Spoiler: 3D printed! The colored ports really sell the effect If you’re anything like me, you’ve found the new, tinier Mac mini to be absolutely adorable. But you might also be like me that you either already have an awesome M1 Mac mini that you have no real reason to replace, or the new Mac mini just isn’t something you totally need. While that logic might be sound, but it doesn’t make you want one any less. To help cure this FOMO, I made a cute little 3D printable Mac mini that can sit on your desk and be all cute. But then I had an even better idea, the new Mac mini is powerful sure, but it can’t hold snacks. Or a plant. Or your phone. Or pens/pencils. So I also made some versions you can print that add some cute utility to your desk in the form of the new Mac mini. They’re free of course! Just chuck ’em into your (or your friend’s) 3D printer. It even has all the little details modeled, like the power button, ports (including rear), and fan holes! They’re pretty easy to print, it’s in separate parts for ease of printing the bottom a different color (black) versus the top, then just put a dab of glue (or just use gravity) to keep them together. If you have a multi-color 3D printer, you can color the ports and power LED to make it look extra cool (or just do it after the fact with paint). Here are the different options for your desk! Secret item stash The possibilities for what you can store on your desk are now truly endless. Individually wrapped mints? Key switches? Screws? Paper clips? Rubber bands? Flash drives? Download link: https://makerworld.com/en/models/793456 A very green sorta Mac First carbon neutral Mac is cool and all but what if your Mac mini literally had a plant in it? Every desk needs a cute little plant. Download link: https://makerworld.com/en/models/793464 Phone holder A phone/tablet holder is an essential item on my desk for debugging things, watching a video, or just keeping an eye on an Uber Eats order. Before, guests came over and saw my boring phone stand and judged me, now they come over and think I’m exciting and well-traveled. You can even charge your phone/tablet in portrait mode by pushing the cable through a tunnel made through the Ethernet port that then snakes up to the surface. Download link: https://makerworld.com/en/models/793495 Pen holder The Playdate had the cutest little pen/pencil holder accessory but it unfortunately never shipped and my desk is sad. This will be a nice stand in for your beloved pens, pencils, markers, and Apple Pencils. Download link: https://makerworld.com/en/models/793470 A solid model Or if you just want to stare at it without any frills, you can just print the normal model too! Download link: https://makerworld.com/en/models/793447 Printer recommendation Whenever I post about 3D printing I understandably get a bunch of “Which 3D printer should I buy??” questions. This isn’t sponsored, but I’ve found over the last few years the answer has been pretty easy: something from Bambu Lab. Their printers are somehow super easy to use, well designed, and reasonably priced. Prusas are great too, but I think Bambu is hard to beat for the price. Don’t get an Ender. So if you’re looking for a printer now, Black Friday deals are aplenty so it’s pretty much the best time to pick one up. I’d grab something in their A series if you’re on a budget, or the P1S for a bit more if you can swing it (that’s what I use). https://bambulab.com On the other hand if you just want to print one thing now and again, a lot of local libraries are starting to have 3D printers so that might be worth looking into! And online services exist too (eg: JLCPCB and PCBWay), but if you do it with any regularity a 3D printer is a really fun thing to pick up. Enjoy! ❤️ Learning 3D modeling over the last year has been a ton of fun so I love a good excuse to practice, and shout out to Jerrod Hofferth and his amazing 3D printable Mac mini tower (that you should totally download) for the idea to solve my desire with some 3D printing! Also, the models are almost certainly not accurate down to the micrometer as I don’t actually have one, they’re based off Apple’s measurements as well as measuring screenshots. But it should be close! If you have a multi-color 3D printer, the linked models have the colors built-in for your ready to go, but if you want to print it in single-colors I also made versions available with the top and bottom separate as well as the logo, so you can print them separately in the individual colors then connect them with a touch of super glue or something.

