iOS Newsletter
Hi folks,
The biggest piece of news this week in the Swift community is the open-sourcing of Xcode’s build system, xcodebuild, which hs now been renamed swift-build. This has a potential to turn coding for non-Apple platforms a much more predictable experience.
What do you think?
Swift
The Next Chapter in Swift Build Technologies
As we stated in the intro, open-sourcing the Xcode build system is a big step forward for the Swift community. An unexpected one, too. Read more about the thought process and the aims behind it.
Swift Everywhere: Bringing Swift Packages to Android
We’ve covered Skip in the past (see issue #5), and it seems like the team behind it is not having a rest. This article covers how Swift Packages can be used on Android, if that’s your cup of tea.
Swift Everywhere: Using Interoperability to Build on Windows
If you have an itch to scratch - say, by coding in Swift on Windows - here’s an overview of what’s possible (hello there, C/C++ interop). This article may also serve as a starting point for your explorations.
Adwaita for Swift
Lastly, though not least in importance, there’s also a library that allows you to use Adwaita (the library behind GNOME) in Swift. This one is something we’ve been monitoring for some time - not only because we love Swift and Linux, but because its ergonomics are very much SwiftUI-like. Who said coding apps for Linux shouldn’t be fun?
Maps
Core Location Modern API Tips
Many of us have built at least one location-aware app. This article covers some of the lessons learned by using the CoreLocation APIs, what the tradeoffs between the old and the modern APIs are, and is a great resource to keep around for reference.
Drawing maps with Swift Charts
This caught us off-guard. We were aware of the flexibility that SwiftCharts offers, but we never expected it to be capable of drawing free forms. This is a relatively new feature, supported in iOS 18, but that does not diminish how useful it is. Here’s a great article on how to leverage this creatively, thanks to Artem Novichkov.
UI/UX
Debugging SwiftUI Layouts: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques
We wrote about debugging SwiftUI a couple of weeks ago. This link can be treated as a follow-up as it explores some techniques that go beyond the _printChanges() method.
Readability: The Optimal Line Length
Finally, this may not be much of a technical resource, but it’s a great overview on text composition for readability. We found these sorts of articles to be sources of information that we leverage a lot when building our apps.