mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06iOS / macOS Developer
A tolerance you're allowed to relax is a wish, not a measurement.
I wrote PureView, a from-scratch SwiftUI engine that never imports SwiftUI. To prove it is faithful, a separate target imports real SwiftUI and compares the two value for value: 125 tests across layout (1e-6), springs (six decimals), pixels (byte for byte).
A firewall test fails the build if the engine ever imports a UI framework. Measuring caught a spring bug reading never would.
How fragile we are:
On June 30, my GitHub account was locked. My public repositories, profile, and Pages sites went 404 to everyone else, while I could still see them from inside the account.
The appeal path was a broken machine gate. No notice. No usable support path. No human on the other side.
I wrote about what happened, what the logs showed, and why I moved my public work to Codeberg.
Cupertino v1.2.0 hits 92% rank-1 on canonical Apple API lookups, up from 52% in v1.1.0. Observable, AsyncSequence, EnvironmentObject, ForEach, DateFormatter and 11 others climbed to rank 1.
No vectors, no reranker. SQLite FTS5 with BM25F field weighting, AST extraction at index time. McNemar p ≤ 1e-5. Zero regressions across 110 paired queries.
Cupertino has moved its working distribution home to Codeberg.
If you installed with Homebrew, update your tap. The old GitHub tap can report that `1.4.1` is current, but the current working release is `1.4.2` from the Codeberg tap.
```bash
brew tap cupertinohq/tap https://codeberg.org/CupertinoHQ/homebrew-tap.git
brew install cupertinohq/tap/cupertino
cupertino setup
```
Full update notes:
https://aleahim.com/blog/cupertino-moved-to-codeberg/
Cupertino v1.0 "First Light" is out.
Ask an LLM what Swift's Task does and you can still get a Mach kernel essay. Cupertino serves Apple's docs to the model over MCP, ranked correctly.
https://aleahim.com/blog/cupertino-first-light/
#Swift #MCP #LLM
Left to its defaults, an AI coding agent is a shortcut machine. It wraps a failing call in try? and moves on. It says "tests pass" without running them. Every one is a small lie that compiles.
I didn't start with a rulebook. I started with corrections, and a correction you give twice is a rule you haven't written down yet.
Writing each one precisely enough for a machine taught me more about my own code than years of writing it had.
https://aleahim.com/blog/rules-my-coding-agent-cannot-break/
You need a PDF with formulas and a table, fast, without installing LaTeX or running a headless browser. Write Markdown, get a real PDF, rendered in your browser by a pure-Swift engine compiled to WebAssembly. TeX-style math, tables, native charts, and Mermaid diagrams are built in.
Try it: https://pdf.aleahim.com
A pull request titled "Fix for issue #13" landed on my open-source project. It repointed a core dependency to a fork the submitter controlled.
It did not even work: it changed the lockfile but not the manifest, so it could never resolve. That tell gave it away. It was one of 36 automated "fix" PRs from a bounty-hunter bot, across 34 repos in a day.
Indistinguishable from a supply-chain attack, one edit from working. Read your lockfiles.
SwiftUI looks like it does 3D. rotation3DEffect, anchorZ, perspective. So I built the simplest 3D scene, a cube: six faces, one shared camera. Pure SwiftUI on iOS and macOS cannot build it. Rotate it and faces occlude in authored order, not by depth: the back face paints over the front. The APIs that would fix it, transform3DEffect and friends, are visionOS-only. Nobody forgot 3D. The boundary is deliberate, and the article maps it.
🚀 New write-up: Extreme Packaging — my approach to modular Swift architecture
I’ve been experimenting with project structures where *every responsibility is its own Swift Package*.
The result: cleaner boundaries, faster builds, and reusable code between iOS & macOS apps.
Full article 👉 https://aleahim.com/ExtremePackaging
#Swift #iOSDev #macOS #SwiftPM #CleanArchitecture #OpenSource #SwiftLang
Three days ago I shipped cupertino v1.0.2 with "all 13 audits return zero."
Today v1.1.0 removes 7,095 silently-bad rows. The audit was walking one out of six source directories. A 3 a.m. SQL query found one HTTP 403 page indexed as Apple's DocC documentation. Pulling that thread unraveled 13 ways Apple's CDN lies to crawlers.
If your audit returns zero, audit your audit.
SwiftUI Is One Graph, Over 40+ Years of Engineering.
I measured the real framework until its behavior was predictable, then read Apple's granted patent. They agree, almost field for field: SwiftUI is one demand-driven graph, and the least interesting engine in the stack it rests on.
The marvel is underneath: Core Animation, by John Harper, Apple's Carmack and Torvalds, who almost no one can name. Start of a series.
https://aleahim.com/blog/swiftui-is-one-graph/
#SwiftUI #CoreAnimation
Cupertino v0.9 is out! 🍎
Now works with 8 AI tools
https://aleahim.com/blog/cupertino-09-release/
#Swift #MCP #AI #AppleDeveloper #iOS #macOS
Swift is for the Eloi. The framework you live in and the machine humming under the floor were built by the same hands, twelve years apart. John Harper built Core Animation (codename "LayerKit"), demoed it on the Mac in 2006, then came back to build SwiftUI. We just stopped looking down.
https://aleahim.com/blog/morlocks-built-swiftui/
#SwiftUI #iOSDev
The keynote says what Apple announced. The sample code says what Apple wants you to ship.
