The Elegant Chaos Blog
News, thoughts, and other ramblings from the world of Elegant Chaos.

The Stack
December 04, 2025

I’ve just quietly released the first version of The Stack.

It represents a slightly different and fairly opinionated take on solving the To Do list / note taking problem, and I made it mostly to scratch my own itches1. I’m hoping that some other people think the way I do and will also find it useful.

You can download it here.

For some more detailed answers as to why I made it, read on…

  1. Also, of course, The Stack exists as a place for me to experiment with new Apple technologies, and generally keep my skills up to date. One day it might also be a source of income, but for now, it’s free. 

Read more

App Storage
Development Diary
October 30, 2025

Whilst adding some settings to The Stack1, I was reminded of something that has bugged me for a while about SwiftUI’s @AppStorage.

In a classic act of yak shaving, I decided to fix the annoyance instead of doing the task I actually set out to do…

  1. I’m still looking for Test Flight testers for this. If you’d be up for giving it a go - even just to help me out by confirming that it doesn’t immediately explode, then please sign up

Read more

Caveat Emptor
Development Diary
October 17, 2025

I was looking back on some of my old blog posts from 2021 earlier1, and I came across something that I thought bears repeating.

It was from this post, and the section I though was worth re-visiting was called “Caveat Emptor”.

It was about how my open source projects are often unfinished, and unpolished, and very much work in progress.

What I said then still applies today, and I’ll repeat it below.

  1. Which sounds a little bit narcissistic now that I say it out loud. Ah well - bite me. I fell into a rabbit hole ok, and it just so happens to be one of my own making. 

Read more

Release Tools Tagging
Development Diary
October 14, 2025

After my last post, I thought a bit more about Release Tools, and decided that requiring a tag was definitely the right way to go, and over a couple of days last week I implemented it.

I also decided that it was a big enough change that I may as well call this Release Tools 4.0, and take the opportunity to clean up and remove some legacy code.

Read more

Release Tools (Fastlane For Idiots)
Development Diary
September 26, 2025

My latest detour was to add an extra option to ReleaseTools, a command-line tool, written in Swift, that I made a few years ago.

Actually I’ve just checked, and I started it in 2019 🤯.

Read more