Brent Simmons

Writes NetNewsWire, a free and open source RSS reader for Mac and iOS.

He/him.

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npub1t9zu5u4ydpgql0cqp9qh4zvc4ruqrdzcd8kejktharvk6vaxjvasqc0pps

NIP-05 Address

brentsimmons@indieweb-social.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9j3w2w2jxs5q0huqqjst63xv237qpk3vxnmvet9m73ktdxwnfxwcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qhjq2w8

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relay.ditto.pub

Author Public Key

npub1t9zu5u4ydpgql0cqp9qh4zvc4ruqrdzcd8kejktharvk6vaxjvasqc0pps

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Last Notes

2026-10-14 18:02:42 UTC

I wish people would stop calling it Twitter. Twitter is gone forever. It’s X.
How to remember: think of a sawed-off swastika.

2026-10-13 19:10:59 UTC

Charging for links. Instagram can go fuck itself. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/10/12/instagram-charging-for-links/

2026-10-01 03:06:54 UTC

Fucking Reddit fucking sucks.

2026-10-01 03:03:21 UTC

Reddit to Stop Providing RSS feeds: https://ranchero.com/2026/09/30/reddit-to-stop-providing-rss.html

2026-08-24 22:08:34 UTC

Tech Choices: https://inessential.com/2026/08/24/tech-choices.html

2026-06-13 14:52:16 UTC

Dog in my neighborhood.
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/116/743/362/033/631/310/original/05e47c08e4a4d938.jpg

2026-06-08 16:15:39 UTC

My biggest hope for WWDC this year is an easy summer 🐣🐥🌴

2026-06-06 15:44:56 UTC

Saw The Church last night at the Showbox in Seattle — great show! If you like The Church and they’re doing a show in your town, don’t miss it. https://www.thechurchband.com/

2026-04-28 21:35:44 UTC

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@nprofile…lel8 @nprofile…ncd0 Gotta be square or I don’t care

2026-03-09 20:20:59 UTC

From open web champion Manton Reece comes a new RSS reader Inkwell:
"Inkwell is built around three main tabs: Today, Recent, and Fading. Today is for the latest blog posts. Recent is for posts yesterday or the day before. And Fading is for posts up to a week old. After a week, posts fade out of Inkwell, so you’ll never be overwhelmed with unread posts. If you missed them, it’s okay."
It already syncs with Unread and we’d like to ... https://ranchero.com/2026/03/09/inkwell-new-rss-reader.html

2026-03-04 18:59:43 UTC

Fuck this translucency shit. Not sure how this has made my content front and center.
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/116/172/441/447/828/955/original/a9d4ac193791859d.png

2026-03-02 17:56:26 UTC

Before sending Apple any money this week, remember that Tim Cook attended a private screening of the Melania documentary at the White House later in the same day that Alex Pretti was murdered by this administration. He knew about it and went anyway.

2026-02-27 17:35:10 UTC

What breaks my heart about LLMs is that when I teach it something about coding, I’m not teaching a person. And the LLM is going to fucking forget anyway.

2026-02-13 22:16:49 UTC

People:
2014: OMG RSS is still around!
2015: OMG RSS is still around!
2016: OMG RSS is still around!
2017: OMG RSS is still around!
2018: OMG RSS is still around!
2019: OMG RSS is still around!
2020: OMG RSS is still around!
2021: OMG RSS is still around!
2022: OMG RSS is still around!
2023: OMG RSS is still around!
2024: OMG RSS is still around!
2025: OMG RSS is still around!
2026: OMG RSS is still around!
Maybe in 2027 we’ll stop being surprised!

2026-02-06 19:19:01 UTC

NetNewsWire 7.0 for iOS has finally passed through the review process. It may take a few hours to propagate — but it should be on the App Store now or soon-ish 🎸

2026-02-04 18:38:41 UTC

NetNewsWire 7.0 for iOS was just submitted to the App Store, which means it should show up in the next few days (possibly as soon as today). 🐣🐥🎉
Cool Liquid Glass stylin’s by @nprofile…3rm8.
iPad screenshots:
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/116/013/813/718/181/521/original/a56bd4e87b74510c.png
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/116/013/814/057/998/481/original/3a8a2723204954ca.png

2026-02-03 23:58:13 UTC

The worst part of app development is making screenshots.
I hate it so much. I’d rather go to the dentist. I’d even rather make a phone call! Fuck you, screenshots. Fuck off.

