We're now just a few days away from the launch of Apple Vision Pro, and like many other developers I've built and shipped a visionOS app ready for launch day. Doing this took quite a few steps, so I wanted to walk you through the whole process: coming up with an idea, building a prototype, visiting Apple's Vision Pro labs, fixing problems, and more. Hopefully this is useful to anyone else who is thinking about shipping for visionOS! If you have an Apple Vision Pro, you can download the app here There's a press kit with screenshot, text, and an app preview video here About the app The app I b ..read more

Unwrap Live is back for its second year, this time focusing on building great apps for visionOS. Once again, it's a full-day, online-only workshop event aimed at intermediate to advanced developers, and everyone who attends will have ample chance to learn new approaches, tackle coding challenges, and of course ask lots of questions. This year we'll be focusing on three key areas of visionOS APIs: 2D apps built using SwiftUI. This will start small, looking at the least it takes to get your app onto visionOS, but then we'll expand to look at platform-specific adjustments so your apps feel fully ..read more

In this article we're going to build a complete iOS app using SwiftUI and SwiftData, all while building a real app so you can see all the techniques in action. The app we're building is called FaceFacts, which is designed to help you remember the names, faces, and personal details of folks you meet at your workplace, school, events, and more. Note: This project requires some Swift and SwiftUI knowledge, but I'll do my best to explain all the SwiftData things along the way. We'll be targeting iOS 17, so you need Xcode 15 or later. Download the finished source code for this project here. Bring ..read more

SwiftUI for iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma come with a fantastic new superpower: the ability to transform any SwiftUI view with Metal shaders, all hardware accelerated so complex effects run at lightning fast speeds even on old devices. I want to help folks get started with Metal, so I've produced two free resources that will help everyone: Inferno is an open-source library of Metal shaders written for SwiftUI, giving you a range of powerful special effects in just a few lines of code. I released a new YouTube video where I walk through how to create Metal shaders for SwiftUI from scratch. It lasts ..read more

If you’ve followed any of my tutorials, you’ll know I make a point of teaching accessibility to everyone – I want to make sure that whether someone is learning SwiftUI or already has a lot of experience with it, they know that accessibility needs to be baked into their work. As part of that, I teach five key concepts that – so I believed – helped make sure most apps provided a great accessibility experience out of the box: Using native controls rather than making your own, including using VStack and HStack in SwiftUI to provide a clear structure for assistive tools to follow. Adding shor ..read more

SwiftUI continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and this year has seen a huge number of improvements to scroll views, fun new SF Symbols effects, advanced support for Metal shaders, and more. Some of these are things I’ve asked for personally, including the ability to add Metal shaders, making Color work better with Codable, adding a completion closure for animations, allowing us to animate gradients, and being able to selectively round corners of a rectangle – I’ve closed at least a dozen feedbacks just from beta 1! Scroll view improvements How to make a ScrollView snap with paging or betw ..read more

Now that WWDC23 is over I’m really excited to announce the full schedule for Hacking with Swift Live 2023. The short version is that we’ll be covering the key new features in Swift, then exploring all the major changes for SwiftUI, and finally going hard on SwiftData – it’s going to be a really packed event! As a reminder, Hacking with Swift Live is a charity-focused event where all ticket and sponsor revenue goes to help folks experiencing homelessness. So, you get to learn Swift, make new friends, and also help people in need! Get your Hacking with Swift Live ticket here Looking for more in ..read more

Although Swift 6 is looming on the horizon, the 5.x releases still have a lot to give – simpler ways to use if and switch, macros, noncopyable types, custom actor executors, and more are all coming in Swift 5.9, making yet another mammoth release. In this article I’ll walk you through the most important changes in this release, providing code examples and explanations so you can try it all yourself. You’ll need the latest Swift 5.9 toolchain installed in Xcode 14, or the Xcode 15 beta. if and switch expressions SE-0380 adds the ability for us to use if and switch as expressions in several situ ..read more

So you think you know Swift? Think again! Fresh from the success of our audiobook launch, Laboratoires TwoStraws is back with an all-new card game that will finally give you something to do while waiting for Xcode to finish indexing. It’s called Swift Against Humanity, and the rules are both dazzlingly simple and also surprisingly similar to some other games you might have previously heard of: one player places a black card on the table that contains a question or part of a sentence, and all other players play one white card they think best completes it. The first player then shuffles the whit ..read more

Although many major Swift changes are currently percolating through Swift Evolution, Swift 5.8 itself is more of a clean up release: there are additions, yes, but there are more improvements that refine functionality that was already in widespread use. Hopefully this should make adoption much easier, particularly after the mammoth set of changes that were squeezed into Swift 5.7! In this article I’m going to walk you through the most important changes this time around, providing code examples and explanations so you can try it all yourself. You’ll need Xcode 14.3 or later to use this, although ..read more