Brent Simmons

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:01:43 -0700

I was curious about NetNewsWire for iOS usage per iOS release. Here are the percentages:

iOS 26: 92.17%

iOS 18: 6.28%

iOS 17: 1.23%

iOS 16 and earlier: 0.32%

(The current version of NetNewsWire for iOS runs on iOS 17 and newer.)

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:52:07 -0700

Dog in my neighborhood.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:26:15 -0700

I usually wait as long as possible before installing new betas of macOS — but this year I think I’ll do it asap and live out of the beta all summer, which I never do, but Golden Gate looks like such an improvement over Tahoe that I want it right goddamn now.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:15:35 -0700

My biggest hope for WWDC this year is an easy summer 🐣🐥🌴

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 08:44:39 -0700

Saw The Church last night at the Showbox in Seattle — great show! If you like The Church and they’re doing a show in your town, don’t miss it.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:47:49 -0700

This time of year in North Dakota things are more brown than green. The farmhouses almost always have trees planted around them for relief from the wind.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:45:02 -0700

We had to wait for a slow-moving train in Voltaire, ND on our way one morning to Anamoose.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:32:57 -0700

I was called away from home (back now) for unexpected reasons.

Here’s what it looks like to fly into Minot, North Dakota in the evening. Note the many sloughs this time of year.

Here’s the jail in Benedict, North Dakota. My trip was not actually related to the jail! I just thought it was cool.

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:05:35 -0700

Code is a liquid now.

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:42:31 -0700

Wordlebot got what was coming to it today. Such a jerk.

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:17:01 -0700

Reminder! The Seattle Xcoders presentation meeting tonight is one you really, really want to be there for!

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:55:47 -0700

Before sending Apple any money this week, remember that Tim Cook attended a private screening of the Melania documentary at the White House later in the same day that Alex Pretti was murdered by this administration. He knew about it and went anyway.

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:31:48 -0700

Jesper writes, in Welcome (back) to Macintosh, of his hope that Apple can “refocus its software and its humility too.” I don’t want to quote the best parts — just go read it if you haven’t yet.

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:27:08 -0700

Spotlight has recently become terrible for launching apps after being so good for years. Now when I type something like Cal or Calendar or even Calendar.app I have to manually select the actual app in the list, if it even appears. Should be first thing.

Just me? Is my Mac haunted? Probably haunted.

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 18:40:57 -0700

Karbon Based, And Stay Out:

I sometimes think about what we lost along the way as Apple chased ultra-simplicity and luxury. Jony Ive spent a decade slowly removing any trace of personality from every product Apple released… Chasing thinness, removing ports, simplifying everything down to metal and glass with no differentiation.

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:14:35 -0700

I’ve been doing some C programming lately — not NetNewsWire, don’t worry! (it’s a personal project) — and just last night I learned about pthread_once and I’m over the moon. What a wonderful thing!

(I used to use dispatch_once frequently in Objective-C code. I assume it uses pthread_once.)

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:56:56 -0700

Just today I learned about Codeberg, “a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects.”

I have open source projects, and plan to have more, and getting away from big-corporation-owned services is an extremely attractive idea. I also like, for obvious reasons these days, the “Hosted in Europe, we welcome the world” part.

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 18:16:42 -0700

I hadn’t looked at my Safari Privacy Report in a while.

Wow Google! Holding the top five spots. Amazing work!

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 11:32:59 -0700

Engineers — new rule — pay attention: whenever you hear or read the word learnings, as said or written by someone in your company, you have to take the rest of the day off.

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 16:17:25 -0700

This has been the greatest long-term technical challenge of my life, off and on for years — but I finally figured out how to get my shell prompt to 1) show me the current git branch 2) in color. Whew!

I gave the path a color too, since I was on a roll. Extra credit, gold star for me. 🐥

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 14:52:30 -0700

I get that “stop doing Combine!” sounds like an old guy thing to say — but I’m in on Swift structured concurrency and SwiftUI.

My argument is the opposite of curmudgeonly — Combine is not the future, and we want to use future things.

But I get that Combine tastes like honey and sparkles.

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 14:47:51 -0700

I keep telling the younger developers “stop doing Combine!” and… they keep doing Combine.

To be fair, though — and I mean this sincerely — they’re all smarter than me. :)

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 10:26:26 -0700

It’s Seattle Xcoders night! Standard place and time — 7 pm at Bale Breaker in Ballard. We’re usually outside by the fire things.

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 14:55:19 -0700

Pretty stoked about the Seahawks hiring Mike Macdonald. SAVIOR OF BOOM!

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 13:31:20 -0700

Note to Mastodon users — if you’re following this account (@brentsimmons@micro.inessential.com), you should switch to following @brentsimmons@indieweb.social.

(This account is actually my ActivityPub-compatible micro.blog account, rather than a regular Mastodon account.)