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Swift is a modern programming language focused on safety, performance, and expressivity.
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Thomas Ricouard Medium (via Scribe)

The making of Ice Cubes, an open source, SwiftUI Mastodon client

Thomas Ricouard:

This is the first article in what I hope will be a long series of stories about the making of the Ice Cubes app. This article will focus on what the app is, the general story behind it, and an overview of the codebase.

I’ve been using Ice Cubes (source code, App Store) for all Mastodon stuff on my phone since it was first released, and I really like it. I didn’t know it was open source at the time, but even better: its author is writing all about the making of it. Looking forward to this series!

Swift swift.org

Apple's Swift rewrite of its Foundation framework will be open source

Tony Parker writing on Swift’s blog:

When Swift began life as an open source project, we wanted to open not just the language itself, but the ecosystem around it. Foundation has been instrumental in the success of decades of software and has been an integral part of the Swift developer experience from the beginning, and we knew it had to be included in the open source offering.

Historically, Apple’s open source efforts have varied in just how open they are when it comes to community. On that topic, this is an uplifting bit of prose:

Open source projects are at their best when the community of users can participate and become a community of developers. A new, open contribution process will be available to enable all developers to contribute new API to Foundation.

This new Foundation project is slated to launch on GitHub in 2023.

macOS marta.sh

A native, extensible & fast file manager for macOS

Marta is a dual-pane file manager that’s super customizable and theme-able, too. It has an Actions Panel like Sublime Text and VS Code where you can work with files, interact with the operating system, or modify Marta itself. But for my money time, if it can remember the state of how I left things the last time… it’s far better than Finder already!

A native, extensible & fast file manager for macOS

iOS github.com

Recreating a fully functional version of iOS 4 in SwiftUI

OldOS is a testament to the days of yesteryear, showcasing what iOS once was ten years ago. The ethos of the app is to merge the technologies of today with a pixel-perfect recreation of the user experience of the past. The vast majority of apps in OldOS are fully functional — meaning they seamlessly integrate with the data on your phone to deliver a live, emulator-esque experience. What does this mean? Well, you can play your music in iPod, get directions in Maps, surf the web in Safari, view the current weather in Weather, and much more.

This is quite the undertaking!

Part of the goal with OldOS is to enable anyone to understand how iOS works and demonstrate just how powerful SwiftUI truly is. For that reason, the entire app will soon be open-sourced — enabling developers to learn about, modify, and add to the app. I thought building this over my last six or so months in high school and sharing it with the world would be a fun and productive endeavor.

It looks like there’s a build available today, but it’s not open source yet so I’m going out on a limb by linking it up now. I’ve +1’d a request for screenshots, which would be a great addition to the repo while we wait for code.

Recreating a fully functional version of iOS 4 in SwiftUI

Swift swift.org

Apple releases a collection of Swift data structure implementations

Karoy Lorentey with the announcement:

The Swift Standard Library currently implements the three most essential general-purpose data structures: Array, Set and Dictionary. These are the right tool for a wide variety of use cases, and they are particularly well-suited for use as currency types. But sometimes, in order to efficiently solve a problem or to maintain an invariant, Swift programmers would benefit from a larger library of data structures.

We expect the Collections package to empower you to write faster and more reliable programs, with less effort.

This joins the Swift Algorithms and Swift Numerics packages in what is becoming a valuable, open source resource for Swift developers around the world to use.

Erik Kennedy learnui.design

iOS 13 design guidelines, templates, and downloads

Erik Kennedy is back with an awesome resource for anyone doing iOS development.

Maybe you’ve never designed an iPhone app, and have no idea where to begin.

Maybe you’ve designed a dozen, but still want one place to reference best practices. Heaven knows Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines are awful to try and read.

Either way, this is the guide for you. I cover basically everything you need to know to create an iOS app that follows standard iOS 13 conventions.

macOS github.com

Control Room – a macOS app to control the Xcode simulator

Control Room is a macOS app that lets you control the simulators for iOS, tvOS, and watchOS – their UI appearance, status bar configuration, and more. It wraps Apple’s own simctl command-line tool, so you’ll need Xcode installed.

The author posted a nice demo video on Twitter and the response was so positive that they open sourced the tool.

Swift github.com

A DSL for writing type-safe HTML, XML, and RSS in Swift

It can be used to build websites, documents and feeds, as a templating tool, or as a renderer for higher-level components and tools. It’s primary focus is on static site generation and Swift-based web development.

I’ve always enjoyed using DSL’s like this.

let html = HTML(
    .head(
        .title("My website"),
        .stylesheet("styles.css")
    ),
    .body(
        .div(
            .h1("My website"),
            .p("Writing HTML in Swift is pretty great!")
        )
    )
)

Matt Gallagher cocoawithlove.com

First impressions of SwiftUI

Matt Gallagher:

A little over a month ago, I released CwlViews and then followed up with an article suggesting that Apple might be about to release their own declarative views library. At WWDC this week, they did just that, releasing SwiftUI.

This article will look at how SwiftUI’s approach to declarative views compares to CwlViews, why the two approaches differ and what Apple changed to make this possible. I’ll end with some thoughts about how this will affect macOS and iOS development.

Swift github.com

An example to-do list app using SwiftUI (introduced at WWDC 2019)

SwiftUI didn’t get as much air time as the new Mac Pro and its ridiculous (in multiple ways) 6K display, but looking back at Apple’s 2019 announcements, SwiftUI might end up being the most profound of them all.

If you want to cut straight to some working code and an XCode project that uses the brand new UI framework, check out the linked repo.

An example to-do list app using SwiftUI (introduced at WWDC 2019)
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