493/094/716/original/854e37d286c4fd78.png