2026-01-26 17:17:56 UTC

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@nprofile…eke9 I know the answer, or at least part of it. I wrote the first one of these — NetNewsWire Lite 1.0 was released in 2002, and it was the first RSS reader to resemble an email app.
I was actually thinking about Usenet, not email, but whatever — the question I asked myself then was how would I design a Usenet app for (then-new) Mac OS X in the year 2002? The answer was pretty clear to me: instead of multiple windows, a single window with a sidebar, list of posts, and detail view.
1/x

2026-01-21 21:55:49 UTC

On my blog — email from family in Minnesota:
https://inessential.com/2026/01/21/email-from-minnesota-family.html

2026-01-06 05:11:46 UTC

Look at this wonderfully icon-free Edit menu…
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/115/846/434/137/635/458/original/c5c448c5453d5e9f.png

2025-12-17 22:36:25 UTC

Years of experience as an app developer has taught me that people who don’t upgrade their macOS and iOS tend to be angry about things.
Me? I’m running macOS 15 and iOS 18.

2025-10-12 15:39:55 UTC

There is no CEO of RSS.

2025-10-04 19:32:59 UTC

On my blog — Why NetNewsWire Is Not a Web App: https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-web-app.html
“I still bristle, after all these years (now more than ever), at having to publish NetNewsWire for iOS through the App Store.”

2025-08-28 17:32:57 UTC

On my blog: “And it seems retro in the worst way that we’re still using anything other than a scripting language for most of our code. We should be using something simple and light that can configure toolbars, handle networking callbacks, query databases, manage views, and so on.”
https://inessential.com/2025/08/28/easy-app-writing.html

2025-06-19 19:54:41 UTC

Reminder of a thing I’ve learned empirically — covid still exists, and people are still getting it, and it really, really, really sucks!
(I don’t actually have it myself. Yet. That could change any minute.)

2025-06-16 21:18:27 UTC

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@nprofile…l5uf Not on purpose. Just looks like a bug.

2025-06-14 03:53:31 UTC

Saturday March: https://inessential.com/2025/06/13/saturday-march.html

2025-06-14 02:41:15 UTC

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@nprofile…7j6v I used to make gin rickeys with the addition of a cranberry ice cube. So good!

2025-06-10 16:08:49 UTC

It occurs to me that Liquid Glass will make Electron apps on the Mac look far more different from native apps than they currently do — seems like it would be very difficult, to the point of not worth trying, to replicate LG in Electron.
As a lover of native apps, I’m totally fine with that. And I imagine, though I don’t know, that people building Electron apps will continue to not care about platform-specific UI. So everybody’s fine with it 🐥

2025-06-09 18:34:11 UTC

On the iPadOS changes — it’s as if Apple suddenly realized that Mac is pretty fucking good and a great model for the future of computing.

2025-06-06 19:10:49 UTC

Retirement Day: https://inessential.com/2025/06/06/retirement-day.html

2025-05-31 18:23:12 UTC

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@nprofile…f6tm @nprofile…0jed Looks like a bug! We’ll check it out.

2025-05-31 18:22:01 UTC

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@nprofile…pwpa Beautiful! Looks a lot like my neighborhood in Seattle

2025-05-31 18:21:01 UTC

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So what am I going to do this last weekend? Watch ’80s new wave music videos. Because that’s what people from my planet do.
DJ Jake Rudh is doing 1985 on his Twitch channel tonight at 6 Pacific. https://www.twitch.tv/djjakerudh

2025-05-31 18:16:07 UTC

Since this Friday is my last day of work, this is my last weekend as a working person! 🎩🎉
After this I won’t even know what day it is, or whether or not it’s 5 pm somewhere.

