Malwarebytes:

If you’ve encountered websites in maintenance mode today, it may be a security precaution. Reports of attacks targeting two critical PHP vulnerabilities have prompted warnings to install emergency updates and consider temporarily taking affected services offline until they can be patched.

[…]

Successful exploitation could let an attacker run malicious code on an affected server without logging in. That code would run with the permissions available to the PHP process, potentially allowing attackers to steal application data, alter website content, or establish a backdoor.

[…]

The PHP team scheduled its emergency security updates for October 21 at 10:00 am ET (14:00 UTC). It has now released fixes in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35, and urges users to update immediately. Administrators should check with their hosting provider or operating system vendor for the appropriate updated packages.

Adam Engst:

Expect to see numerous websites go down or serve “Page not found” errors as they update PHP, the programming language that underpins 70% of websites. If you run a WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla site, this affects you directly.

Nick Heer:

Word on the street is that these exploits have leaked, and that remote code can likely be executed all the way back to PHP 5. If you have access to your website’s php.ini file, it might be worth turning off multipart uploads for now.

Vincent Schmalbach:

Two changes reduce the risk until the fixed versions are out. They were checked against PHP’s source code and the PHP manual, but they are not an official PHP mitigation. When someone suggested that turning off session upload progress might be enough, PHP core developer Gina Peter Banyard replied, “The only thing I can say is that the only mitigation is patching / upgrading PHP. I sadly know too much.” Use the stopgaps to lower the risk for a few hours, and update PHP as soon as the fixed builds exist.

Add to php.ini:

session.upload_progress.enabled = Off

Add to .htaccess:

<If "req('Content-Type') =~ /multipart/i">
    Require all denied
</If>

Sean Allen (via Rebecca Sloane):

iOS dev course sales plummeted due to AI. It costs a lot of money to host my courses online and with sales at basically $0, I’ve cancelled that hosting.

This closes down the site which unfortunately removes access to the courses.

[…]

I’ve put my recent course on sale at a large discount so you can get it before it’s gone and I’ve made old courses available for free if you want to grab those too.

The school will be online until November 24th so you have a few weeks to download these videos at seanallen.teachable.com.

Artem Novichkov (via Fatbobman):

Xcode also ships two command-line tools for the new format:

• xcprojformatter came with the format in beta 2. It’s a formatter for project files, like swift-format for code: it checks that a project.xcproj file is valid and rewrites it with sorted keys and consistent layout.
• xcodeproj arrived in beta 3. It reads and edits projects from the terminal: targets, build phases, groups, build settings, xcconfig files, and Swift packages.

Neither is on your PATH, so run them with xcrun.

Previously:

• Xcode’s New .xcproj Files Are JSON

Seth Willits (2024, bug):

There’s a deprecation warning in Xcode for URL.path that reads:

WARNING: path will be deprecated in a future version of macOS: Use path(percentEncoded:) instead

The problem is something like this:

Bundle.main.url(forAuxiliaryExecutable: "tool")!.path

… which returns the expected file path (ex: /Applications/MyApp.app/Contents/tool)

would be quickly rewritten as suggested to:

Bundle.main.url(forAuxiliaryExecutable: "tool")!.path(percentEncoded: false)

… which simply returns tool, because the URL returned is relative to a base URL.

[…]

I’ve always found it not-completely-obvious to newcomers how to get a standard file path string from a file URL and this only makes it more confusing.

There are at least three issues here:

1. url.path returns an absolute path, but url.path(percentEncoded: false) returned a relative path as of his writing. I tested this on macOS 26, and now it returns an absolute path. The documentation now says, “This function will resolve against the base URL.” It seems the behavior of the method changed without it being documented when, so be careful if you’re deploying to a mix of OS versions.

2. percentEncoded has a default value of true, whereas path did not return an encoded string. In other words, url.path() and url.path are completely different. So this is another case where Apple updated the API but flipped the default—a good way to introduce bugs.

