Originally published at: TidBITS News App Updated and Open Sourced - TidBITS
Some apps don’t need frequent updates. First released in 2009, Matt Neuburg’s TidBITS News is a free iPhone and iPad app focused on making it easy to stay up to date with TidBITS. Over the past 16 years, he has published 15 updates, some of which are tiny bug fixes (dealing with HTML entities is always tricky) and others that gave him excuses to rewrite the app from scratch for major iOS releases. In part, those rewrites are because the app serves as a testing ground for Matt to experiment with fundamental aspects of iOS user interface elements, such as self-sizing table cells and split view controllers. Both of these have undergone tremendous change since the app’s initial release for iPhone OS 3.
Version 2.6 was one of the significant rewrites, with Matt taking the code down to the studs and rebuilding it for iOS 26 and Swift 6.2. (The numerical synchronicity of version 2.6 being built for iOS 26 in Swift 6.2 is purely coincidental.)
However, those familiar with the app might not even notice the changes since the overall user experience stays the same. The app displays a chronological list of TidBITS articles from the RSS feed, and tapping an item opens the article. On the iPhone and when the iPad’s window is too narrow, the list and article appear on separate screens; when the iPad’s window is wide enough, the list appears in a sidebar and the article in the main pane. The arrow buttons let you navigate to the next or previous story without returning to the list, and the button in the upper right allows you to cycle through different font sizes for the article. Pull down on the list to refresh it if necessary.
There is one new feature in TidBITS News 2.6: support for Dark mode. I’m not a fan of Dark mode, but it’s good that the app adjusts appropriately for those who do use it. Matt mentioned that he also made a few minor layout improvements. A quick 2.6.1 update improves launch behavior on the iPad, shows the selection when the article list reappears, and adds an alert if the RSS feed fails to load. Matt has just submitted a 2.6.2 update that better handles emoji layout; it turns out that WordPress converts emoji to images in its RSS feed, which required additional CSS work in the app to eliminate ungainly spacing.
You might wonder what rewriting the app from scratch means with regard to Liquid Glass. Matt’s not crazy about Apple’s new design language—the phrase “kicking and screaming” was used—but it’s impossible to leverage the fundamental interface elements of iOS 26 without involving Liquid Glass. The main area where Liquid Glass asserts itself is with the iPad version’s sidebar. In iPadOS 26, creating a split view forces the sidebar to appear as a floating overlay rather than just the left pane. The way the overlay floats unnecessarily over empty space looks a little janky, but there’s no way to avoid it. Similarly, the buttons at the top of the article view are now enclosed in little circles and ovals that bloop out when pressed, but that’s easy to ignore since they are under a finger.
The other big news is that Matt has decided to open source the code for TidBITS News and post it on GitHub. For developers interested in exploring the code, Matt designed it to be compact, organized, and rigorously paired with tests.
If you like the idea of reading TidBITS in a small, focused app, give TidBITS News a try!