David Smith

@_Davidsmith
17.4K Followers
329 Following
2.1K Posts
Independent app developer. Independent in general. Maker of Widgetsmith, Pedometer++, Sleep++ and Watchsmith.
Bloghttps://david-smith.org
Podcasthttps://www.relay.fm/radar
Widgetsmithhttps://apps.apple.com/us/app/widgetsmith/id1523682319
Pedometer++https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pedometer/id712286167

RE: https://mastodon.macstories.net/@viticci/116398205988680627

I’ve been using this recently and it is super helpful. I must frame dozens of screenshots a week and always looking for more efficient workflows for it.

Also just very cool see how far @viticci has been able to push Shortcuts. He’s a wizard:🧙🏼‍♂️

RE: https://mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/116319618506552344

What are the odds that Lil' Finder Guy is in the goodie bag at WWDC this year? Now that would be epic.

Had my Apple Watch dock for less than 30 minutes and already found a bug in my app which has been lurking for years because attaching the debugger to the watch's widget extension never worked properly over WiFi.

RE: https://mastodon.tz.is/@khaost/116253127280820238

OMG, @khaost is my hero. They posted about this Apple Watch repair dock which allowed for direct connection debugging in Xcode. Just got mine in the mail and it 100% works. For the first time in my 11 years of active watchOS development that I can reliably/quickly step through code running on device.

It is a bit pricing and does feel a little bit sketchy in terms not being officially supported but I don't care…it will save me huge amounts of time and gray hairs to not doing it wirelessly.

While I don't yet feel like I have fully settled on how the I'll end up using LLMs in my day-to-day programming tasks, I have found a handful of prompts which I repeatably find to be generally useful and applicable regardless of whether I'm manually or agentically programming.

These are for:
- SwiftUI Previews
- Realtime Documentation
- Newly Localizable Strings
- Testing Plans
- Bug Finding
- Draft Release Notes

Detailed here: https://david-smith.org/blog/2026/03/20/generally-useful-prompts/

I was exploring the repairability of a MacBook Neo and came across this absolutely gorgeous exploded views Apple publishes in their Repair Manuals for their products.

I love the vibe of ‘em.

Also, kinda wild that the MacBook Neo is only 22 parts (vs the 35 of a Pro).

Neo: https://support.apple.com/en-us/126172
MBP: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/102712
Air: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/121934

It's a wild feeling when you are debugging a bit of logic and think you find the bug, so you fire up `git blame` to see where the code in question came from…and it turns out you write it nearly a decade ago. Mind bending that it is still in active use.

For a recent Widgetsmith feature I wanted to know how common the use of Display Zoom was among iOS users, but I couldn't find any published data on it. So I added the necessary analytics for collecting this data point, so that I could publish.

I found that around 1.9% of users have it enabled. Which is much lower than I would have guessed.

It is most common for with SE and Mini models, and least common for the Pro models.

Full write-up: https://david-smith.org/blog/2026/03/12/display-zoom-stats/

As a lover of the old 12″ MacBook I'm a bit sad to see that the MacBook Neo weights 2.7lbs (the same as the MacBook Air). There was something really magical about the 12″ weight of 2lbs. It was light enough you could carry it around and almost not notice it. I would (literally) carry it around in an inside jacket pocket.

Physically it’s nearly identical to the Air. I was hoping it would be a return of a Mac which focused around portability. A nice update, but not quite what I wished it was.

Reading through the System Prompts / Hints that Xcode 26.3 injects into the agents is fascinating..and honestly is just helpful documentation to read…essentially concise examples of best practices and implementations recommendations.

Reminds me of the old programming "Guides" which apple used to publish alongside the main documentation which were more focused on how to use the API, than what it was.

There're in: Xcode.app/Contents/PlugIns/IDEIntelligenceChat.framework/Versions/A/Resources