3. It’s not obvious how to get the full file system path out of a URL. With NSURL, url.path was natural and did the right thing. Now, the URL equivalent is deprecated.

   The natural replacement, url.path(), is wrong. So is Xcode’s recommendation of url.(percentEncoded: false).

   url.absoluteURL.path(percentEncoded: false) is correct but verbose.

   url.absoluteURL.standardizedFileURL.path(percentEncoded: false) is possibly better but even more verbose.

   FilePath(url)?.string uses a newer API but gives you an optional, even though for a file URL it should never fail.

   This seems like such basic functionality, but there’s no API that’s the obvious right choice, concise, and ergonomic.

Previously:

• The Switch From File Paths to URLs
• Swift URL Improvements at WWDC 2022
• Proposed Foundation URL Improvements
• URL Path Retrieval Cheat Sheet
• NSURL Path Handling

Apple (xip, downloads):

Xcode 27.1 includes Swift 6.4 and SDKs for iOS 27.1, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27. Xcode 27.1 supports on-device debugging in iOS 17 and later, tvOS 17 and later, watchOS 10 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 27.1 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later.

Christian Beer:

You can’t run macOS UI tests on Xcode cloud as soon as your app uses „restricted entitlements“[…]

Previously:

• Jumping to 27.2
• Xcode 27
• Developing for iPhone Duo

Janine Liberty (Hacker News, NASA, NYT, WSJ, Slashdot):

Margaret Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died on Sep. 30. She was 90.

A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline.

[…]

Moments before the Eagle module was set to land on the lunar surface, the onboard computer raised the alarm. It had detected a 1202 error: The computer was overloaded due to a fault in a hardware switch, and it was possible the system would not be able to handle the complex landing procedure.

But Hamilton and her team had engineered priority-driven software, able to shut down unnecessary background tasks in order to prioritize mission-critical tasks. Houston trusted Hamilton’s software and allowed the mission to proceed, and two men walked on the moon for the first time.

Dave DeGraw:

The following is an excerpt from a textbook called Fluency With Information Technology: Skills, Concepts, & Capabilities, 7th Edition ISBN 0-13-444872-3

At the time of publishing, the Wikipedia page for Margaret Hamilton has an important quote about the origin of the term “software engineering”. I was moved by this and wanted to add it to my /quotes page, but needed to verify the source of the quote. I was bothered that the source came from an interview given for an out-of-print textbook that as far as I can tell is unavailable to legally obtain. The interview is also not published in later editions of the book.

Fortunately, I was able to find the complete interview and I am publishing that excerpt here under fair use doctrine for educational, archival, and personal informational purposes only.

The Computer History Museum has an article and a full oral history.

Previously:

• Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer
• Testing the Apollo Spacecraft
• The Apollo Guidance Computer
• Margaret Hamilton and Apollo 11
• That Would Never Happen

Update (2026-10-14): Jennifer Ouellette:

You’ve probably heard the famous story of how Lorenz kept a continuous simulation running on his LGP-30 computer, and of that fateful 1961 day when he realized that even small differences in starting values could lead to very different outcomes—a sensitivity to initial conditions that is a hallmark of chaos theory, along with strange attractors. You might not have known that it was Hamilton who was responsible for programming the LGP-30.

Computers were still a novelty at the time, and neither Lorenz nor Hamilton had any programming knowledge; they taught themselves. Per a 2019 Quanta article, Lorenz was amused by her unusual methods: For instance, she once bypassed the “clunky debugging process” by rolling the paper tape down the hallway and editing the binary code by hand with a pencil. “I’d poke holes for ones, and I’d cover up with Scotch tape the others,” she recalled.

