I am very happy to report that we’ve worked out the details and will be livestreaming the LIVE near WWDC show once again this year.
If you’re not going to be in town for WWDC (or could not get a ticket to the show—they’re going fast!) you’ll be able to watch the show from wherever you happen to be.
There will be a live chat along with the stream before and during the concert, hosted by Breakpoints Steve Hayman and Tom Harrington. The live chat is a great way to connect with other members of the community.
The live chat begins at 7:30 pm with the music starting about 8:00 pm. All times Pacific.
The live stream is free, no paywall or ticket required to watch the concert online. In the spirit of the benefit concert, we do request you consider making a donation to Techtonica.
Tickets still available
A limited number of tickets are still available to come see the show in person.
Our sponsors make this show possible. Everyone involved in this event, from planning to performing, sends an enormous thank you to our sponsors for their support. Please support our sponsors by clicking through the links below and checking them out!
It’s that time of year where rumors fly in anticipation of another WWDC keynote.
Meanwhile across multiple timezones, Breakpoints are rehearsing nights and weekends getting ready to perform LIVE near WWDC once again.
For 2025, the show returns to The Art Boutiki—a funky San Jose gem of a venue and self-proclaimed “Geekeasy”.
(Being a sucker for a nice pun, when scouting venues last year, they pretty much had me at “Geekeasy” before I even walked in the door.)
Carrying on what has become a yearly tradition, this year’s show poster is inspired by vintage National Parks posters of the 1930s. It leans into the theme of the venue and the name of the show, with a Tiki outpost near, but not at WWDC, with Apple Park in the distance.
The poster art was created a talented artist at the legendary Iconfactory. They were a pleasure to work with as we iterated on the design, moving from a truly terrible rough concept sketch and a few pages of notes I provided to the finished artwork. I am very happy with how the poster turned out and am looking forward to hanging it on my wall.
Show posters (11” x 17”) will be on sale at the event with all proceeds going to Techtonica. If you‘re a VIP ticket holder, we already have you covered, one is included with your ticket.
You can get tickets to the show as well as full details (date, time, venue address, etc.) at livenearwwdc.com.
Tickets are still available but they have been going quickly.
Every year I hear from people who waited to buy tickets and then were disappointed that the show was sold out. If you are planning on coming to the show, I encourage you to get your tickets now to save yourself a lifetime of regret. ;)
Introducing A New Song
At the end of April, at the Deep Dish Swift conference, I performed a new song as a work in progress. I had arrived in Chicago on Saturday afternoon with a partially-written song with a chorus and bridge but no verses at that point. By noon on Monday, I had a completed draft of the full lyrics and melody. Between conference sessions I would rush back to my room to rehearse the new song for our Breakpoint Jam on Tuesday afternoon.
Because it was brand new, there wasn’t time to have the other performers learn it, so it was just me singing and playing ukulele. On stage, I called it the TestFlight version of the song because just like an app in TestFlight, it wasn’t the final version and the entire thing could potentially come crashing down at any moment.
We’ve been working on the arrangement for the full band and are really looking forward to sharing it everyone live at the show.
The Band
Speaking of the band, as in past years, we have an eclectic group of musicians ranging from the core band of drums, bass, rhythm and lead guitars to violin, banjo, saxophone, Croatian tamburica—and of course: slide-advance keyboard; additional vocalists round out the sound.
At present about 18 different musicians are expected to perform, arriving in the Bay Area from various locations around the globe. The exact lineup is always subject to change right up until showtime. This year, we have a mix of longtime Breakpoints as well as some folks performing LIVE near WWDC for the first time.
I am incredibly grateful to everyone who lends their time and talent to the show. This includes all of the musicians as well as folks volunteering to do operations like working the door and the merch table, photographing the show, and producing on the livestream.
For me, one of the greatest joys of this band has been the number of people I have had the chance to meet, get to know, and perform with over the years at various LIVE near WWDC shows and Breakpoint Jams. This community has so many wonderful, talented people and it has been a true honor to have so many join me on stage.
A Big Night During A Big Week
WWDC25 is promising to be an exciting week full of announcements and almost certainly some surprises.
And for Wednesday, June 11th, we‘ve been working on a show we hope you’ll really enjoy.
Once again, all of us are incredibly excited and grateful to be able do this show again; happy to be supporting Techtonica; and very thankful for the support of our sponsors.
We all hope you can join us on Wednesday night for LIVE near WWDC 2025! •
And speaking of sponsors—our sponsors make this show possible. Everyone involved in this event, from planning to performing, sends an enormous thank you to our sponsors for their support. Please support our sponsors by clicking through the links below and checking them out!
