Author Archives: Joel Kin

About Joel Kin

Developing on Apple platforms for, holy shit, like twenty years now. Find me on linkedin and twitter. My personal website is joelk.in.

Querl

Posted on February 28, 2023 by Joel Kin

There’s a corporate-approved blog post over at my company‘s blog, so I’ll keep this real brief: after a great deal of corporate wrangling, I managed to open-source the GraphQL library we build and have been using internally after finding no … Continue reading →

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Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and UIFont

Posted on July 7, 2022 by Joel Kin

A few months ago I tweeted this: iOS PSA: as of at least iOS 14, apps support the compressed .woff font format. This isn’t documented anywhere as far as I know. Shave some kb off your installed app size! pic.twitter.com/CudCS8VfM4 … Continue reading →

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Handling Empty Lists with Realm’s Property Wrappers

Posted on December 23, 2021 by Joel Kin

At work we recently updated from a pretty old version of Realm (10.8) to a pretty new version (10.20). Despite being just a point release, there have been some significant changes. I was very excited that the library is taking … Continue reading →

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User Language Preferences

Posted on November 29, 2021 by Joel Kin

Here’s a quick one. Google has a neat library for (among lots of other things) on-device translation, called ML Kit. I’m trying to implement it for a hackathon. Turns out (no surprise?) it’s written in Objective-C, and doesn’t really have … Continue reading →

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GraphQL

Posted on April 26, 2021 by Joel Kin

I’ve been lazy about blogging for the past, oh, five years or so, but I just published a new post about GraphQL over at my company’s blog. Check it out if you want to know why Apollo is bad and … Continue reading →

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Mistakes Were Made: A Brief Note on Keyboard Full Access

Posted on January 18, 2019 by Joel Kin

If you’re like me, you just spent several days refactoring a framework shared between a host app and its app extension–say, a keyboard extension–into its own project and repository. You finally got everything building again, resolving all the broken framework … Continue reading →

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DYJ4U on iOS Autocomplete: a Response

Posted on November 6, 2018 by Joel Kin

Jason Clauß, self-described “UX Renegade,” recently published an article on the iOS keyboard’s suggestion bar: Doing Your Job For You: The iOS autocomplete. I have some thoughts. I strongly disagree with the conclusions Clauß draws. They’re based on his own “cursory … Continue reading →

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Recursive Property Observation in Swift

Posted on April 5, 2018 by Joel Kin

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been writing almost exclusively Swift. It’s been quite a roller coaster. I still don’t feel as though I’m an expert in the language, but I am getting to the point where I quickly … Continue reading →

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Jot

Posted on April 2, 2018 by Joel Kin

Hi folks. Joel here. It’s been a while since this blog has been up to much, hasn’t it? Well, after a lot of privately-owned work about which I was not meant to blog, I’ve got something I can talk publicly … Continue reading →

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Repartee

Posted on June 26, 2014 by Joel Kin

Spaceman Labs was founded on one principle: that we are two extremely debonair individuals capable of making extremely excellent iOS apps. Today we advance this hypothesis by introducing our flagship app, Repartee. In truth, Repartee is the app we created … Continue reading →

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