OrchardNest

This coming Monday, Apple is having an event they are referring to as "Unleashed". The general rumor is this will be an announcement of new MacBook Pros with faster M1 based processors. That'd be great, but what I really want...

The Sub Club Podcast: On the podcast, we talk with Ben about all things app stores. From Apple’s revolutionary launch of the App Store in 2008 to the monopoly-like powers, both Google and Apple now wield today. With multiple lawsuits...

I released Acorn 7.1 yesterday, which has some new features, changes, and bug fixes. There's nothing earth shattering in here, just another release that continually improves Acorn. The full release notes are available as always. There...

Allen Pike: The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform In practice, the tradeoff is about more than “cheap vs. good”. Unintuitively, sometimes native tech can actually be the cheapest way to achieve a certain goal, and sometimes...

Freya Holmér has a wonderful video about how bézier curves are constructed with some amazing animations throughout. I wish this video had been around a decade or more ago, when I was really getting into bezier curves and implementing them...

This has easily been the longest sale we've ever had on Acorn - since March 17th! But if you've been holding out on buying it for some reason, now is the time to purchase. The 50% off sale will end Monday, August 23rd, and the...

Michael Buckley: macOS only allows sandboxed apps to access a limited number of files at a time, but there is no way for an app to query how many files it can open, or if it’s close to the limit. In fact, this limit is dependent on the...

50 Years ago today, Marvin Gay's album "What's Going On" was released. It's such an amazing album and if you haven't listened to it recently, why not today? The music and lyrics on this album are timeless in so...

Update (May 25): Security Update 2021-003 Catalina was released by Apple, and has the required fixes in it to enable Acorn to work correctly again. Update (May 2nd): Acorn 6.6.5 and Retrobatch 1.4.4 are out for anyone who has downloaded or...

Collin Donnell's The Run Loop podcast is back! Collin and myself talk a while about Acorn 7 and pixels and pipelines and lots of other stuff too. It was a fun time.

Acorn 7, our image editor for humans, is out. It's currently on sale for $19.99 (50% off), directly from us or via the App Store. After the sale, the full price is moving up to $39.99 from $29.99. So unless you feel like giving me more...

Dr. Brad J. Cox Ph.D. 1944 - 2021: Dr. Brad Cox, Ph.D of Manassas, Virginia, died on January 2, 2021 at his residence. Dr. Cox was a computer scientist known mostly for creating the Objective – C programming language with his business...

From the study: The researchers saw little to no response to code in the language regions of the brain. Instead, they found that the coding task mainly activated the so-called multiple demand network. This network, whose activity is...

I'm looking for some folks to help test out the next major version of Acorn. Does that sound interesting? If so, send an email to [email protected] and I'll add you to the list. What's new? Now optimized for Apple Silicon,...

NYTimes: A New Population of Blue Whales Was Discovered Hiding in the Indian Ocean The covert cadre of whales, described in a paper published last week in the journal Endangered Species Research, has its own signature anthem: a slow,...

An Ernie Ball documentary on one of my favorite guitarists, Buddy Guy. Buddy on Muddy Waters: "The rumor was he was sick, let's call him and go out there. And he answered. 'I ain't sick motherfucker, just keep the blues...

I'm hearing from a number of people that some old versions of Acorn aren't working correctly on Big Sur. This isn't unexpected, as apps that haven't had updates in 5-10 years probably aren't going to work on the latest...

In short, to make a boot disk for MacOS: sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume I had no idea Apple was including a shell tool as part of the OS distribution,...

Capo is an app that helps you learn songs by ear, available on both the Mac and iOS. It's one of my favorite apps and I use it on both iOS and the Mac to help figure out tricky guitar solos (Hendrix, SRV, etc.). The new version has a...

In short, Apple has created a fork of TensorFlow (a machine learning package) which is accelerated on Macs (including the new M1 Macs). One of the problems I've encountered when trying out machine learning ideas is that a lot of sample...

Starting January 1, 2021, App Store developers can apply to have their commission rates dropped from 30% to 15% if they made less than $1 million in proceeds the previous year. This is very good news and I'm happy to see a reduction in...

James Allworth: Indeed, that deal between Apple and Intel was more important for Intel than it could have ever possibly realized. But it wasn’t because Intel had sewn up the last of the desktop computer processor market. Instead, it was...

First up, I released Retrobatch 1.4.3 this morning as a Universal Binary, meaning it will run natively on the new Apple Silicon Macs. There are also a couple of bug fixes, features, and compatiblity fixes for MacOS 11 Big Sur. It's...

There's lots of celebrating, not just in the US but around the world, that Joe Biden has won the US presidency. We heard fireworks this morning when all the networks called it. The impromptu celebrations in the streets right now are...

I received my US election ballot yesterday, filled it out today and dropped it off at the nearest drop box. Voting up here in Washington State has been mail in (or drop off) for a long while now, and it's pretty awesome. No lines and...

Maciej Cegłowsk has some good advice: When the George Floyd protests began to spread nationally in the summer of 2020, I noticed many people on social media asking Hong Kongers for advice on protest tactics–which apps to use, what...

This past September 18th was the 50th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death. He would have been 77 years old. Hendrix was amazing. Beyond amazing. Something on a whole other level. It's hard to explain. It seems that the longer I...

School started yesterday for my daughter Madeline. She's entering grade 3, but classes are all virtual because of the ongoing covid crisis. This generally sucks, but like the majority of parents in our area, we weren't going to...

Marc Edwards: SVGs can now be used as assets for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS apps. The most exciting part of this new feature is that there’s not much to say — it’s full SVG support, and it just works.

The Corona-Warn-App is an app that helps trace infection chains of SARS-CoV-2 (which can cause COVID-19) in Germany. The app is based on technologies with a decentralized approach and notifies users if they have been exposed to...

I'm really enjoying the format of the WWDC videos that are coming out. The talks I've been interested in are short and focused, so I don't have to fast forward through sections I'm not interested in. The code sections in...

I feel like I have whiplash. I'm super happy that the Mac is finally moving to  processors and I've already applied for the dev kit. Hopefully I'll be getting it soon. Can we call it the Chip, instead of "Apple...