For those not familiar, BuildSettingExtractor (BSE) is a free, open-source utility that provides a fast, easy way to extract build settings from an Xcode project into a set of xcconfig files.
(And even that description likely makes very little sense unless you develop software for Apple platforms.)
Reaching milestones like this make me reflect on the passage of time and think things like “How is it possibly ten years?”
So today I take a little walk down memory lane to celebrate the anniversary of BuildSettingExtractor.
Origin story
I was watching an NSScreencast episode by Ben Scheirman (friend and longtime guitarist in the Breakpoints) describing setting up xcconfig files.
Part of the episode demonstrated copying and pasting build settings out of Xcode into xcconfig files.
All of the copying and pasting made for a tedious process. In addition, at the time it also required a lot of manual clean up of the pasted values. (As of Xcode 16, pasted build settings are in valid xcconfig format.)
Months earlier I had been futzing around with some code I had written to extract build settings from an Xcode project but I had no intention of releasing it until I watched that episode.
It bothered me thinking about people going through a tedious, time-consuming, error-prone process, when I already had written some code that would do the same thing quickly and easily.
I cleaned up the existing code, added a user interface, and released BuildSettingExtractor 1.0 just a few days later on January 31, 2015 as an open source project.
A decade with the same simple interface. Drop an xcodeproj file on it—it spits out xcconfig files.
What does that setting do?
About ten days later the second release of BuildSettingExtractor quickly followed the first. This version added one of my favorite features: generating build setting info.
There are dozens upon dozens of build settings and it’s often not obvious how they behave. BuildSettingExtractor can annotate each setting with an explanatory comment gleaned from Xcode.
This info is available wherever you are looking at the xcconfig file—in GitHub, text editors, diff tools. No trip to a reference webpage or Xcode help is required to figure out what a build setting does.
For example:
// Enable Testability
//
// Enabling this setting will build the target with options appropriate for running
// automated tests against its product.
//
// This setting can be enabled when building targets for debugging if their products will
// be tested. This may result in tests running slower than otherwise.
//
// When this setting is enabled:
//
// * `GCC_SYMBOLS_PRIVATE_EXTERN` is disabled (`-fvisibility=hidden` will not be passed
// to `clang`).
// * `-enable-testing` is passed to the Swift compiler.
// * `-export_dynamic` is passed to the linker.
// * `STRIP_INSTALLED_PRODUCT` is disabled (`strip` will not be run on the produced
// binary).
ENABLE_TESTABILITY = YES
// Build Active Architecture Only
//
// If enabled, only the active architecture is built. This setting will be ignored when
// building with a run destination which does not define a specific architecture, such as
// a 'Generic Device' run destination.
ONLY_ACTIVE_ARCH = YES
For those who prefer a pithier xcconfig file, there is also a setting to turn these comments off.
Design goals
A decade ago, I set a few design goals which have guided each version of BuildSettingExtractor:
Safe
Focused
Easily Maintained
The design goals were driven primarily by the following:
The Xcode project file is a proprietary, unpublished format. Although the format has been remarkably stable for many years, it is still subject to change without warning at any time.
Time is limited and always at a premium. The less time required to maintain a piece of software the more likely it can be maintained over a long period of time.
From the beginning, safety has been an explicit goal. A user should never have to worry that BuildSettingExtractor would leave them with a corrupted or incorrectly formatted project file.
For that reason, BSE never changes the original project file. Extracting the build settings is a read-only operation.
This means that BuildSettingExtractor will generate xcconfig files, but it is up to the user to set up their Xcode project to use the configuration files.
I periodically think about adding this functionality to BSE to automate the project setup.
And, every time, I come back to those initial design goals and decide against it.
Beautifully, Unapologetically Objective-C
The app began in Objective-C and has stayed that way.
The initial choice was because the core functionality was already in Objective-C and I was very familiar with the Obj-C AppKit APIs.
At the time Swift 1.0 had only been released for four months and I was trying to use what I already knew well to release the app quickly, as opposed to using the app as a way to learn Swift.
Looking back at the last ten years, developing in Swift and Objective-C have been two very different experiences.
Swift brings with it many great language features as well as a lot of excitement.
But one major benefit of choosing Objective-C has been stability.
If I had written BuildSettingExtractor in Swift a decade ago the code base would have needed to do major migrations to Swift 3, Swift 4, a minor one to Swift 5, and now to Swift 6.
Throughout that time, the Obj-C code has just kept working with a minimum of fuss.
I have considered migrating to Swift and SwiftUI, but as long as the tool continues to work as intended without requiring a great deal of maintenance, there are plenty of other things to spend time on.
