Dear Friends,

today is a very special day for me and the iOS Dev Diary. Since I’ve launched this site in 2012, over two million visitors have come to check it out and find solutions to puzzles this challenging hobby has presented to all of us.

TWO MILLION VISITORS!

That’s a phenomenal amount of people for me, and I’m thrilled that my site has helped so many interested and like-minded folks on this planet.

Keep in mind, this site is a personal note pad on all things iOS, meant as a thinking aid for myself rather than visitors. I’ve started it so that I don’t forget the solutions to intricate puzzles I found answers to. It was never meant to be anything along the lines of “presentable” or “understandable for others”.

Sometimes the best things happen when you don’t really try. This site is certainly proof of that.

To take a look at all the articles I’ve written here over the years, check out the Table of Contents. It’ll tell you that at the time of writing, there are over 400 articles to explore, featuring a total 135,000 words. That’s the equivalent of THREE WHOLE BOOKS.

I’d like to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who’s been coming over, and for those who continue to drop by, so I’ve prepared a few surprises for ya’ll’s enjoyment:

I’m making the whole site FREE for EVERYONE

That’s right! All content on this site, including those long and in-depth screencasts on In-App Purchases, searchable UITableViews and 3D Touch features are now available for everyone. For free. Forever.

This used to be a membership site since 2013, and the proceeds went straight into offsetting the hosting cost for this server. It was a necessary measure because there came the point at which I used to have several thousand visitors per hour over here, and my then infrastructure couldn’t cope with the requests. The site regularly crashed as a result, which prevented me and everyone else from accessing it.

When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2015, I had to take a step back from iOS hacking. Apple’s ever changing ideas for both software and hardware didn’t help much, and over time, those huge visitor spikes disappeared. I’m still getting around 2000 visitors per day here, which tells me it’s still a popular enough site to keep around.

Besides, I do keep my hand in iOS hacking every so often, but I can now finance the hosting through adverts and my wonderful Patreon supporters.

The iOS Dev Diary Podcast is back!

With additional content now being available, I’ve made an effort to revive the iOS Dev Diary Podcast Feed. Now you get to enjoy all my YouTube videos as audio tracks and can listen to them on the go: in your car, while you’re out for a run, or when you’re out on your bike.

This is a great way to remember principles, no matter if you see the screen or not. Try it out! I was surprised myself when I listened to those episodes.

Ad-Free Browsing Feature

For those of you who had signed up as lifetime members before, you’ll retain the privilege to login at the top right and enjoy my content without the Google ads. For life. You deserve it 🙂

For those of you who no longer have a membership, or for those who are interested in this feature, please check out my Patreon campaign and signup for the Ad-Free Browsing tier. I’ll send you login details so you can enjoy ad-free browsing on ALL my many websites:

• The iOS Dev Diary (this site)
• The WP Guru (my other popular tech site
• versluis.com (my 3D development and “creative projects” site)

You can support them all with a single click to Patreon.

That’s it for now!

Rolling out these changes will take a little bit of time, but I’m working on it as we speak. All ex-membership videos are already live on YouTube, and new posts on this site link to them.

So what’s next?

While much of my time is taken up by several other ventures (including a new part-time job with Instacart), I have plenty of ideas for new iOS apps and I’m getting itchy coding fingers. Let iOS 12 roll out and we may just see some more posts on this site as I run into new puzzles to solve.

Thank you so much for all your support over the last six years! I wish you all the very best of luck with this crazy yet fascinating hobby.

As always: HAPPY CODING 🙂