Alexis King (tweet):

The type systems provided by mainstream languages have grown vastly more sophisticated, but how much value does that complexity actually provide programmers in practice? I would like to make the case that it is somewhat less than one might think. While at times convenient, invariants can be captured in the type system using a small set of simple tools applied in principled fashion, and while fancy type systems may be convenient, they have misled many programmers by obscuring what is possible to model without built-in type system support. This talk aims to provide a simple shift in perspective, plus a set of concrete design principles, to make modeling invariants in types feel accessible to the working programmer without fancy language support.

“Type system as obligation tracker” is a catchy phrase, like her previous “parse, don’t validate” (Hacker News).

See also: Matt Diephouse.

EagleFiler 1.9.22 is a maintenance release of my Mac file/note organizer and e-mail archiving app. This version works around various bugs in macOS 27, adds capture support for the Thorium Web browser, and improves importing from Mariner Paperless.

• macOS 27 broke several things with drag and drop out of Apple Mail. Simply trying to read a URL from the pasteboard will cause a hang while it waits forever for the pasteboard server (FB24803817). The same thing happens when using PasteboardSetPasteLocation() and reading kPasteboardTypeFileURLPromise directly, which I was doing (instead of using newer API) to work around bugs in older versions of macOS. EagleFiler now uses NSFilePromiseReceiver for drags from Mail on macOS 27, which works better, but I also had to work around a bug where Mail would promise superfluous files for which the reader callback was never invoked at all.

• macOS 27 also seems to include various regressions when reading PDF and Word files, producing invalid strings containing NUL characters. Also, displaying certain PDF files worked fine on macOS 26 but now crashes.

• I also ran into (and worked around) a bug where macOS 27’s NSTextView would get into an infinite layout loop when displaying an attributed string that included images.

• Drag and drop from Airmail is still an issue. When using the newer drag APIs, it will often hang Airmail or not produce a file, and this also happens with other apps like Finder as the destination. EagleFiler works around this using older APIs with Airmail and tries to report a helpful error when there’s trouble. Single-message drags work best.

• I’ve also been investigating a problem where saving a file with a colored tag in iCloud Drive will, a few seconds later, change the color to gray, but I don’t have a solution for this.

Previously:

• EagleFiler 1.9.21

Dave DeLong:

I can improve the process of removing backwards compatibility shims by using conditional compilation to remind me when they’re no longer necessary!

[…]

This does mean that the first time we change our deployment target, we’ll get a bunch of compilation errors. But given the nature of how Backport is implemented, this should be a relatively quick process to move past. (And of course, you’re welcome to use #warning instead of #error).

Shaps Benkau:

SwiftUIBackports mirrors Apple’s SwiftUI API names, shapes, behavior, documentation, and availability where practical. This keeps app code familiar today, and easy to migrate away from once your deployment target reaches the native API.

Backports are discovered through .backport, the Backport namespace, or backport-prefixed environment values.

Majid Jabrayilov:

Usually, we don’t see many new APIs in intermediate releases like 27.1, but this time is different. Apple introduced several new iPhone Duo-related APIs in the 27.1 release. This week, we will learn how to use all of these new APIs without bumping your project’s target version.

[…]

Here we introduced the toolbarVerticalBehavior function on the Backport type that handles availability checks and calls the new APIs if available or returns a plain view when it is not available.

Previously:

• Developing for iPhone Duo
• SwiftUI Toolbars
• SwiftUI in appleOS 27
• Simplifying Backwards Compatibility in Swift

Nicolas Seriot:

// "<a>" in UTF-16 LE + a single dangling byte
const UInt8 bytes[] = {'<', 0, 'a', 0, '>', 0, 'X'};

[…]

The whole bug is a confusion between bytes left versus UTF-16 characters left. The result is repeated buffer doubling until allocation fails, and a local process crash if the exception is uncaught.