2025-05-31 04:24:49 UTC

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@nprofile…5f2h Radio Userland worked on Mac OS 9, I’m pretty sure, and it included an RSS reader and a blog generator and editor

2025-05-29 16:49:32 UTC

Seattle Xcoders tonight is a special 5th Thursday edition — we’ll be at the Waterwheel in Ballard rather than at Bale Breaker. 7-9 pm (or whatever, really).
Waterwheel is closing in like a year — we won’t have many more chances to hang out at this wonderful Seattle institution.

2025-05-28 17:10:27 UTC

My last sprint starts today, and I won’t be there for the end of it. Feeling good.

2025-05-28 17:09:30 UTC

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@nprofile…v8hz Wonderful news!

2025-05-28 17:08:34 UTC

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@nprofile…rl67 Great example! That’s one I can’t seem to hold on to either. Another example for me is currying — I always have to be reminded what it is when it comes up. (Which is pretty rare these days anyway.)

2025-05-28 16:59:03 UTC

I will get through my years of working at a corporation without being able to remember what OKR and KPI stand for and what the difference is between them.
I also can never remember what logarithms are for more than 10 minutes, so it’s not like my mind is a steel trap anyway.

2025-05-25 17:58:15 UTC

In Gus’s post about my post about my incorrect bias about corporate developers, he suggests I might be counting down the number of meetings I have left. I am!
https://shapeof.com/archives/2025/5/brent_on_biases_and_retirement.html
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/114/569/762/857/069/014/original/1cf0c9cf4d382c48.png

2025-05-24 19:38:46 UTC

Retirement and NetNewsWire: https://inessential.com/2025/05/24/retirement_and_netnewswire.html

2025-05-23 23:10:09 UTC

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@nprofile…ar28 Maybe find some open source project to volunteer on, and work with the folks there? Maybe more than one? Seems like it might be a good way to get exposed to more code and ideas and get practice solving a wider variety of problems.

2025-05-23 20:40:02 UTC

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@nprofile…p3vk I will continue to work on NetNewsWire (and perhaps other free and open source apps) — I’ll have a lot more time for it, which is awesome

2025-05-23 20:39:24 UTC

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@nprofile…p4gz Partly — but there’s also a difference between the person who did some apps on their own, or were the only one (or one of two) iOS engineers at their company, and the person who worked on a team of six iOS engineers. (For instance.) Maybe just one job in each case, but different amounts of working with other people.

2025-05-23 19:43:20 UTC

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@nprofile…t4km Not native, but I’ve been here for several decades

2025-05-23 19:35:23 UTC

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@nprofile…t4km Yes! No plans to ever move. I love my city

2025-05-23 18:54:23 UTC

My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers: https://inessential.com/2025/05/23/love_letter.html

2025-05-19 18:39:20 UTC

I opened GarageBand for the first time in years and there was an ad for Logic Pro in the app.
It is increasingly difficult to say Apple is any different from any other tech company.

2025-05-15 23:33:57 UTC

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@nprofile…vk7p Reeder, Tapestry, Unread, NetNewsWire

2025-05-14 23:42:07 UTC

Developers, me included, started selling software on the internet in the mid ’90s. The App Store didn’t save us from that.
Many developers, large and small, had been selling on the web for more than 10 years by the time the App Store appeared.

2025-05-05 04:43:50 UTC

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@nprofile…7j6v nobody

2025-05-05 04:42:53 UTC

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@nprofile…8c6a I cried in the theater about the robot

2025-04-24 23:47:00 UTC

I often wonder, though I know the answer doesn’t matter in any way at all — will these fucking people be super-surprised when they go to hell, or will they have known it all along?

2025-04-18 08:35:24 UTC

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@nprofile…ftpk Weird how often I think about that

2025-04-18 05:46:21 UTC

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@nprofile…9kl0 We’re too old for this shit. Pay a pro.

2025-04-15 16:49:03 UTC

Looking at some figmas with a title “Accessibility (A11Y)” — and I’m going to suggest that maybe we should adopt a new convention where we just shorten that to “Accessibility.”

