Apple Developer:

Xcode now supports a JSON-based project format (.xcproj) that’s more readable, merge-friendly, and easier for coding agents to edit. Enable it in the file inspector. Projects using .xcproj also open in earlier versions of Xcode 27.

Apple released, on GitHub, a Swift library (and CLI tool) for reading, writing, and manipulating this new project format. Michael Tsai has a list of developer reactions, which are universally positive. A sampling:

Simon B. Støvring:

Developers have been screaming for a friendlier Xcode project format for years. I’m one of them.

Tony Arnold:

I’ve been waiting for something like this for most of my career! 🎉

Rob Napier:

It does feel like another case of “we’ve quickly done a thing to help AI that we’ve been unwilling to do for years to help humans.” I’m seeing that happen across the industry.

It is very welcome and appreciated, and lots of thanks to the teams involved. It’s also frustrating that it took “it can help AI” to make it happen.

The old .pbxproj project format was not XML; it was an old NeXT-style “ASCII” property list — a file format that is surprisingly JSON-like considering that it predates not only JSON, but JavaScript (JSON = JavaScript Object Notation). The problem developers have long had with the old .pbxproj project file isn’t about the old plist format, but instead the way the object graph was represented in it. Everything was represented by opaque ID values; one small change in Xcode often resulted in multiple changes on different lines in the .pbxproj file. While technically that format is a human-readable (and thus LLM-readable) text file, it effectively needed to be treated as a binary file.

Link: developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-notes/xcode…

For the first half of my childhood in suburban Ohio, we lived next to Bob.

Bob and his wife were a kind, reserved older couple who decorated their home mostly with crucifixes and talked about Jesus a lot. Bob helped my mom with a lot of common household tasks after my dad died. When she woke up to a small fire on our deck, she didn’t call the fire department — she called Bob.¹

I never learned any of Bob’s political views, though I can make some guesses in retrospect. They never mattered. He was just our neighbor.

We later moved, and hit the neighbor jackpot with Van.

Van was deeply kind, generous, and friendly — the sort of neighbor everyone wishes for. In my lazy teenage years, he’d often mow our lawn or shovel our snow for us before I even woke up. As his mobility later declined, I was honored to return the favor.

Van and his delightful wife passed away years ago, before I learned how either of them felt on any political issue.

If they were my neighbors today, how likely would that be?

*     *     *

If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?

Should I be condemned for supporting or associating with them in non-political contexts?

Should I be condemned for not publicly condemning them myself?

While privilege and power dynamics play a complex and unavoidable role in this, I don’t want to associate with any community that would insist on either of those.²

And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything.

The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang out with our friends.

Our casual friends were just casual friends. We didn’t expect them to take positions on the world’s most complicated conflicts. We could just talk about weather and TV shows, and maybe sometimes get a beer.

And our neighbors were just our neighbors.

HEAVEN — A representative of Heaven confirmed on Thursday that people who line the dashboards of their Jeeps with little duckies will not inherit the kingdom of God.

God's rainbow wins again!