SpamSieve 3.3.2 is an update of my Mac e-mail spam filter that improves remote training, can export more rule information, and improves uninstallation, help, and more. The most significant news is that Microsoft has changed plans again. They will no longer be preventing users from continuing to use Legacy Outlook and in fact will keep it available for download as part of the combined Outlook app. This gives more time to adapt to their change in plans for AppleScript. Exchange (EWS) support remains an issue. Microsoft is still planning to cut off Legacy Outlook users, and Apple has yet to announce when Mail will support Graph. So far, I’ve not heard that it’s enabled in the macOS 27.2 beta.

We’re participating in a seasonal festival of artisanal software called SummerFest. For a limited time, you can get a 25% discount on new purchases of SpamSieve, EagleFiler, and other top Mac apps from our indie developer friends.

Some interesting engineering issues were:

• Updating NSWorkspace APIs introduced a problem because with the old launchApplication(at:options:), the .withErrorPresentation option is off by default, whereas with the newer openApplication(at:configuration:completionHandler:), the promptsUserIfNeeded option is on by default.

• Previously, Core Data would strip leading BOMs from NSStrings when saving to a SQLite database. With macOS 27, this happens for Swift Strings, too.

• I have lots of unit tests that check for memory leaks. These caught a change where addPersistentStore(type:configuration:at:options:) now seems to return an autoreleased store. Without adding a pool, it looked like there was a leak.

• Also, the tests were finding lots of “leaks” because KVO was retaining NSTabView, which retains a controller. Previously, XCTestCase.waitForExpectations(timeout:) would spin the run loop, and everything would get cleaned up. With Xcode 27 and macOS 27, I need to manually spin the run loop before waiting for the expectations.

• During a software update, macOS may decide to reload the Dock icon. The application package no longer exists because it’s been replaced with a new version. This wasn’t a problem before because SpamSieve had been drawing to an image in memory and setting that as the Dock icon. Now, with the Liquid Glass–imposed removal of custom Dock icons, macOS tries to load the icon from disk, and rather than handling errors gracefully it will crash. I fixed this by setting an image with a memory representation before starting a software update.

• SpamSieve 3.3.1 introduced a crash affecting a small but significant number of users when doing a Core Data fetch of a large number of objects. The private [_PFManagedObjectReferenceQueue _processReferenceQueue:] method was seemingly releasing an object that had already been released. What’s odd is that, as far as I can tell, none of the related app code had changed since the previous version, yet suddenly crashes started happening all the way from macOS 12 through macOS 27. If I had to guess, this was triggered by upgrading from Xcode 26.2 to Xcode 26.6. Maybe Swift’s ARC optimizations are doing something subtly different?

  The crash was triggered by an autorelease pool that I had inserted to promptly clean up any temporary objects after a fetch. (The actual fetched objects were returned and used outside of the pool.) Interestingly, both Gemini and ChatGPT were convinced that this is a well-known exception to standard memory management rules. They said it’s never safe to use managed objects outside of a pool they were fetched in because they depend on internal Core Data objects that the pool will have released. I was not able to find any basis for this “belief,” but it was easy enough to test. As expected, removing the pools (during the beta cycle) just made the same crashes happen slightly later.

  I think there’s probably something wrong in Core Data’s internal bookkeeping, but this does not seem to be a popular crash (and I’ve never seen it on any of my Macs), so my code must be doing something uncommon to trigger it. My current best guess is that it was related to calling refreshAllObjects() after saving. (I bet there’s some fancy bookkeeping to make that efficient.) I was doing this throughout the app to break retain cycles so that unused objects could be deallocated. But it wasn’t necessary in this particular case because the entity being fetched has no relationships. So far, removing the refresh seems to have stopped the crashes, but I won’t know for sure until more people have been using this version for a while.

Previously:

• The End of EWS in Mail and AppleScript in Outlook
• SpamSieve 3.3.1
• SpamSieve 3.2.2

Apple:

Xcode now supports a JSON-based project format (.xcproj) that’s more readable, merge-friendly, and easier for coding agents to edit. Enable it in the file inspector. Projects using .xcproj also open in earlier versions of Xcode 27. Learn more in Updating your Xcode project configuration file format.

