Clutch Engineering is now an official corporate sponsor of the OpenStreetMap Foundation 🎉 2026 is going to be a huge year for Sidecar. Looking forward to advancing the state of the art in open mapping technologies and communities ❤️

CarPlay widgets ready for the road 🏎️💨

Release notes for today's Sidecar release — this was a big one! - ▶️ Customizable CarPlay widgets - 📌 Pinnable OBD parameters - 🗺️ Improved automatic trip logging - 🚘 New car symbols for the bZ4X and León - ❤️ Tons of fine-tunings thanks to the incredible beta testing crew 💪

CarPlay functionality coming together nicely 😁

"Design for Dark Mode", they said — well I can't just leave this little guy in the dark y'know?

"Let’s build iOS 18’s navigation title card in SwiftUI" https://t.co/Owt9jHzkau iOS 18 standardizes a design pattern that could be called “navigation title cards”. In their simplest form, these cards appear at the top of a list of content and provide brief explanatory text.

"Everything you never thought you wanted to know about emoji flags". Learn the technical difference between 🇺🇸 and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 and some handy tricks to generating flags from country codes in this new post: https://t.co/OwT4392v0U

Get your key designers and engineers together. Not just for a sprint, but for the greater goal of building something incredible together 🚀

Ladders and job roles incentivize specialization, so it's up to leaders to create environments that encourage high-efficiency cross-pollination of talent, and to avoid the tendency for product design groups to default to the assembly line (i.e. "hand-off") model of work.

When you afford space for an engineer/designer pair to have full agency to own product quality together, this combo can move mountains.

I've seen this story play out many times over the past decade, both of my own volition and through enabling it with members of my team, and the same central ingredients have held true every single time:

And the results showed. The v1 launch was one of the most stable, well-received product launches of that iOS era. Launching any v1 is a massive team effort, and our war room of polish contributed an important part to that effort.

...we meticulously walked through every pixel of the application to make sure it reflected a degree of craftsmanship that we felt was critical for this v1.

Every day we'd bounce ideas, play with concepts, and fine tune micro interactions. From the bottom sheet gesture physics, to the app's navigation, from localization ("hipster ipsum" mode was critical here), to the way the "swap directions" button animates when you tap it...

So a few months out from launch, I took over a conference room, ordered pizza, brought in a sound system, and convinced one of the designers (Viktor Persson) to sit with me in the room as we fine-tuned every single interaction in the app.

Every day, I'd run over to the design pod with the latest prototype, ask tons of questions, and then run back to my desk to tune the design. It was super inefficient, and I was one of the only engineers doing this near-daily ritual.

And yet, I couldn't shake this feeling that the separation of design and engineering was creating a quality bottleneck.

We were under immense pressure to launch. With Apple's new Maps app having been released in September, every day that passed was another day that Google Maps didn't exist on iOS. First impressions matter, and this created a tangible sense of accountability within the team.

This created a dynamic where engineers would be handed design specs and tasked with implementing them, factory line work style. If you work on a design systems or product team, this might sound familiar.

When I joined the team, the engineers had a pod in one part of the building and the designers had a separate pod, ~200 yards away and out of sight.