Frank Illenberger

@bdkjones I find this architecture reasonable. Object IDs are small integers and CoreData needs to increment the counters within a transaction to be race-safe. You can obtain permanent Ids before saving in a separate transaction. And you can always add an indexed UUID attribute.

Core Data: "Here is your new model object. It has ID 123." Developer: "Thanks. Save it." CD: "Saved." Dev: "Give me model object 123." CD: "No object has that ID." Dev: "What? You saved it 10 seconds ago." CD: "Oh, yea, that thing has ID 789 now. Changed it when we saved." If I could meet the Apple Engineer who designed this idiocy—preferably at the top of a large cliff—that would be swell.

@bdkjones This function is your friend if you want to obtain permanent IDs for newly inserted managed objects BEFORE you save the context changes:

@krzyzanowskim I feel you. I’ve been implementing and maintaining a text editor with it for four years now. It is terrible how many crazy workarounds you need to get it production ready.

ok TextKit why you so damn broken at random places

Apple XNU: Clutch Scheduler: mjtsai.com/blog/2026/02/0… #mjtsaiblog

Love this little improvement in Swift, proposal got accepted! github.com/apple/swift-ev…

StackOverflow graph of questions asked per month. Holy shit.

Automates iOS Simulators via Accessibility APIs github.com/cameroncooke/A…

Apple just filed a patent hinting that Personas in visionOS might soon react to the virtual environment they are in. Rain falls and your Persona gets wet. Lighting shifts and your look changes. Wind blows and your hair moves. Shout out to @PatentlyApple for uncovering it.

After rewatching Home Alone, I couldn’t stop wondering: how plausible is the oversleep that leaves Kevin behind? So I wrote a tiny paper and ran the numbers. Merry Christmas! 🎄

Runs iOS apps on Apple Silicon Macs github.com/PlayCover/Play…

Arthur C. Clarke on BBC's Horizon in 1964, when he gave some astonishing predictions about the future.

@juanbuis This is so funny and true…

to commemorate alan dye moving from apple to meta, here's one of his best quotes

GUI for lsof on macOS github.com/sveinbjornt/Sl…

New researsh shows ice is slippery because of electrical charges — not pressure and friction. For almost 200 years, the prevailing explanation for ice’s slipperiness was that friction or pressure from a skate, boot, or tire melted a microscopic film of water on the surface, creating a lubricating layer. A new study from Saarland University has overturned that long-standing idea. Instead, the true cause lies in the electric fields generated by molecular dipoles. When any object contacts ice, the partial charges in its own molecules interact with the highly ordered dipole arrangement of water molecules in the ice crystal. This electrostatic tug-of-war loosens the topmost layer of the ice lattice, transforming it into a thin, disordered, quasi-liquid film—without any need for heat or significant pressure. Remarkably, this self-lubrication mechanism works even at temperatures approaching absolute zero, where thermal energy is virtually absent and conventional pressure-melting or frictional heating theories completely break down. In those extreme conditions, ice remains slippery simply because its surface molecules are electrically vulnerable. The discovery fundamentally rewrites our understanding of one of nature’s most familiar phenomena. Beyond settling a centuries-old debate, it has immediate practical implications: from designing better winter tires and non-slip surfaces that actually work on ice, to engineering superior skis, ice skates, and even advanced nanomaterials that perform reliably in cryogenic environments. By revealing the dominant role of intermolecular electric forces, the research opens entirely new avenues for controlling friction and adhesion at the molecular scale—potentially transforming fields from winter sports equipment to aerospace and nanotechnology. ["Cold Self-Lubrication of Sliding Ice", Physical Review Letters, 2025]

if apple ever makes a car

Chris Lattner (@clattner_llvm) is one of the most influential engineers of the past two decades. He created LLVM, Swift, contributed to TensorFlow, and created the Mojo programming language. What was the story about creating Swift - and why did he face resistance inside Apple when wanting to replace Objective C? What did he learn at Tesla, Google and CPU maker SiFive, that led him to working on Mojo at Modular? We cover these and many more in today's episode. Watch or listen: • YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=Fxp313… • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2NkObx… • Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fro… Brought to you by: •⁠ @statsig ⁠ — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. statsig.com/pragmatic •⁠ @linear – The system for modern product development. linear.app/pragmatic?utm_… My favorite quote from Chris in this episode: “I believe in the power of programmers. I believe in the human potential of people that want to create things. And that’s fundamentally why I love software is that you can create anything that you can imagine.”

It’s time to share some well kept secrets by all these ASO tools 🤪 The new web App Store uses the same endpoints than the iOS/macOS App Store apps. Once you have an authentication bearer token (inspect the browser XHR), you can get many things from the Apple catalog 👀 🧵 1/n

Swift 6 and iOS 18 introduce the Synchronization framework, containing two new low-level concurrency primitives — Mutex and Atomics.  These features could only be introduced with Swift 6 because they are implemented using the brand-new generic ownership mechanics. I tested them out and benchmarked their performance versus Actors. Learn them here: blog.jacobstechtavern.com/p/the-synchron…