Fatbobman:

[The] new project.xcproj caught my eye. What it replaces is project.pbxproj, the build graph inside the .xcodeproj bundle, not the bundle itself.

[…]

In the age of agents, the drawbacks of pbxproj are amplified further. A great many IDs carry both object identity and cross-references, so an agent modifying a project usually has to locate the right object in a flat table, then update several mutually referencing places in step, all while trying to keep the serialized output faithful to Xcode’s conventions.

[…]

From a flat ID table to a tree that mirrors the UI: instead of dumping everything into objects, it unfolds into structures like files / targets / build-settings, so diffs look closer to the operations you actually performed in the interface;

The direction of relationships is reversed: a file can declare which targets it belongs to via target-membership, so adding a file no longer means editing several mutually referencing places at once;

Simon B. Støvring:

Developers have been screaming for a friendlier Xcode project format for years. I’m one of them.

Tony Arnold:

I’ve been waiting for something like this for most of my career! 🎉

Rob Napier:

It does feel like another case of “we’ve quickly done a thing to help AI that we’ve been unwilling to do for years to help humans.” I’m seeing that happen across the industry.

It is very welcome and appreciated, and lots of thanks to the teams involved. It’s also frustrating that it took “it can help AI” to make it happen.

Apple:

xcode-project-format is a Swift library for reading, writing, and manipulating Xcode’s JSON-based project.xcproj format. It models the format as a rich set of value types nested under a single namespace, XCSchema, so consumers get precise, typed access to a project’s structure instead of hand-parsing JSON.

The goal is to give the ecosystem a shared, accurate model of the Xcode project format — so tools like generators, linters, verifiers, and validators don’t each have to reverse-engineer the format from scratch.

Helge Heß:

Didn’t most people switch to local SPM projects anyways? Those are the new xcproj that have to be replaced with sth sensible 🙃

Fatbobman:

What the community has actually been waiting years for is a project manifest along the lines of Package.swift: something written by people, read by people, and reviewed by people, rather than a more modern encoding of the IDE’s internal database.

Previously:

• WWDC 2025 Wish Lists
• Xcode 16 Folders and Groups
• EditorConfig Files in Xcode
• Why Work Without a Nib?
• Xcode 5’s New XIB Format

Update (2026-09-23): John Gruber:

The old .pbxproj project format was not XML; it was an old NeXT-style “ASCII” property list — a file format that is surprisingly JSON-like considering that it predates not only JSON, but JavaScript (JSON = JavaScript Object Notation).

Apple (xip, downloads):

Xcode 27 includes Swift 6.4 and SDKs for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27. Xcode 27 supports on-device debugging in iOS 17 and later, tvOS 17 and later, watchOS 10 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 27 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later.

Peter Witham:

Is this new in Xcode 27? Pretty sure it as and I approve whole heartedly! I really hate setting up Xcode settings more than once.

Christian Beer:

Building with Xcode 27 doesn’t work because of some intransparent XCStrings error… and I even can’t check with Xcode 26 anymore because Apple decided to not let me run it on macOS 27…

Steven Woolgar:

After all these years Apple has finally broken cmd-e in Xcode 27.

Previously:

• iPhone Duo
• Ending the Golden Era for Backward-Compatible Apps
• Xcode 26.6
• Xcode 27’s Device Hub
• Swift 6.4
• Xcode 27 Announced

Update (2026-09-18): Jesse Squires:

Xcode 27 seems to have broken UI appearance vs Editor appearance. They used to be separate settings.

For example, previously, the app could be light mode while the editor theme was dark.

But now, you choose a dark editor theme and the whole app goes to dark mode.

I hate this.

Me, too.