And finally, maintaining BuildSettingExtractor keeps me from forgetting how to write Objective-C.
What’s next for BuildSettingExtractor?
The main thing that has been on my to-do list is adding Sparkle support for automatic updates from within the app.
Are there things you would like to see in BuildSettingExtractor? Feel free to file any requests using the project issue tracker.
And if you have yet to experience the glorious build setting extracting splendor that this utility provides, you can download it for free at buildsettingextractor.com.
I’ll be doing a few things this week at WWDC24 and wanted to pass along my schedule. Hope to see you at one or more of these happenings!
Wednesday: LIVE near WWDC 2024
On Wednesday night James Dempsey and the Breakpoints perform LIVE near WWDC in a benefit concert for Techtonica.
The show is a full concert of humorous, original, programming-oriented songs, including favorites from our iTunes chart-topping, #5 Billboard comedy album Backtrace.
I’ll be joined on stage by the Breakpoints—a fabled group of talented techies-by-day and musicians-by-night who make the music and fun come alive!
You can enjoy the show in person or watch the free live stream.
The live stream includes a live chat hosted by Breakpoints Brent Simmons and Steve Hayman. Join the live chat to connect with other folks in the community while enjoying the show!
Full details are at livenearwwdc.com or click below to add the live stream to your calendar so it doesn’t slip your mind.
Bringing back a tradition that started at AltConf, I’ll be closing out the week at the One More Thing conference with a WWDC Week In Review, a lighthearted look back at the announcements and events of the week.
After a week front-loaded with announcements and technical talks—this easy-going closing session of One More Thing combines humor, music, and perspective.
As usual, it will be a busy WWDC week with plenty of new announcements and technology to wrap our heads around. Feel free to follow me on Mastodon and say hello!
I hope you can make it out to one or more of these events—see you at WWDC! •
With less than a week until LIVE near WWDC 2023, we’ve been gearing up for an evening of music, laughter and fun that we think folks are going to really enjoy.
Across multiple timezones, over a dozen Breakpoints have been rehearsing nights and weekends in preparation for our first WWDC-week concert in four years.
Tickets for the event have already sold out, but it looks like we may be able to do a bit of rearranging to accommodate a few more attendees.
In the next day or so, we will be contacting people on the waitlist to give them a chance to purchase tickets.
Join the waitlist and we will notify you as tickets become available.
NOTE: Click the “Get tickets” button on the event page to get to the “Join Waitlist” button.
We‘re all very excited to bring back this WWDC tradition and hope you can join us in person or at our livestream event online!
Join Us Online For The Livestream Event
For the first time ever LIVE near WWDC will be live-streamed so you can be part of the fun no matter where on the planet you happen to be!
The event will be streamed on our YouTube channel. If you subscribe to the channel, you can turn on a notification so you don’t forget to come back for the show!
The online event starts at 7:30 pm Pacific on Wednesday, June 7th.
Chat with others in the community
In addition to the livestream, we’ll have chat open before and during the event. It’s a great way to catch up with folks in the community and maybe make a few new friend as well.
The chat will be hosted by Breakpoint trombonist Steve Hayman. Possibly some other Breakpoints will drop by as well.
Please feel free to spread the word and share the event link with as many people as you like!
2023 Show Poster Revealed!
This LIVE near WWDC 2023 show poster is a visual answer the question, “What if our favorite avian programming language icon decided to perch, relax for a while, and groove to some music?”
Not every Swift programmer realizes that there really are birds known as swifts.
The tradition of LIVE near WWDC show posters goes back to 2017 when WWDC moved from San Francisco back to San Jose.
The poster’s style and color scheme were both suggested by Adrian Eves. Thank you Adrian!
Show posters (11” x 17”) will be on sale at the event with all proceeds going to Women Who Code. If you‘re a VIP ticket holder, we already have you covered, one is included with your ticket.
I’m really happy with how this year’s poster turned out—which is good since it will probably be hanging on my wall for the next few decades. I hope it catches your eye as well!
Looking Forward To A Big Night During A Big Week
Next week is promising to be an exciting WWDC full of announcements and almost certainly some surprises.
And for Wednesday, June 7th, we‘ve been working on a show we hope you’ll really enjoy.
Talking with members of the band over the last few weeks, we are incredibly excited and grateful to be able do this show again; happy to be supporting Women Who Code; and very thankful for the support of our sponsors.
We all hope you can join us on Wednesday night for LIVE near WWDC 2023, whether in person or online. •
And speaking of sponsors—our sponsors make this show possible. Everyone involved in this event, from planning to performing, sends an enormous thank you to our sponsors for their support. Please support our sponsors by clicking through the links below and checking them out!
