iOS Newsletter
Hi folks,
With just 2 weeks to WWDC the rumor mill is ramping up with news on Apple changing their versioning model across the operating systems, screenshots on the usual design improvements and more. Not long before we see how much of this is true, but we’re sure it’s just scratching the surface on the updates that are waiting for us.
This week we’re offering you a lot of UX topics to keep you entertained, but we’re also looking at using MCP, slicing the app into multiple micro-applications and more.
Enjoy!
Swift
Microapps architecture in Swift. Scaling.
Micro-apps architectures are a great way to maintain separation of concerns; to enhance compile time; adhere to the single responsibility principle, and facilitate continuous delivery. They enable us to deploy a feature without the need for the completion of other features. This article is the last in the series of articles that Majid Jabrayilov dedicated to the topic, but have no doubt - the entire series is worth it.
Swift 6 Refactoring in a Camera App - SLIT_STUDIO Development Log
Swift 6 has been around for some time, but even many of Apple’s first-party frameworks have yet to fully adopt it. This creates challenges for developers who rely on them during this migration period. While developing the SLIT_STUDIO camera app, Megabits encountered similar issues—but chose to tackle them head-on. This one is an interesting read on some of their discoveries.
UI/UX
Mesh gradients in SwiftUI
Unlike linear or radial gradients, which interpolate color along fixed axes, a mesh gradient defines colors at specific positions within a two-dimensional grid. The result is often quite appealing, and here’s a great tutorial on how to adopt this technique in our apps.
Ever heard of .contextMenu()?
SwiftUI’s .contextMenu() modifier is often not well recognized by SwiftUI developers, but it’s a powerful tool that can enhance your user experience. Vincent Pradeilles with a great tutorial on what it enables us to do.
Exploring creative coding with Swift and SwiftUI
This one is more of a conceptual look at an interesting form of computational art, named “creative coding”. It’s not only a great entry point into the topic, but also a historical walkthrough, and a look at the art form through the lens of Swift and SwiftUI. It’s quite an inspiration to see some of the concepts implemented with the help of the tools that we use on a daily basis.
How to combine lists of Strings into natural and localized sentences in Swift
We all know how powerful a language Swift is in providing a bunch of built-in quality-of-life features that help us write clean, efficient and readable code. Among these useful features is the ListFormatter class - it helps us to join the content of a list, which may not be so trivial when we have localization in the picture.
Bar Chart creation using Swift Charts
One of the most useful additions to the ever growing list of Apple APIs is, no doubt, the Swift Charts framework, announced during WWDC 2022. This tutorial offers a look at creating a Bar Chart, which to some of us may be a trivial task, but many of the methods you’ll learn about can be applied to other types of charts.
AI/ML
Using Model Context Protocol in iOS apps
MCP is all the hype right now, and there are plenty of MCP clients out there already, but most of them are tailored for desktop use. As iOS developers, we may be wondering how to adopt MCP in our iOS apps. This post looks at implementing a simple chat with Claude LLM which gets the blood pressure data from HealthKit by utilizing an in-app MCP server.