Hey I'm a developer not an artist Following my last blog post about difficulties surrounding UserDefaults and edge cases that lead to data loss (give it a read if you haven’t, it’s an important precursor to this post!), I wanted to build something small and lightweight that would serve to fix the issues I was encountering with UserDefaults and thus TinyStorage was born! It’s open source so you can use it in your projects too if would like. GitHub link 🐙 Overview As mentioned in that blog post, UserDefaults has more and more issues as of late with returning nil data when the device is locked and iOS “prelaunches” your app, leaving me honestly sort of unable to trust what UserDefaults returns. Combined with an API that doesn’t really do a great job of surfacing whether it’s available, you can quite easily find yourself in a situation with difficult to track down bugs and data loss. This library seeks to address that fundamentally by not encrypting the backing file, allowing more reliable access to your saved data (if less secure, so don’t store sensitive data), with some niceties sprinkled on top. This means it’s great for preferences and collections of data like bird species the user likes, but not for sensitive details. Do not store passwords/keys/tokens/secrets/diary entries/grammy’s spaghetti recipe, anything that could be considered sensitive user information, as it’s not encrypted on the disk. But don’t use UserDefaults for sensitive details either as UserDefaults data is still fully decrypted when the device is locked so long as the user has unlocked the device once after reboot. Instead use Keychain for sensitive data. As with UserDefaults, TinyStorage is intended to be used with relatively small, non-sensitive values. Don’t store massive databases in TinyStorage as it’s not optimized for that, but it’s plenty fast for retrieving stored Codable types. As a point of reference I’d say keep it under 1 MB. This reliable storing of small, non-sensitive data (to me) is what UserDefaults was always intended to do well, so this library attempts to realize that vision. It’s pretty simple and just a few hundred lines, far from a marvel of filesystem engineering, but just a nice little utility hopefully! (Also to be clear, TinyStorage is not a wrapper for UserDefaults, it is a full replacement. It does not interface with the UserDefaults system in any way.) Features Reliable access: even on first reboot or in application prewarming states, TinyStorage will read and write data properly Read and write Swift Codable types easily with the API Similar to UserDefaults uses an in-memory cache on top of the disk store to increase performance Thread-safe through an internal DispatchQueue so you can safely read/write across threads without having to coordinate that yourself Supports storing backing file in shared app container Uses NSFileCoordinator for coordinating reading/writing to disk so can be used safely across multiple processes at the same time (main target and widget target, for instance) When using across multiple processes, will automatically detect changes to file on disk and update accordingly SwiftUI property wrapper for easy use in a SwiftUI hierarchy (Similar to @AppStorage) Uses OSLog for logging A function to migrate your UserDefaults instance to TinyStorage Limitations Unlike UserDefaults, TinyStorage does not support mixed collections, so if you have a bunch of strings, dates, and integers all in the same array in UserDefaults without boxing them in a shared type, TinyStorage won’t work. Same situation with dictionaries, you can use them fine with TinyStorage but the key and value must both be a Codable type, so you can’t use [String: Any] for instance where each string key could hold a different type of value. Installation Simply add a Swift Package Manager dependency for https://github.com/christianselig/TinyStorage.git Usage First, either initialize an instance of TinyStorage or create a singleton and choose where you want the file on disk to live. To keep with UserDefaults convention I normally create a singleton for the app container: extension TinyStorage { static let appGroup: TinyStorage = { let appGroupID = "group.com.christianselig.example" let containerURL = FileManager.default.containerURL(forSecurityApplicationGroupIdentifier: appGroupID)! return .init(insideDirectory: containerURL) }() } (You can store it wherever you see fit though, in URL.documentsDirectory is also an idea for instance!) Then, decide how you want to reference your keys, similar to UserDefaults you can use raw strings, but I recommend a more strongly-typed approach, where you simply conform a type to TinyStorageKey and return a var rawValue: String and then you can use it as a key for your storage without worrying about typos. If you’re using something like an enum, making it a String enum gives you this for free, so no extra work! After that you can simply read/write values in and out of your TinyStorge instance: enum AppStorageKeys: String, TinyStorageKey { case likesIceCream case pet case hasBeatFirstLevel } // Read let pet: Pet? = TinyStorage.appGroup.retrieve(type: Pet.self, forKey: AppStorageKeys.pet) // Write TinyStorage.appGroup.store(true, forKey: AppStorageKeys.likesIceCream) (If you have some really weird type or don’t want to conform to Codable, just convert the type to Data through whichever means you prefer and store that, as Data itself is Codable.) If you want to use it in SwiftUI and have your view automatically respond to changes for an item in your storage, you can use the @TinyStorageItem property wrapper. Simply specify your storage, the key for the item you want to access, and specify a default value. @TinyStorageItem(key: AppStorageKey.pet, storage: .appGroup) var pet: = Pet(name: "Boots", species: .fish, hasLegs: false) var body: some View { Text(pet.name) } You can even use Bindings to automatically read/write. @TinyStorageItem(key: AppStorageKeys.message, storage: .appGroup) var message: String = "" var body: some View { VStack { Text("Stored Value: \(message)") TextField("Message", text: $message) } } It also addresses some of the annoyances of @AppStorage, such as not being able to store collections: @TinyStorageItem(key: "names", storage: .appGroup) var names: [String] = [] Or better support for optional values: @TinyStorageItem(key: "nickname", storage: .appGroup) var nickname: String? = nil // or "Cool Guy" Hope it’s handy! If you like it or have any feedback let me know! I’m going to start slowly integrating it into Pixel Pals and hopefully solve a few bugs in the process.