Update (2026-09-24): Christian Beer:

• generate stubs for protocol: uses wrong class names
• fix for missing parameter: inserts it at the wrong position
• generating init with Bindings, State, etc.: mostly wrong

Update (2026-10-01): Steve Troughton-Smith:

AI code completion was such a nothingburger, for all of that investment. I don’t even have it turned on in Xcode anymore. If you’re into code completion, you’re into using Codex and Claude, so why would you ever use it now.

The built-in Xcode stuff has pretty much never worked at all for me. I either get errors or it does nothing.

Craig Hockenberry:

It looks like Xcode 27.1 is needed to test the iPhone Duo resizability - and that hasn’t been uploaded yet.

Jordan Morgan:

Cupertino and Friends™️ dropped six new videos over developing, designing, and crafting great apps for the nascent device:

1. Design for iPhone Duo
2. Prepare your app for iPhone Duo
3. Raise the bar with iPhone Duo
4. Strike a pose with adaptive layouts on iPhone Duo
5. Leverage multiple displays and scenes on iPhone Duo
6. Build a great camera experience for iPhone Duo

Nathan Manceaux-Panot:

In the Duo dev video, they describe how text buttons can’t be moved to the new vertical sidebar, as opposed to icon buttons.

I wonder if that’s one of the reasons Liquid Glass pushed hard for icon buttons, even though these are harder to understand; they make the vertical layout possible at all.

Nico Reese:

Totally confusing to me how the toolbar is ordered completely different between both modes here.

Dennis Oberhoff:

I think the problem with the iPhone Duo for developers is mostly that it does not create any new opportunities in the form of a new market or a new audience.

Previously:

• iPhone Duo
• SwiftUI Toolbars

Update (2026-09-17): See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.

Previously:

• Jumping to 27.2

Update (2026-09-18): Xcode 27.1 Beta (Hacker News) adds support for iPhone Duo, but:

StandBy is unavailable in the iPhone Duo Simulator runtime.

Running and debugging most app extensions is unavailable in the iPhone Duo Simulator runtime.

Update (2026-09-21): Léo Natan:

Apple writing example code in Objective C, in 2026. They are REALLY desperate for developers to support this device.

Natalia Panferova:

On iPhone Duo, navigation controls, toolbar actions, and tabs can move into a shared vertical bar along the edge of the display, leaving more vertical space for content. Apps built with the iOS 27.1 SDK get this adaptation through standard containers such as NavigationStack, NavigationSplitView, and TabView. We continue to declare toolbar actions in their usual placements, and SwiftUI determines how to present them in the current context.

Imthaz Ahamed:

I was going through the iPhone Duo specs and realised the inner screen has a different pixel density to the outer screen. The inner 7.6-inch folding display runs at 1878×2670 and 430 ppi, while the outer 5.4-inch display runs at 1398×2034 and 460 ppi.

Jesper:

The iPhone Duo remains interesting, and is clearly a technical tour-de-force that is the outcome of deep thinking about what a foldable phone can be. But the things that sparkle in my mind when I consider it is just the details. They are very important details that yield a noticeably different product, but they are sprinkles on top of a downward slope in user interface design at Apple that does not care any longer about what users or developers want. All that's important is for this year's device to uproot fundamentals and demand that everyone conform to an arbitrary new intuition.

Update (2026-09-29): Craig Hockenberry:

I don’t remember seeing this mentioned anywhere, but you have to be careful about where you place your safe area constraints.

My first pass moved the constraints on scroll/collection views from the superview leading/trailing to the safe area leading/trailing.

[…]

But if you look at Settings and Safari - our only two examples of “what’s right”, you’ll see the scroll indicators are “outside” the navigation bar and hug the edge of the device bezel.

Natalia Panferova:

I thought it would be useful to have a single reference for the different ways we can style the toolbar in SwiftUI on macOS 26.

Phil Zakharchenko:

The toolbar id creates a stable customization domain, and each item id gives the framework something stable to persist when the user adds, removes, or reorders controls. This identifiability of toolbar items is a requirement for customization. Under the hood, when SwiftUI inevitably bridges your toolbar contents to NSToolbar, these identifiers will be directly translated to the NSToolbarItem’s itemIdentifiers.

