Spent some time reworking pilky's Coppice for the new design language, moving the symbology to SF Symbols, trying to get glass in the right places, patching out all of the old licensing system. It's hard enough porting your own app, nevermind somebody else's vast codebase, but I'll get through it eventually 🙂
We talked for years about bringing Coppice to iPad and the App Store, but those plans just kept getting punted as the short-term todo list got longer. And with new OS redesigns and frameworks being a moving target, there's a lot of investment needed just to tread water, so I expect this to be a long-term project
Coppice is a pretty complex AppKit app, about 70,000 lines of code, with plenty of NIBs and lots of Combine. Finding every nook and cranny in the app that needs a redesign for Liquid Glass, figuring out where it is in the codebase, and how it interacts with everything else, would be impossible without Xcode's 3D layer visualizer. On top of that, the data model is broken in the last set of commits, so I have a lot of spelunking ahead of me just to get it working again. Making progress though
Here's a before/after of the empty Coppice UI so you can see the changes I've made so far, and the nature of my redesign
We're getting somewhere with the design. AppKit has a lot of rough edges with Liquid Glass, and it doesn't seem like they've bothered to update Interface Builder for any of the recent control styles either, but it's been an interesting challenge nonetheless
Problem of the day revealed: M3Data's plist parser was stumbling on 1s and 0s being interpreted as bools instead of their actual number type. Quick fix deployed, and now Coppice opens documents again 🥳
Another reveal: NSToolbar's .flexibleSpace doesn't provide progressive blur by default, but .space does 🤦♂️
All in a good day's work.
If you want to see how Coppice was built, pilky's dev livestreams are still up on YouTube, with hundreds of hours of AppKit and related discussion. As we approach a year since his passing, and as I prepare a significant update to Coppice, it's kinda nice to revisit them
https://www.youtube.com/@mcubedsoftware/videos
Coppice
Coppice is an app for the Mac that lets you collect your thoughts and ideas, link them together, and visually lay them out on an infinite canvas.
Coppice is developed live on Twitch, with VODs put up on this channel afterwards.
Putting a significant amount of work in while I wait for App Review; not gonna be shy about changes to Coppice — there was a lot I wanted to add to it even before it was passed to me, like quality of life additions, interaction and terminology changes, and more. I'm seeing how much I can get away with without digging a hole for myself; this week I'm the AppKit whisperer
Bringup of Coppice 2026.0 so far: 317 changed files, 2041 additions, 8575 deletions
I had often asked for color pages in Coppice, but it was always on the back burner behind a lot of other pressing todo list items. So I figured I may as well dig in now and see if I could do it myself
~several hours later~
Related: IB autolayout can go IN THE BIN 🚮
👨✈️ What I'm currently working on in Coppice is now available on TestFlight if you're running macOS 26 or newer. I would love for some external feedback, as it's a big app with a lot of corners to test and I don't have a pre-existing bugs list
https://testflight.apple.com/join/Z2j1UB3Y
@stroughtonsmith done! Is it fine to use the usual TestFlight feedback channels, or do you prefer something else?
@juandesant those'll work, or use the contact support option in the Help menu
Steve Troughton-Smith
Dr. Juande Santander-Vela
butternut