Tom Kraina

iOS & macOS Engineer, consultant, contractor. Writing code for @MindNode. Somewhere between CPH, VIE, and PRG. ☕️🍷🏃‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏂🏔📱🖥

[Tom Kraina @krajaac]

Sure, iPhone 11 Pro is great but have you tried holding iPhone SE in your hand?

[OpenAI Developers @OpenAIDevs]

More of the iOS app loop, now inside Codex.

The Build iOS Apps plugin lets Codex view and test your iOS app in the in-app browser, open SwiftUI previews, and hot reload edits without leaving Codex.

[Tom Kraina @krajaac]

Xcode always shows error "Error Downloading Crash Log Information" when trying to download crash logs.
https://t.co/WjByem4rEJ

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

This is such a good post. https://t.co/IdmAnh18Nt

[Stephan Casas @stephancasas]

Sick of closing crash reports every time Xcode dies?

You can swap the standard modal window in macOS for a less-intrusive notification:

𝚍𝚎𝚏𝚊𝚞𝚕𝚝𝚜 𝚠𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚖.𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚕𝚎.𝙲𝚛𝚊𝚜𝚑𝚁𝚎𝚙𝚘𝚛𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝚄𝚜𝚎𝚄𝙽𝙲 -𝚋𝚘𝚘𝚕 𝚈𝙴𝚂

[Tom Kraina @krajaac]

Another day another macOS bug. This time CallHistorySyncHelper and peopled processes eating up my battery and overheating my mac.
Turns out the process was trying to access CallHistoryDB file that was quarantined.
https://t.co/0r041T9WtD

[Tom Kraina @krajaac]

AppIntents 'DisplayRepresentation.Image.init(url:)' is broken on iOS 18 - fails to copy image with provided url

FB22769538

[Nicolas Bichon @nicol3a]

Has anyone found a way to use Git worktrees in iOS projects without having to re-download all Swift packages for each worktree? 🤔

This defeats the entire purpose of Git worktrees—it's slowing me down and consuming a lot of disk space. 😕

[josh avant @joshavant]

I remodeled my first home over the last few years and my rule for smart home products was that it must also work like the analog product it was replacing: wall light switches to turn on/off smart lights with one button press, smart lock with both a physical key and an app (and ideally no gaudy industrial design).

It was a surprisingly hard rule and is not the default mode of the industry.

https://t.co/L1nGEWeNa8

[DHH @dhh]

Smart houses are so stupid. I've regretted it every single time the siren call of technology caused me to install a computer instead of a light switch, a computer instead of a door lock. And the custom integrations like Control4 are THE WORST. Jason is spot on.

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

THE BIG REGRESSION

My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented them a house nearby.

It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. The ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard.

And it’s terrible. What a regression.

The lights are powered by Control4. And require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understand which ones control what, and to be sure not to hit THAT ONE because it’ll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn’t mean to. Worse.

The TV is the latest Samsung which has a baffling UI just to watch CNN. My parents aren’t idiots, but definitely feel like they’re missing something obvious. They aren’t — TVs have simply gotten worse. You don’t turn them on anymore, you boot them up.

The Miele dishwasher is hidden flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here’s what isn’t: It wouldn’t even operate the first time without connecting it to an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn’t know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate? For serious? Worse.

Thermostats... Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other propriety ones from some other company trying to be nest-like are baffling. Round touchscreens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options just to be sure it’s set at 68. Or is it 68 now? Or is that what we want it at, but it’s at 72? Wait... What? Which number is this? Worse.

The alarm system is essentially a 10” iPad bolted to the wall that has the fucking weather forecast on it. And it’s bright! I’m sure there’s a way to turn that off, but then the screen would be so barren that it would be filled with the news instead. Why can’t the alarm panel just be an alarm panel? Worse.

And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem.

Now look... I’m no luddite. But this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can’t see in these cases. I’ve heard the pitches too — you can set up scenes and one button can change EVERYTHING. Not buying it. It actually feels primitive, like we haven’t figured out how to make things easy yet. That some breakthrough will eventually come when you can simply knock a switch up or down and it’ll all makes sense. But that's at least 20 years down the road.

It’s really the contrast that makes it alarming. We just got back from a vacation in Montana. Rented a house there. They did have a fancy TV — seems those can’t be avoided these days — but everything else was old school and clear. Physical up/down light switches in the right places. Appliances without the internet. Buttons with depth and physically-confirmed state change rather than surfaces that don’t obviously register your choice. More traditional round rotating Honeywell thermostats that are just clear and obvious. No tours, no instructions, no questions, no fearing you’re going to do something wrong, no wondering how something works. Useful and universally clear. That’s human, that’s modern.

[Edward Sanchez @edwardsanchez]

I always forget you can ⌘ click anything in an unfocused window to interact with it without switching your active window focus.

[Tom Kraina @krajaac]

@klemensstrasser @ARCTIConference I really wanted to attend next year but sadly it collides with the spring vacation at our school. I hope I'll be able to make it in 2027. 🥲

[Axel Le Pennec @alpennec]

Confirmed by Apple 🫡

[Axel Le Pennec @alpennec]

One tip to speed up your SwiftUI previews 🤩

I wanted to centralize constants like opacity, spacing, or sizes used by my View to speed up prototyping.

Stored properties: slow 🐌 as Xcode recompiles the file every time I tweak a value.

Computed properties: instant updates 🏎️

[Tom Kraina @krajaac]

This Link and .widgetAccentedRenderingMode(.desaturated) bug in WidgetKit drives me bananas. What's worse is that the suggested workaround no longer work in iOS 26 🙈
Anyone knows how to fix it? https://t.co/Z3ImkFQEJG

[Tom Kraina @krajaac]

💯

[Scott Hanselman 🌮 @shanselman]

I think that the Internet should be weird again and we should just code things because they’re delightful. We should also code things so that the haters hate less

[Tom Kraina @krajaac]

@stephancasas @lucidstarfield willing to share what was the root cause in your case? I recently ran into the same issue, narrowed it down to a custom button style where foregroundStyle was set...

[Tom Kraina @krajaac]

“I swear I had conversations in which I mentioned ‘key window’ and no one knew what I meant.”

… that explains a lot about the state of windowing on iPadOS

[Tom Kraina @krajaac]

https://t.co/ThyHa5TIuc down. Has someone at cloudflare been shipping on Friday again and took down half of the websites?

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Damn half the internet is down again - including Downdetector

Downdetector is multi-region but has a singular dependency on Cloudflare

Is Cloudflare down again?

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Damn half the internet is down again - including Downdetector

Downdetector is multi-region but has a singular dependency on Cloudflare

Is Cloudflare down again?