As we continue the migration to a customizable toolbar, we are likely to encounter a few surprises related to this model.

[…]

After a closer inspection, and perhaps a few minutes of digging through the documentation, we come to the bleak realization: there is no customizable ToolbarItemGroup API.

[…]

The regular toolbar model and the customizable toolbar model overlap, but they are not interchangeable. You cannot give a ToolbarItemGroup an id, and you cannot place one directly inside toolbar(id:content:).

Majid Jabrayilov:

Let’s take a look at another example. This one is a bit tricky, because on macOS, you will get Action 1 in the top trailing position and the whole group of actions centered in the navigation bar. On iOS, you will get Action 1 pinned to trailing and all other items collapsed.

[…]

The final addition to the Toolbar API is the toolbarMinimizeBehavior view modifier allowing us to minimize toolbars while scrolling up or down. You can minimize tab, bottom, window and navigation bars with it.

With new modifiers SwiftUI gives us a much better balance between system-driven adaptation and explicit control. We can now decide which actions are more important, which items should always stay visible, which groups should intentionally live in the overflow menu, and how toolbars should react to scrolling.

Natalia Panferova:

iOS 27 includes a few smaller additions that make toolbar content easier to configure.

We can remove the default padding around an item whose content should extend to its edges with contentMarginsRemoved(_:)[…]

[…]

The status bar is now represented by ToolbarPlacement.statusBar, so its visibility can be controlled through the same toolbar API as other bars[…]

[…]

ForEach now conforms to ToolbarContent, which means we can generate toolbar items directly from a collection[…]

Natascha Fadeeva:

Together, the toolbar APIs let us express the importance of each action while SwiftUI continues to handle the toolbar’s layout across different sizes.

Previously:

• NSToolbar in Golden Gate
• SwiftUI in appleOS 27
• Golden Gate Window Corners
• Golden Gate Sidebars and Toolbars
• Where Did SwiftUI Leave You Hanging?
• Liquid Glass: Content vs. Controls

Amy Worrall (Mastodon):

McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again!

[…]

Gone are the days of converting your strokes and shapes to outlined paths before export. Keep everything how you drew it, and let McKinley handle the output.

[…]

Link your project’s asset catalog to your McKinley document. Then when you make a change, hit the Sync keyboard shortcut and it’s immediately populated with your latest version.

[…]

McKinley is a Mac-assed Mac app: a native AppKit UI, Quick Look previews and thumbnails for your documents, a full AppleScript dictionary for batch work, and the whole user guide offline in Help.

$60, no subscription. It’s been a while since I had to deal with custom SF Symbols, but I remember it being a major pain. I haven’t had the chance to try McKinley with a real project yet, but it looks very well done. I love seeing a new app ship with documentation and extensive AppleScript support, including sample scripts that you can install right from its script menu.

Mario Guzmán:

The icon isn’t just a symbol but a whole artistic creation on a canvas.

Look at how your tools are on panels that could be individually opened on their own auxiliary window. I can’t stand the single-window, everything buried into a single-sidebar design we get these days.

Amy Worrall:

SF Symbols rendering does a surprising amount behind your back: it interpolates nine weights from three masters, applies optical size adjustments, resolves hierarchical opacity ladders, and changes some of this between OS releases. Any preview I rendered myself might diverge from the real thing in ways nobody would notice until the symbol was in an app looking subtly wrong. (Obviously I aim to get my canvas rendering with the exact same nuance as Apple’s renderer, but programmers are fallible and the fewer ways things can diverge, the better.)

Apple provides no API for “here’s my SVG, render it as a symbol”. For a normal app using a custom SF Symbol, the symbol is compiled from an Asset Catalog in Xcode into a .car file (a compiled asset catalog) at build time. But there’s no ‘build time’ when I want to update a preview in McKinley.

