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Posts tagged with: iOS 26

9 posts found

All Development AI Apple Vibe Coding SwiftUI Announcements
A bright orange DETOUR road sign with a black arrow pointing right — the moment a request reroutes from the on-device model to the server.
Swift SwiftUI

ThinkBud + Foundation Models: What I Shipped On-Device, and the Wall That Sent Me Back to the Server

Day 10 of the 30-day iOS series, the build-in-public finale of AI week. I took the on-device Foundation Models stack from Days 8 and 9 and bolted it into ThinkBud, an app I actually ship. Here's the honest field report: the bounded tasks the on-device model nailed for free and offline, the context-window wall a 100K-character textbook import smashed into, and the exact line of code where I gave up and routed to a server. Plus the one decision that's pure Swift — so it gets a real test.

13 min read
A grid of metal letterpress type blocks set into wooden compartments — each slot a defined, typed character, the analog ancestor of structured output.
Swift SwiftUI

@Generable: Make Apple's On-Device Model Hand You a Swift Struct, Not a String to Parse

Day 9 of the 30-day iOS series, part 2 of AI week. Yesterday Foundation Models gave us a String. Today we make it give us a typed Swift value — BrewSummary(flavor:, advice:, rating:) instead of a paragraph you regex your way through. @Generable, @Guide constraints, session.respond(to:generating:), and the sleeper-within-the-sleeper: tool calling, where the on-device model calls your own Swift code mid-answer. With the TDD seam, because typed output changes what you test.

14 min read
An open notebook with the word 'Notes' handwritten and underlined, a fountain pen resting on the page, reading glasses blurred behind it — the raw input a summarizer turns into one clean line.
Swift SwiftUI

Foundation Models: Your First On-Device AI Feature With No Backend, No API Key, No Bill

Day 8 of the 30-day iOS series, and the start of AI week. The Foundation Models framework runs a real language model entirely on the phone — free, private, offline. We build the smallest thing that works: summarize a block of text in three lines, handle the availability cases that bite in production, wire it into a real app, and put a TDD seam around the part that isn't the model. Code-along, with tests.

12 min read
A building wrapped in scaffolding mid-renovation — the new facade isn't up yet, so the old one stays protected. The same call you make with UIDesignRequiresCompatibility while your redesign is still in flight.
Swift SwiftUI

UIDesignRequiresCompatibility: When (and Why) Opting Out of Liquid Glass Is the Pro Move

Apple hands you one Info.plist key that freezes the old design for a full year. It's not a cop-out — for banking, enterprise, and apps caught mid-redesign, opting out of Liquid Glass is the responsible call. The exact flag, a real before/after from my own app, the deadline, and a decision matrix you can actually defend in a standup. Plus the per-screen rollout gate you should be testing instead.

11 min read
Light refracting through layered glass into a spray of color — the same object reading differently under different light, the way one Icon Composer document renders as light, dark, clear, and tinted.
Swift SwiftUI

Icon Composer and the New App-Icon Era: One Document Instead of Three Exported PNGs

iOS 26 wants your app icon in light, dark, clear, and tinted. The old way was three flat 1024px PNGs that quietly drifted apart. Icon Composer turns it into one layered .icon document the system relights for you. The real workflow from a single SVG to a full set — plus the one decision around icons you can actually unit-test.

12 min read
Orange and teal ink diffusing through water, translucent layers blending and morphing into each other — the visual metaphor for layering and morphing Liquid Glass effects.
Swift SwiftUI

Custom Liquid Glass Components: When to Leave the Defaults (and the Three Mistakes That Kill Your Frame Rate)

glassEffect(.regular, in:) with a custom shape, two glass blobs that morph into each other with glassEffectID, and the three things that turn buttery Liquid Glass into a stutter machine. Built on a real iPhone 17 Pro simulator, with the TDD seam that keeps the decision testable even though the render isn't.

12 min read
Close-up of textured, refractive glass with warm amber-to-cream tones — the real-world material Apple's Liquid Glass design language imitates on screen.
Swift SwiftUI

Liquid Glass for an App You Already Shipped: What You Get From a Recompile vs. Five Lines of Tuning

I rebuilt a real SwiftUI app against the iOS 26 SDK and took two screenshots of the exact same screen — one with zero code changes, one with five lines of glassEffect. Here's the honest split between what the recompile hands you for free and what's worth your custom-tuning time, plus the TDD seam that makes a visual feature testable.

10 min read
Workshop bench with tools laid out — visual stand-in for the small specific tools an iOS developer reaches for during a typical week of shipping.
iOS Development Indie iOS

What iOS Dev Land Is Missing in 2026 — and a Few Things I Built to Fill the Gaps

There are a handful of small, specific frictions every iOS developer hits this year that should not still exist in 2026 — Privacy Manifests, Universal Links validation, iOS 26 icon variants, App Store screenshots. Walking through what's actually missing, why it persists, and four free tools I made for myself that you might find useful too.

11 min read
iOS 26 home screen showing app icons in default, tinted, and dark variants — the new Liquid Glass icon system that demands three versions of every app icon
iOS 26 Liquid Glass

We Updated Our App Icon for iOS 26. Apple Now Wants Three of Them. So We Built a Tool.

iOS 26 Liquid Glass quietly tripled the work to ship an app icon — default, tinted, and dark variants for every iPhone app. Existing icon tools haven't caught up. We hit the wall updating ThinkBud last week, so we built a free generator. Here's what changed in iOS 26, why every iOS dev is about to learn this the hard way, and the tool we shipped to handle it.

10 min read