iOS Newsletter
Hi folks,
This week we have a mixture of topics - from build times optimization to looking under the hood of SwiftUI’s Animation engine and beyond. We’re also happy to share that our freshly released open-source framework called SnappTheming is now on Swift Package Index.
Enjoy!
Swift
How Swift’s server support powers Things Cloud
The developers of Things have shared some details on the outcome of migrating their Cloud infrastructure to Swift with the help of Vapor. There are some interesting details on what the building blocks are and the performance gains are, so don’t skip this.
Swift build times and module verification
Here’s a neat find that we stumbled upon this week - splitting a project into multiple modules has the tendency to increase the build times in some (many) cases. Apparently the build system does some thorough checks to guarantee that the modules are in the expected shape, but you can opt out of this for the debug builds in attempt to lower the build times. And the gains are worth it. Read on to discover how.
UI/UX
Meet SnappTheming
Following our announcement of SnappTheming last week, our colleague Volodymyr Voiko has published a thorough article on adopting it by creating your first theme. We are very excited about what’s shaping up next for the framework, so be sure to check it from time to time.
Generating images programmatically with Image Playground
While ImageCreator is still in beta (as it’s expected to arrive with the release of iOS 18.4), the documentation is now available online. The API is fairly simple and modern so check this article to discover how to adopt it.
Spatial SwiftUI: Model3D
Continuing our explorations around visionOS, we have used this article as a reference on loading USD or .reality file and display it in our SwiftUI views. Apple hosts some free USD files on their Augmented Reality developer website for you to experiment with. Fun fact: most of Apple’s products also have USD models that you can use for preview straight from their website, just look for “view in your space” link when visiting with your iPhone.
Animatable Protocol: Taming Unruly SwiftUI Animations
Another interesting look under the hood of SwiftUI’s animation engine. This article shows us how much control can we gain by adopting the Animatable protocol in our views. Don’t miss it!
SwiftData
Separating Concerns in SwiftData Models, or: @Query Considered Harmful
Here’s an article that discusses an interesting point of view on not using @Query with SwiftData. The proposed solution is not specific to the SwiftData domain and can be used in other contexts. It’s also based on the basic rule of separation of concerns, so, thumbs up!
Tips
SwiftUI @State in UICollectionViewCell
A quick tip on sorting the problem of UICollectionViewCell not preserving our SwiftUI @State with cell reuse in the picture can be found at the link below, thanks to Adam Bell.