My workaround involves compiling your symbol into a .car file at runtime, on every edit, by patching bytes into a template, then loading that temporary .car file into McKinley via NSBundle.

Previously:

• Octavo 1.0
• SF Viewer Removed From the App Store
• SF Symbols

Update (2026-09-08): John Gruber:

I mean just look at McKinley. It’s both beautiful and quite obviously a serious professional tool.

Update (2026-09-11): Amy Worrall:

Anyone used any great implementations of dockable palettes? (Adobe’s don’t count, I don’t think they’re great!)

I’m not going to go back to sidebars, but some kind of options/flexibility might work, if it doesn’t get in the way!

Adam Engst explains why AI software development should be approached as an evolution, starting with safe, verifiable data analysis, advancing to simple scripts, and eventually building applications. He distinguishes programming from development, arguing that non-programmers can act as product managers who direct AI, demand security checks, define requirements, and create software tailored to problems existing apps do not solve. (3) 

💾

💾

Howard Oakley:

As those new models start shipping on 22 September, the window for the first public release of Golden Gate has narrowed to 15-22 September, with greatest likelihood on the same day as the arrival of those new Macs.

[…]

At the same time as the release of Golden Gate, we should get Tahoe 26.7 and Sequoia 15.8, but it looks increasingly likely that the final version of Sonoma has been 14.8.9, released on 6 August.

Howard Oakley:

As we prepare to flee from the visual horrors of macOS Tahoe at last, this article is a reminder that it wasn’t the first major release of macOS that has had blatant bugs in its interface, although I suspect it may be unique in that those were intentional. While progress in Golden Gate has been limited, I hope you’ll find it rectifies some of the worst errors of Liquid Glass.

Many Macs will be left behind, as Golden Gate drops support for Intel.

Normally, I update around January. With Tahoe I waited until July. This time, I’m considering updating to Golden Gate soon after its release. The downside is that Xcode 26 doesn’t run on Golden Gate, so I would have to drop support for many older macOS versions (about 3% of my customers’ Macs). But it seems like Apple’s going to force that soon, anyway, as one of the next Xcode 27 updates will likely drop support for Tahoe. I want to get off Xcode 26, both to use the newer SDK and because there are various debugging/testing things that don’t work properly.

Mario Guzmán:

I am working on a new app. Right now, I am targeting back to macOS Sequoia. I think that would be a good OS to target but becoming quite old with Golden Gate just around the corner. […] I wonder if I should just target macOS Golden Gate and focus testing on that.

Previously:

• Ending the Golden Era for Backward-Compatible Apps
• Mac Studio 2026
• Mac mini 2026
• macOS 27 Public Beta
• Glow Leopard
• Avoiding Tahoe
• Ending macOS Intel Support
• Waiting to Update to Big Sur
• Waiting to Update to Catalina

Update (2026-09-04): Isaiah Carew:

i’m in the exact same boat. i’d really like to stay on macOS 15 and whatever Xcode works there. it means i can still build things in the old UI and mostly Tahoe and GG respect it.

but recent bug reports from beta testers and the inability to see these bugs on my VM has made me feel very stuck here — like apple has purposefully made it difficult to move forward and support older versions too.

Update (2026-09-11): Howard Oakley:

What if any preparations do you need to make before upgrading or updating then, or in the coming weeks?

Update (2026-09-16): Adam C. Engst:

So who should upgrade immediately, and who should wait? Let’s consider a few broad categories of users.

Our conversation with Adam Engst continues with an exploration of  how AI can help non-programmers build sophisticated software by following professional development practices. Adam explains using specifications, architecture documents, and AI-guided decisions to create reliable apps, then examines the approach his app, SetShot, takes to macOS settings, privacy, security, user feedback, Cloudflare, GitHub, and minimizing sensitive data collection. 

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