Treading water with software updates

Brent Simmons of Inessential and NetNewsWire fame came home from holidays to a slew of new errors he has to fix. Fun! He explained: Here’s the thing: iOS app development (and Mac, but to a lesser extent) is just constant churn. I thought I was getting a year off this year! But nope. There’s always something. My theory is that the automatic split view collapsing, which NetNewsWire uses, is just no longer an option, and I’ll have to specify a separate compact view controller. So that’s just a bunch more work and testing, including testing on previous iOS versions (we go back to iOS 17), and not improvements like performance enhancements and new features. It’s just treading water. It’s a waste of time. For what reason? Why? It’s a good question, and one I find myself asking every time one of my Ansible scripts breaks because the syntax for something has changed, or a Linux distribution decides to replace another long-standing and well understood UNIX tool with something else…