2025-04-02 03:43:42 UTC

I think of this 2018 article surprisingly often: C Is Not a Low-level Language
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479

2025-03-28 17:29:45 UTC

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@nprofile…t8ng @nprofile…5n8f Waiting for the EO officially renaming Earth to Mars. Mission accomplished!

2025-03-26 21:30:32 UTC

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@nprofile…s4xj NetNewsWire can usually find the feed itself if you just give it the website URL

2025-03-16 19:13:37 UTC

Seattle Xcoders Presentation Meetings Return: https://inessential.com/2025/03/16/seattle_xcoders_presentations_return.html

2025-03-16 19:05:32 UTC

Seattle Xcoders is returning to tech talks Thursday, April 3 — read all about it!
https://xcoders.org/2025/03/16/seattle-xcoders-returns-to-presentation.html

2025-03-13 16:11:48 UTC

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@nprofile…0fu2 In your 50s you can really fuck up your knee by hearing a sound or looking straight ahead

2025-03-11 02:58:31 UTC

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@nprofile…0k5k I’ve been Linux-curious lately, for real.

2025-03-09 22:05:49 UTC

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@nprofile…9vce Same in Seattle! This is one of my happiest days of the year.

2025-02-25 20:15:06 UTC

I’ve been doing some C programming lately — not NetNewsWire, don’t worry! (it’s a personal project) — and just last night I learned about pthread_once and I’m over the moon. What a wonderful thing!
(I used to use dispatch_once frequently in Objective-C code. I assume it uses pthread_once.)

2025-02-09 20:07:34 UTC

All of America is counting on the Eagles today. Don’t let us down! 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅

2025-02-07 08:30:42 UTC

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@nprofile…g832 Account and Folder both conform to a Container protocol.

2025-02-02 20:53:29 UTC

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@nprofile…a3k0 @nprofile…syft

2025-01-27 17:53:56 UTC

Sorry — can’t work today. Slack is showing an unread count of 1 on its Dock icon badge, but there are no unread messages or activity of any kind. I’ve searched through everything and refreshed multiple times.
Till this clears up I’ll just be spinning in my chair.

2025-01-24 00:34:52 UTC

I strongly dislike UI that requires tap-and-hold.
I don’t like that it’s so slow compared to other interactions — it’s more about *waiting* than just tapping and holding, and I just don’t have any patience when using my phone.
And there’s the weird mental brace-for-impact during the wait — waiting for the menu and haptics and whatever that will happen not immediately on tap but at some unpredictable time later, as my brain anticipates it on a loop until it finally happens.
Just me?

2025-01-19 05:39:31 UTC

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@nprofile…8t2y I’d go into work this weekend just to approve those PRs. (Except that I won’t, actually. But I will look forward to them next week!)

2025-01-07 23:23:46 UTC

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@nprofile…d56d Yup! I would pay extra to _not_ have AI!

2025-01-07 23:15:42 UTC

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@nprofile…gftj I was writing on another Slack group I own that I’m the opposite of a hoarder — and so I agree. I’m actually quite fine with a whole bunch of stuff going away. I always thought of Slack more like irc than like something that should last forever.

2025-01-07 22:23:22 UTC

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The good news is that we can continue to use Slack for free, and we will. We will lose older messages forever, yes, but I don’t care about that.

2025-01-07 21:45:32 UTC

I was curious how much I’d have to pay to upgrade to Slack Pro for the NetNewsWire group — and it’s obviously more than the revenue from my free app can sustain. :)
Note that the lower price is just for three months, and then it would go up to the full price. And let’s not even talk about adding AI! (Seriously — let’s not.)
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/789/260/834/005/165/original/e5bf192b175baaa8.png

2025-01-07 18:34:14 UTC

Engineers — new rule — pay attention: whenever you hear or read the word learnings, as said or written by someone in your company, you have to take the rest of the day off.

2025-01-03 01:42:42 UTC

Seattle Xcoders venue change for tonight!
Bale Breaker (normal place) is closed this week, so folks are going to Reuben’s (5010 14th Ave NW).
(I’m personally missing it tonight, for secret reasons, but I do hear about other folks going.)

