Dates and times. Every developer has to deal with them, and very few languages make it super enjoyable. This library aims to help out in Swift land:

Working with calendars can be extremely complicated and error-prone. Time solves these problems by clarifying concepts and restricting improper usage through type-safe APIs.

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.

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.

Ted Kremenek (member of the Swift Core Team and Project Lead) shared on the Swift Forums the broad topics that the Core Team wants to tackle for the next major version of Swift.

From more platforms to improvements on the language to support elegant APIs, but also including major language features such as memory ownership and concurrency.

Welcome to Publish, a static site generator built specifically for Swift developers. It enables entire websites to be built using Swift, and supports themes, plugins and tons of other powerful customization options.

Built to build swiftbysundell.com.

You can rearrange them with ⌘ + drag and then click the arrow icon to hide.

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!")
        )
    )
)

This isn’t a full-fledged Reddit client (yet), but it looks like a nice example app if you want to see what SwiftUI is all about.

At WWDC 2019 Apple announced SwiftUI. A single “cross platform”, “declarative” framework used to build tvOS, macOS, watchOS and iOS UIs. SwiftWebUI is bringing that to the Web ✔️

Disclaimer: Do not use this in production. Use it to learn more about SwiftUI and its inner workings.

Usually it is much faster to read through some bullet points instead of watching a 50 min session video. Then if you find something interesting you can still watch it.

As I said on Backstage after the keynote, I’m particularly interested in the Sign in with Apple details.

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.

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.

Swiftenstein is a partial reimplementation of ID Software’s 1992 classic FPS Wolfenstein 3D in Swift for iOS. It is not a complete game, just a single-level tech demo.

Not a complete re-creation of the original, but “close enough for nostalgia purposes” and definitely worth a read-through for education purposes.

I’ve wanted something like this for so long that I forgot I wanted it. Insta-install!

A (coverage-)guided fuzzer for dynamic language interpreters based on a custom intermediate language (“FuzzIL”) which can be mutated and translated to JavaScript.

Not an official Google project, but written and maintained by Google engineer Samuel Groß. The README lays out quite a bit on the concept, implementation, and usage of the fuzzer, but there’s even more to learn in this presentation from Offensive Con 2019 and the associated master’s thesis for which the project was produced.

I’m logging this not because it’s super-useful in its current form (it is not). I’m logging this not because it’s a good example of a modern Swift app (it may be, I have no idea). Nope. I’m logging FeedCompass because it represents an idea that deserves more attention.

Independent websites, loosely stitched together via open protocols, are what make the web great.

Yeah, let’s do more of that.

This project aims to collect bizarre (but “legal”) Swift programs that the commmunity produces. Like esoteric programming languages, but for weird or nonsensical shit we can do in Swift that actually compiles. For fun purposes only.

Compiling some open source goodness just for the fun of it. Avant-garde!

This show is just getting started (only 1 episode in), but it’s always awesome to have podcasts dedicated to a particular language/community.

They’re taking episode ideas via GitHub Issues. That sounds like a (familiar 😉) good idea.

Is Apple trying to own paradigms of a computer language or are they trying to keep the patent trolls away? Here’s a link to the patent in question, and here’s the patent’s abstract:

In one embodiment, an improved programming system and language for application development is provided that combines elements of the C and Objective-C languages without the constraints imposed by a requirement to maintain compatibility with the C language. The language provides the functionality of the C language compatibility in certain areas to improve the inherent safety of software written in the language. The new language includes default safety considerations such as bounds and overflow checking.

What’s cool about this is it’s not a proxy, so you don’t have to futz with certificates, proxy settings, and the like. As long as the iOS device and your Mac are on the same local network, you can view the network traffic of your apps.

Avoid migrating your Swift scripts to packages and using swift build just to include a dependency. Change #!/usr/bin/swift to #!/usr/bin/swift sh and you’re good to go:

#!/usr/bin/swift sh

import PromiseKit  // @mxcl ~> 6.5

firstly {
    after(.seconds(2))
}.done {
    print("Scripts with package dependencies!")
    exit(0)
}

RunLoop.main.run()

Whether you are writing yet another one task tracker or calendar app, or simply want to offer the users to skip the joy of using UIDatePicker and let them quickly and efficiently select dates — CrispyCalendar is the calendar UI framework you need.

Mobile apps were one of the big discussion points when we talked Mastodon on episode #315 of The Changelog. Here’s one thing Eugen had to say about the subject:

Oh, yeah, for some reason I get a lot of questions like “Why isn’t Mastodon on the app store?” and it’s really weird, because there are like a million apps for Mastodon on every app store… They’re just not called Mastodon, because they are developed by third-party developers.

Mastodon has a principle - API first, and… Yeah, that’s essentially it - API first. [laughter]

Add Mast to the ever-growing list of third-party developers making iOS apps for Mastodon.

When Apple open sourced Swift, it was only a matter of time before the server-side frameworks started rolling out. Perhaps that time is now? Amazon’s entry is called Smoke, and InfoQ has the deets:

Amazon Smoke framework is a new open-source light-weight server-side framework written in Swift and aimed to build REST-like or RPC-like services. Its architecture stresses ease of use and favours a pure-functional programming style for request handlers.

Click through for some code snippets and to learn exactly how Smoke is built (hint: they’re using SwiftNIO)

Straight outta Cupertino:

a low-level tool for building high-performance networking applications in Swift. It particularly targets those use-cases where using a “thread-per-connection” model of concurrency is inefficient or untenable. This is a common limitation when building servers that use a large number of relatively low-utilization connections, such as HTTP servers.

Could this be a first step toward Swift-powered servers running all around the globe? Maybe Apple will finally be able to ditch WebObjects… 😉