Pilky's avatar in his spaceship, after gravity was reactivated

On February 14th, 2025, Martin Pilkington died.

I don’t remember exactly where I first met Martin. We probably both hung out on Apple’s Cocoa-Dev mailing list or other online spaces, but we first met in person at NSConference, I’m sure. 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.

After Scotty closed down NSConference, we didn’t run into each other that often anymore. We followed each other on Twitter, and I learned about his first encounter with cancer, and how he’d managed to get past it, and I learned about the apps his M Cubed Software worked on, and we had lots of fun conversations and polite disagreements about things going on in the Apple world. But we didn’t run into each other much, beyond 160-character bursts here and there.

Until a few years ago, he created PilkyCRC on Twitch. There he was, doing a body-doubling stream, of him working on his newest app Coppice, updating the M Cubed Software web site, and just chatting with viewers about lots of development questions. He freely gave advice, he also graciously took it.

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.

Also, he had an amazing setup with a virtual avatar. A 3D-rendered “desk lamp”-style iMac avatar with a face that moved as he spoke. He could push buttons and “Pilky” got angry, desperate, went to sleep … eventually he built an amazing Unity setup. A spaceship with multiple rooms, projection screens to show his screen capture when working on code, or rooms little Pilky iMac could move to for some change of scenery.

There were channel point redeems, where you could spend the “currency” that every viewer accumulates per minute watched to throw “bugs” at him, or turn off gravity, making him float around the space and hearing Martin act everything out hilariously. He also drew the cutest emotes of his avatar. It was nice to have him back, to have those conversations again, to benefit from his experience and pick his brain. To hear him act the grumpy curmudgeon and to hear him laugh.

Then he had a doctor’s visit, symptoms he hadn’t seen before, and the doctors said the cancer was back. As someone who only saw his public face on the ‘net, I don’t know what his immediate reaction was (probably like any of us would react), but by the time I heard about it, Pilky was raring to fight this thing. Do everything he can.

But it had advanced too far, it wasn’t looking good. The day came, sometime late in 2024, when he announced that he was in the process of sorting his affairs.

Fuck he was young.

Fuck he was brave.

And Fuck Cancer.