For those not aware, a few months ago after reaching out to me, YouTube contacted the App Store stating that Juno does not adhere to YouTube guidelines and modifies the website in a way they don’t approve of, and alludes to their trademarks and iconography. I don’t personally agree with this, as Juno is just a web view, and acts as little more than a browser extension that modifies CSS to make the website and video player look more “visionOS” like. No logos are placed other than those already on the website, and the “for YouTube” suffix is permitted in their branding guidelines. I stated as much to YouTube, they wouldn’t really clarify or budge any, and as a result of both parties not being able to come to a conclusion I received an email a few minutes ago from Apple that Juno has been removed from the App Store. Juno was a fun hobby project for me to build. As a developer I wanted to get some experience building for the Vision Pro, and as a user I wanted a nice way to watch YouTube on this cool new device. As a result, I really enjoyed building Juno, but it was always something I saw as fundamentally a little app I built for fun. Because of that, I have zero desire to spin this into a massive fight akin to what happened with Reddit years ago. That’s kind of the opposite of fun. I hope that’s understandable. For those who have Juno, to my knowledge it should continue to work fine until/unless YouTube updates in some fashion that breaks stuff. Sorry it had to end this way, I had some really cool stuff planned for it that I think would have been a lot of fun! It’s been genuinely awesome hearing all the kind words from Vision Pro users who have loved the app. 🫡

iOS 17.2 gained the capability to start Live Activities from a server, which is pretty cool and handy! I’ve been playing around with it a bit and found some parts a bit confusing, so I thought I’d do a little write up for future me as well as anyone else who could benefit! (For the uninitiated, Live Activities are the cool iOS feature that adds a live view of a specific activity to your Dynamic Island (if available) and Lock Screen, for example to see how your Uber Eats order is coming along.) Overview of starting a Live Activity server-side It’s pretty straightforward, just a few steps: Get token In your AppDelegate’s didFinishLaunching or somewhere very early in the lifecycle, start an async sequence to listen for a pushToStartToken so you can get the token: Task { for await pushToken in Activity<IceCreamWidgetAttributes>.pushToStartTokenUpdates { let pushTokenString = pushToken.reduce("") { $0 + String(format: "%02x", $1) } print("Our push token is: \(pushTokenString)") } } Use token to start Live Activity server-side Now that you have the token, we use that to send a push notification (using APNs) to start the Live Activity on the user’s device. There’s lots of server side libraries for this, or you can just use curl, or you can an online site to test like this one (in the case of the latter where you’re uploading your token to random sites, please create a sample token that you delete afterward). The key points that differ from sending a “normal” push notification: Headers Set your push token to the pushToStartToken you received above Set the topic to your app’s normal bundle ID with an added suffix of .push-type.liveactivity Set the priority to 5 for low priority or 10 for a high priority notification (does not seem like any values in between work) Set apns-push-type to liveactivity Payload timestamp field with the current unix timestamp event field set to start attributes-type set to the name of your Swift Live Activities attributes struct attributes with a dictionary representing your Swift Live Activity attributes content-state with the initial content state as a dictionary, similar to attributes alert field set with a title and a body (will silently fail if you just set alert to a string like the old days) Note that you cannot use the old certificate based authentication and instead have to use token based authentication and http2. Send the http request and it should start the Live Activity on the iOS device! 