I diffed the latest Apple-docs corpus against the last one: 19 brand-new frameworks, almost every one Apple Intelligence, and 11 new samples, all AI-themed. Four are literally "Integrating Your Music / Messaging / Calendar / Photo App with Apple Intelligence."
That is not documentation. It's a brief. Cupertino v1.4.0 puts it offline.
Recently I shipped cupertino v1.0.1 with "verified zero duplicate pairs across 405,782 rows."
Today v1.0.2 removed 128,142 of those rows. They had been duplicates the whole time.
The v1.0.1 verification query was structurally incapable of seeing the bug: URIs carry a hash suffix computed before lowercasing, so GROUP BY LOWER(uri) was lowercasing two already-different strings.
Full write-up:
https://aleahim.com/blog/cupertino-v1-0-2/
"Swift runs everywhere" is usually a slide. So I held my own projects to it: every platform claim must be a CI gate that runs on every push, and at least one build must be something you can click.
Four pure-Swift codebases pass today: a static site generator, a Markdown to PDF engine that runs in your browser tab, a YAML parser that matches Yams on a 111-document corpus with zero disagreements, and a 2D graphics engine that tests on Windows too.
iRelay: a Swift daemon that turns iMessage into a remote terminal for Claude Code.
Send a message from your phone, your Mac picks it up, runs the agent, and replies with the result. No
SSH, no VPN — just iMessage.
Built it in a day, used it from the couch.
Cupertino v0.10 — my AI documentation server now indexes all 307 Apple frameworks. 302,424 pages.
Found 5 bugs in the crawler. Best one: it was only discovering ~20 frameworks from Apple's
homepage. Fed it Apple's own technologies.json and the whole library opened up. Even
OpenGLES. Deprecated, but completionism has no room for judgment.
First community contributions too. Feels good.
aleahim.com/blog/cupertino-10-release/
Cupertino v0.7.0 is out 🍎
302,424 pages of Apple documentation, now searchable by AI.
What's new:
• OS version filtering — search for iOS 17+ APIs only
• HIG support — design guidelines, not just code
• Unified search — one tool, 8 sources
• Teasers — AI learns where to dig deeper
Kernel docs went from 25K to 40K pages. The complete Apple crawl is done.
Cupertino v0.4.0 is out! 🍎
New: Human Interface Guidelines support, framework aliases.
Key discovery: AI agents read tool descriptions once, but read search results every time. If you want agents to use a feature, put hints in the output.
Also learned hard lessons about release engineering and why you commit the version bump BEFORE creating the tag 😅
Every validator I wrote started the same way: one giant function that walks the tree and appends to an error array through nested ifs. It works. It also rots. You cannot test one rule alone, turn one off, and the error location is whatever string you remembered to interpolate.
Matt Polzin's OpenAPIKit taught me the fix. A validation is not code you run, it is a value you build: a positive description, a check, a path that fills itself in.
Cupertino v0.5.0 is out 🍎
234,331 Apple docs. 287 frameworks. Nearly doubled the database.
The 5-day deep crawl finally finished. Kernel alone has 25K pages - IOKit, BSD, Mach APIs. The stuff you can never find when you
need it.
Raw docs are noise. Curated docs are signal.
brew install mihaelamj/tap/cupertino
I already had a static site generator I liked, right up until I wanted diagrams, charts, a per-article PDF, real math, and a path out of "static forever."
Couldn't get all of it from one tool without the setup fighting me, so I built one around typed tiles. Math typesets to SVG at build time, no MathJax or LaTeX. Every article ships a PDF for free. This post is rendered by it.
brew install tiledown/tap/tiledown
The YAML was fine. The actual problem was one stray key, eleven levels deep, that OpenAPIKit rejected and Yams wrapped in a DecodingError pointing nowhere useful. The real error was three layers in.
I lost an afternoon. Then a morning the next week. Then I built OpenAPIDoctor: a typed validator and auto-repair CLI for OpenAPI 3.0/3.1, on OpenAPIKit, tested across 594 YAML files.
#Swift #OpenAPI
Shipped Cupertino v0.8.0 🍎
Now with SwiftSyntax under the hood. Search "@Observable" and actual @Observable classes rank first, not random text mentions.
Also: 4 new semantic search tools, major refactoring, and 7x more tests.
iRelay: a Swift daemon that turns iMessage into a remote AI coding terminal.
Send a text from your phone → Mac runs Claude Code → result comes back as iMessage.
@schwa@mastodon.social Not enough :).
A search filter that returns the same 88 results for iOS 13 and iOS 18 isn't a filter. It's decoration.
That bug became cupertino v1.3.0, The Big Refactor: one source registry, eight per-source databases instead of one monolith, all shipped read-only so search can't mutate the cache it reads. The retired unified search.db is finally gone.
https://aleahim.com/blog/cupertino-v1-3-0-platform-filtering/
#Swift #iOSDev
