Neil Macy

I remember my first thought when I heard the opening of Oxygen: "holy crap they got a new singer".

When I was a teenager, I read the Lord of the Rings every year.

I don't use Twitter any more.

I don't remember when Google Reader was killed off.

Biffy have moved on a lot since their debut, sounding a lot more polished and much less grungy.

I loved this album when it first came out.

I bloody love The Gaslight Anthem.

Two of my most-used keyboard shortcuts in Xcode must be ⌘-Shift-O (Open Quickly) and ⌘-Shift-J (Reveal in Project Navigator).

I've had the text size on my phone set as small as possible for as long as I can remember.

I hear two songs from this and get the feels: "Everybody's Dancing and I Want to Die" sends shivers up my spine.

I recently moved home and haven't had fibre connected yet, so I'm exclusively using my phone service for the Internet.

I love how dark this feels.

I love working with code files side by side in Xcode.

I hadn’t listened to this album in years, and boy was I surprised.

I love the mix on this album.

I have a couple of very different projects on the go just now.

For all the shit it got at the time, this really holds up.

I don't really care about version numbers I've long thought that version numbers are unimportant.

runningtrack.app I've published the first version of the website for Running Track.

I’ve just had approval from App Review, so Running Track is now ready for beta testing on TestFlight!

A month or so ago I gave myself a clear instruction for Running Track.

The world’s town square.

I have a premium tier in Running Track.

Andy Ibanez has a great resource for working with the Xcode Simulator on the command line.

One interesting part of planning my novel is figuring out how much technical accuracy to go for, as opposed to how much to just make up.

Yesterday I set up a static site for Running Track on my phone, in half an hour, while holding a sleeping baby.

I'm currently working on a couple of projects.

I've been writing some SwiftUI recently for my run tracking app and I hit a really annoying problem.

This is really handy.

It's really easy to make a property wrapper in Swift to automatically modify a property.

I'm aware that I'm very late to this party.

The iOS project that I work on is a few years old and has over 14,000 commits in its commit history.

Let's say you have an app that supports iOS 13 and above.

I got a new laptop for work recently.

I use a customised version of Panic's palette as my Xcode theme.

I've been playing around with SwiftUI recently.

I write a lot of UI code in UIKit, and in particular in code rather than using Interface Builder.

Ctrl-R is one of my favourite terminal commands.

I think tags are simultaneously the best and worst organisation method for my brain.

When you write a UI test, you will often find you need to get the app into the right state to perform the test.

If you're going to use mock data when building your app, for example to mock API responses, make sure that the data you use will stand the test of time.

When you're writing a UI test, you often want to check that a view is on-screen.

Over the last year or so I've found myself using my phone far more often than my iPad or Mac.

If you have a UITableViewController which can be empty, it's helpful to have some kind of empty state, rather than just an empty screen.

The new Mac mini with the Apple M1 chip is an incredible machine to use.

This is a fairly small thing, but really handy if you need it.

I just added interval splits to Running Track, and vastly improved the map view too.

When you want to use a UITableViewCell or UICollectionViewCell subclass, you need to go through a few boilerplate steps to register and dequeue it.

If you’re finding your UIViewControllers are getting large and unmanageable, and have too many responsibilities, splitting them out into Child UIViewControllers is a great way to go.

The two big electoral shocks in western democracy this year [2016], the British vote to leave the EU and the American presidential election, have a few things in common.