Back in 2013, I released an app called Static for iOS. It was a basic white noise app, with a few different sound choices. It had a very opinionated interface, complete with an era-appropriate speaker grill artwork.

While setting up Christmas decorations this past weekend, one of the kids^[1] suggested we connect the lights in a set of village buildings to Siri. My instinct was to grab a few more Z-Wave outlet plugs from Amazon, but I remembered having an outlet controller stashed away somewhere that I’d used for a similar purpose a few years back.

HomeKit has seen a slow-but-steady increase in the number of supported accessories since its introduction in 2014. Initially, lights, outlets, and thermostats were the most common. Today locks, fans, garage doors, and cameras are also starting to emerge on the market from reputable manufacturers, along with a slew of sensors.

Over the past couple years, I’ve worked with quite a few third-party frameworks. These experiences have highlighted a significant deficiency common in many frameworks; most frameworks suck at logging. More recently, I’ve had the chance to build a few frameworks from the ground up, so I’ve used those to explore how logging could be done differently.

Before I get started, I need to preface this essay with a few important points:

I really like Swift. I’ve built quite a few apps with it, both at work an on my own. Astra is almost entirely written in Swift, with only a few classes that touch Core Audio written in Objective-C.

My opinions are my own - they don’t reflect those of my employer or my coworkers.

Over the last couple months, the single biggest question I’ve received in my support inbox has been:

During Apple’s “underwhelming” event yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of these words from Ecclesiastes 1:8:

When the App Store first launched, mere presence was enough to ensure at least some small amount of success. Today, things are much different. A great idea with good execution will still struggle to make a splash in the App Store, unless the stars are perfectly aligned. Even then, it’s usually more about who you know and the press you can drum up.

The iPhone 6 Plus is one of the most curious devices Apple has built in recent years. The largest iPhone ever built, it evokes a sense of awe, confusion, and concern. In some ways, it suffers a bit of an identity crisis in the iOS family, as it behaves like an iPad sometimes, but is also clearly an iPhone.