2025-01-01 22:53:40 UTC

Muting everybody who looks back at 2024.

2024-12-19 16:05:39 UTC

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@nprofile…n8dz Why melancholy?

2024-12-19 03:29:38 UTC

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@nprofile…0k5k It may be my masterwork. The thing I was born to make. (And I cribbed most of it!)

2024-12-19 02:58:23 UTC

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@nprofile…0k5k Looks like we’re the last ones! Started on tcsh with the first release of Mac OS X. Just never switched off.
From my .tcshrc:
alias __git_current_branch 'git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD >& /dev/null && echo "(`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`)"'
alias precmd 'set prompt="[%m:%{\e[34m%}%c2%{\e[0m%}]%{\e[31m%}`__git_current_branch`%{\e[0m%} "'

2024-12-19 02:56:52 UTC

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@nprofile…ms77 Still on tcsh! Was the default shell in the early OS X releases, and I’m still on it :)

2024-12-18 23:18:08 UTC

This has been the greatest long-term technical challenge of my life, off and on for years — but I finally figured out how to get my shell prompt to 1) show me the current git branch 2) in color. Whew!
I gave the path a color too, since I was on a roll. Extra credit, gold star for me. 🐥
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/676/378/846/988/600/original/45b1f59e4cd1aa21.png

2024-12-18 18:11:16 UTC

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@nprofile…s4xz The Hacker News feed is a rare case in that it doesn’t have anything besides a title.

2024-12-18 18:09:46 UTC

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@nprofile…s4xz Do you not usually see — with almost all feeds — something more like this, with title and/or first part of text?
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/675/166/152/578/701/original/8284bab8c9564cf2.png

2024-12-18 16:07:11 UTC

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@nprofile…s4xz What’s the feed URL for that feed?

2024-12-09 17:25:01 UTC

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@nprofile…j04h @nprofile…4057 See FB16026167 for tab bar not hiding and see FB16026524 what appears to be a related crash.

2024-12-08 19:54:37 UTC

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@nprofile…4057 That toolbar is an Apple bug with support for iOS apps running on Mac. Has to do with the tab bar changes in iOS 18. (Already filed FB on it, but don’t have number handy.)

2024-12-06 21:53:00 UTC

I get that “stop doing Combine!” sounds like an old guy thing to say — but I’m in on Swift structured concurrency and SwiftUI.
My argument is the opposite of curmudgeonly — Combine is not the future, and we want to use future things.
But I get that Combine tastes like honey and sparkles.

2024-12-06 21:47:53 UTC

I keep telling the younger developers “stop doing Combine!” and… they keep doing Combine.
To be fair, though — and I mean this sincerely — they’re all smarter than me. :)

2024-12-05 23:56:06 UTC

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@nprofile…r38h I can’t seem to find it either! But I remember writing that. These days a clean console seems like a hopeless dream, though.

2024-12-05 21:31:53 UTC

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@nprofile…824q @nprofile…0k5k Ah! I never thought to wonder if that practice had a name.

2024-12-05 21:13:23 UTC

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@nprofile…0k5k What is a destructuring statement?

2024-12-05 17:44:44 UTC

The worst time of the year at my job, and maybe at yours, too, is feedback-writing time.
What if we skipped it — what if we saved the time all this browser-work takes — and just gave everybody a raise?

2024-12-04 19:29:42 UTC

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@nprofile…7c2r I did! But it’s been six or seven years, and I don’t remember anything about how column resizing works in OmniOutliner.

2024-12-03 21:32:55 UTC

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@nprofile…rjks @nprofile…a0dn I should have included a crash log — but it’s so easy to reproduce, and 100% reproducible with the attached project, that I just didn’t think of it.

2024-12-03 04:33:40 UTC

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@nprofile…a0dn Good to know! Thank you.

2024-12-03 02:45:59 UTC

For Apple employees who are fans of fixing crash bugs I submit FB 16026524 — presenting a .fullScreen view controller when running a tab bar app as iOS-app-on-Mac (not Catalyst) crashes. Super simple test project included.