Martin Pilkington, RIP
Martin Pilkington (November 2024):
As some of you know I’ve been being treated for Oesphageal Cancer, treatment which was going pretty well, especially after surgery in July.
Unfortunately over the past weeks things seem to have gone downhill. The cancer has returned and spread to my brain and spine. My doctors have said it’s terminal and I have on average 3-6 months to live.
Martin passed away yesterday, peacefully in his sleep. He was a true fighter until the bitter end but he is now pain free and at peace.
I’m terrible at finding the words in these situations, so I’ll just say that he was a wonderful member the Mac/iOS developer community and will be missed.
He was a Mac developer’s Mac developer, with an eye for details, and his own work was infused with fine craftsmanship. His “Xcode 4: The Super Mega Awesome Review” back in 2011 was a genuine work of art and service to the community (linked with brief commentary), and he rightfully skewered Apple’s Catalyst Mac port of the Developer app in 2020 (linked with significant commentary).
Devastated to learn about the passing of @pilky last night, at home, surrounded by family, after a short, unexpected battle with cancer. He was a talented developer, designer, miniature painter and accessibility champion, and one of my closest friends for the past sixteen years. He provided the inspiration and design help I needed when bringing my apps to the Mac, and no social media post will ever convey how much he will be missed.
You might have known @pilky for his apps, like Coppice (whose development was streamed on Twitch), or his wealth of knowledge on AppKit & Xcode, or the infamous fixradarorgtfo petition that sparked intense internal debate at Apple and drove a ton of changes to Apple’s bug reporting. I knew him too, for his mini painting and #warhammer hobby, which we shared. He spurred me on to paint more and improve my skills, to build better, more-accessible apps, and so much more.
Damn. When I first met him he was a kid, but never really changed too much. Positive, gentle, thoughtful. Really showed his sanguinity and quiet composure — grace, I suppose — through all this, and during his previous run-in with cancer. Lauren and I send our condolences. I can say with complete confidence that Martin will be remembered with fondness by everyone in our shared cohort of Apple-platforms developers.
Previously:
- Passkeys Credential Exchange
- iPhone Action Button Uptake
- Sequoia Screen Recording Prompts and the Persistent Content Capture Entitlement
- EU to Charge Apple for Violating DMA
- Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs
- Slow Swift Macro Compilation
- iMac 2023
- Evernote Acquisition and Layoffs
- Xcode 14.3
- SwiftUI in 2022
- Modifying NSTextLists in Code
- Apple Developer App for Mac
- Mac Pro Available to Order
- Apple’s Technology Transitions
- Annoying Catalina Security Features
- Catalyst vs. SwiftUI for Building a New App
- The State of Apple’s Developer Documentation
- What to Expect from Marzipan
- Sandboxing and Code Collector Pro
- Xcode 4.3 Review
- The Xcode 4.1 Review
- Xcode 4
- Objective-C 2.2 Features
- Xcode 3.2
- Making Xcode’s Source List Work For You
Update (2025-03-03): Uli Kusterer:
He was immediately likeable, impossibly young, and full of ideas. He made Mac apps and knew a lot. It was fun to talk shop. You could help him out, he could help you out, and everyone came out a smarter, more optimistic person.
[…]
Coppice was a gorgeous mind-mapping app. You just placed stuff on a canvas, dragged connection noodles between them, and there were so many clever small touches to reduce friction in the process. It let you use all sorts of media on your canvas. And it looked like it had been built and refined by a team of 20, not a clever young man from the North West of England. But here he was, on stream, building away at it, line by line, both textual and graphical.
Update (2025-03-04): Steve Troughton-Smith:
There are still a lot of details to work out, but one of the things @pilky entrusted to me is Coppice, his hypertext mind-mapping app, with the intention of releasing the source code (AppKit & Swift). Coppice was in the middle of a major refactor, so unfortunately that's not as easy as flipping a switch — it will take time to clean it and its dependencies up into a buildable form, but I started on that in December and will work towards a public release.
