OrchardNest

How we're spending our summers so far.

Approaching a change with very, very high stakes.

The second digital-only WWDC, how iOS 15 and watchOS 8 impact our apps, and what we'll be tackling first this summer.

What to expect from WWDC, how to prepare for the virtual event, and how to follow the material.

Dealing with features we wish we'd never added.

When big-company maneuvers hit the little fish like us.

Forgiving ourselves for a year of greatly reduced productivity.

WWDC 2021's announcement, and whether Overcast should adopt a terminology change along with Apple and Spotify.

You should totally run your own servers. It'll be fine! Well, most of the time.

A _DavidSmith Story Half-Hour on the surprising journey to build a simple photo complication for Apple Watch. How hard could it be?

Deforestation, timber production, and wood preparation. [taps earpiece] What?… Oh, sorry. Scratch that. Writing lines of text to files for diagnostic purposes.

Trying to remove emotion and assumptions from indie business decision-making.

Copying someone else's work as a learning exercise, and the tricky balance between copying and inspiration.

The kind of year we expect 2021 to be for Apple-platform developers, and an update on Overcast's SwiftUI progress.

Apple's new privacy labels in the App Store, and how we've designed our custom analytics frameworks for minimal data collection.

The tricky balance of making big changes to your app to better serve your current market without upsetting your initial customers.

How the M1 Macs are game-changers for developers, and our thoughts on the lower fees from the App Store Small Business Program.

The continued challenges of modernizing Overcast with Swift and SwiftUI, and deciding whether to rewrite Objective-C components in Swift.

Refactoring and rewriting the foundations of a 6-year-old Objective-C codebase using Swift and modern APIs.

Settling into a baseline, leaving no room to be undercut, and where Widgetsmith goes from here.

Dave's app is number one in the App Store! We explore the mind-bending scale and perspective of such a defining moment in an indie developer's career.

What Apple's event and iOS 14's timing means for us.

Our second-annual wishlist for how we hope this fall's Apple hardware spends the efficiency gains from another year of technological progress.

How Epic vs. Apple might affect developers like us.

The new App Store privacy disclosures and tracking-permission prompt in iOS 14.

What we're working on so far this summer, and why we're not keeping it secret.

Adapting to the continued consolidation of Apple's platforms and frameworks.

How the online-only format of WWDC 2020 is working out in practice, and how quickly we plan to adopt the new APIs.

Putting mental health above productivity during challenging times.

Using compatibility shims and abstractions to gain some of the newest APIs' benefits on previous OS versions.

Imposing arbitrary limits on yourself to produce better projects.

The risks and rewards of using custom fonts, and how to implement them in a modern app.