🎉 Aside Sending push notifications is kinda complicated, so you likely want a server-side library. I wanted to play around with Node for this for the first time, and in case you go down that path, in September 2024 Node is in a weirdly lacking spot for APNs libraries. The de facto one is abandoned, the community replacement for it doesn’t work with TypeScript, and there’s a third option with TypeScript support but it isn’t super popular and has some issues. I ended up going back to Go, and there’s an excellent APNs library there. It’s broken on iOS 17 On iOS 17, getting the above push token is really hard (you can seemingly only get it once). I tried for ages to get the token before stumbling upon a thread on the Apple forums where a user said to delete the app, reboot your device, then fresh install it. Sure enough that worked and the token displayed, but if I just rebooted the device, or just reinstalled the app, it wouldn’t. Had to do all of them. And no it didn’t change if I used a release configuration. I tried this on iOS 17.6.1 (latest iOS 17 release at the time of writing). It does not seem to be an issue at all on iOS 18. The difficulty in acquiring it makes it incredibly hard to use on iOS 17 if you add in the feature in an update and the user isn’t getting your app from a fresh install, to the extent that I can’t really trust its reliability on iOS 17 as a feature you could advertise, for instance. John Gruber recently wrote about the Apple Sports app and wondered why its Live Activities feature is iOS 18 only. A reader wrote in to mention the new broadcast push notifications feature requiring iOS 18, and that well may be it, but I’d say it’s equally as likely that it just doesn’t work reliably enough on iOS 17 for even Apple to bother. Update/end the activity This part admittedly confused me a bit. The docs state: Send the push-to-start token to your server and use the pushToStartTokenUpdates sequence to receive token updates. Similar to the update token, update it on your server when needed and invalidate the old token. While the system starts the new Live Activity and wakes up your app, you receive the push token you use for updates. To update and end the Live Activity on devices that aren’t running iOS 18 or iPadOS 18, use this update push token as if you obtained it by starting a Live Activity from within your app. I assumed that this all operated through that same pushToStartTokenUpdates, because as soon as you start the activity server-side, your app wakes up, and your pushToStartTokenUpdates async sequence fires again with a “new” token. However the “new” token is just the same one that you started the activity with, and if you try to end your activity server-side with this token, nothing happens. Turns out, your pushToStartTokenUpdates is (per the name!) only able to start Live Activities. Not sure why it fires a second time with the same token, but you do want to use that async sequence to monitor for changes to the start token, because it might change and the next time you want to start a new Live Activity you’ll need that token. To update/end your Live Activity, what you actually want to do is create a separate async sequence to monitor your app for Live Activities that get created, and then monitor its push token: // Listen for local Live Activity updates for await activity in Activity<IceCreamWidgetAttributes>.activityUpdates { // Upon finding one, listen for its push token (it is not available immediately!) for await pushToken in activity.pushTokenUpdates { let pushTokenString = pushToken.reduce("") { $0 + String(format: "%02x", $1) } print("New activity detected with push token: \(pushTokenString)") } } iOS will also call this async sequence on start of a new Live Activity from a server, and you use that token to update/end it. I’m not blaming the documentation on this, I understand it as it is written now, but I wanted to clarify in case anyone else gets confused. Once your server is made aware of this token, you can end your Live Activity server-side with the following changes from the above start considerations: Payload: event should be end or update Payload: If ending you might want a dismissal-date unix timestamp. If you don’t set this, iOS will immediately remove the Live Activity from the Dynamic Island but leave it on the Lock Screen for up to four hours. You may want this, but you can control how long it stays there by setting dismissal-date, if you set it to now or in the past it will remove it upon receipt of the notification. Payload: Send a new content-state if updating (optional if ending, if ending and you want to leave it on the lock screen (see previous point) you can set a content-state which will serve as the final content state for the Live Activity) Payload: Do not send attributes or attributes-type as these are intended to be immutable through the life of the Live Activity There’s other interesting ones that you might want to consider but aren’t as important, like stale-date, discussed in the docs. That’s it! That should cover most things! I want to thank the incredible Francesc Bruguera for helping me get unstuck a few places.