iOS Newsletter
Hi folks,
This week we’re looking at the internals of the virtual memory management in iOS, we experiment with using SwiftUI animations in UIKit, we set up Sign in with Apple on the server and in an app. We also look at debugging CoreData before we get to a useful article on some considerations that need to be made before adopting SwiftData. We round up with a “book” on Swift Wasm, to make this newsletter packed with interesting stuff.
Enjoy!
Swift
Size Matters: An Exploration of Virtual Memory on iOS
This is an article that came out of experiencing an odd out-of-memory problem when attempting to debug an iOS app on device. The app consistently crashed shortly after launch, preventing the author from investigating the bug. To unblock himself, he learned a lot about the iOS virtual memory implementation and documented his findings here.
UI/UX
Animate UIKit views with SwiftUI animations in iOS 18
Starting with iOS 18, Apple now gives us a powerful new feature: the ability to animate UIKit views using SwiftUI animation types. This bridges the gap between the two frameworks even further, allowing us to bring the flexibility and expressiveness of SwiftUI animation system to UIKit-based projects.
Understand and implement Share Extension Conversation Suggestions in Swift for iOS
Conversation suggestions are a feature introduced with iOS 13. They present a row of suggested sharing recipients, offering convenient one-tap access to your recommended contacts, when sharing images, videos, website URLs, or any files outside of your application making it easy to share quickly and effortlessly. Developers have the choice to update their apps to support Siri’s messaging domain when sending messages and enabling their apps to appear in the share sheet. This article explains how.
Setting Up Sign in with Apple with Server Side Swift and SwiftUI
Sign in with Apple provides both secure, privacy-focused and an easy alternative to the standard user name and password interface on watchOS. This article shows us how to set up Sign in with Apple on our servers, implement Sign in with Apple in our SwiftUI apps, and gives us tips on how to handle authentication tokens securely.
visionOS
Collisions & Physics: Getting started with Collision Component
We can use the Collision Component for interacting with RealityKit entities using system gestures or to trigger app events and/or animations when entities collide. This article is an entry point that you may not want to miss.
Data
Core Data Debugging in Xcode using launch arguments
CoreData has been around for some time, and many developers still consider it a great solution to use for persistent storage of structured data in your application. Debugging CoreData can be challenging, but some less-known functionalities in Xcode can help you a lot. This article explains how.
Key Considerations Before Using SwiftData
SwiftData is the long-anticipated successor of Core Data, but being relatively new, it still has some limitations. This article aims to serve as a guide for developers interested in SwiftData, helping us to understand its strengths and limitations so that we can make informed decisions based on our project needs.
Book
Swift Wasm book
We stumble upon bookmark-worthy findings pretty often these days. Recently, we’ve been collecting information around WebAssembly (abbreviated as Wasm). Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. SwiftWasm is an open source project to support the WebAssembly target for Swift. The goal of this project is to fully support the WebAssembly target for Swift and to be merged into the upstream repository. The book is being updated as the implementation progresses, so keep an eye on it.