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Posts tagged with: Tutorial

30 posts found

All Development AI Apple Vibe Coding SwiftUI Announcements
A close-up black and white photograph of a mechanical stopwatch — the kind a track coach would hold, not a Rolex — face-on, hands frozen mid-second.
Xcode iOS Development

Build Time Optimization for the Solo iOS Developer Running 5+ Apps

Day 30 of the 30-day iOS series. Real numbers, real DerivedData chaos, and the three things that actually move the needle on Xcode build times when you're maintaining multiple apps on one machine.

9 min read
A wooden rubber stamp reading 'geprüft' (checked) resting on an open legal document, mid-stamp — something getting verified before it's allowed to count as approved.
Swift Swift Macros

Custom Swift Macros: When They're Actually Worth the Build-Time Cost

Day 29 of the 30-day iOS series. The difference between @freestanding and @attached macros, why most macro ideas are over-engineering traps, and a real #URL macro — built TDD-first as a standalone Swift package — that catches BrewLog's force-unwrapped base URL at compile time instead of runtime.

9 min read
A vintage black typewriter and a modern MacBook sitting side by side on a wooden desk, shot from directly above — the old tool and the new one, both still doing real work.
Swift UIKit

UIKit Tricks SwiftUI Still Can't Do (Yet): Back to UIViewRepresentable

Day 28 of the 30-day iOS series. SwiftUI has no PDF viewer, no custom keyboard primitive, and no waterfall grid — five real gaps where you still reach for UIViewRepresentable, anchored by a real PDFKit-backed brew history export built TDD-first for BrewLog.

10 min read
An espresso machine portafilter pouring two separate streams of coffee into two paper cups sitting side by side on a stainless steel drip tray — one source, two independent streams.
Swift Combine

Combine in 2026: The Three Cases Where It's Still Better Than async/await

Day 27 of the 30-day iOS series. A real searchable brew history for BrewLog, built with Combine instead of async/await, and the three reasons it was the right call: debounce, independent multiple subscribers, and a four-way CombineLatest pipeline.

10 min read
A hand squeezing the last drips of coffee from a paper filter into a Chemex — the kind of multi-minute brew that's worth glancing at from the Lock Screen instead of standing over.
Swift ActivityKit

Live Activities and the Dynamic Island: A Decision Matrix, Not a Demo

Day 26 of the 30-day iOS series. A real ActivityKit countdown for BrewLog's pour-over timer, the one-function decision matrix that decides which brew methods even get one, and the exact reason it still won't show up on a Lock Screen.

10 min read
Close-up of an espresso machine's row of glowing buttons — press one, skip the rest of the ceremony, which is the entire pitch of an App Intent.
Swift WidgetKit

WidgetKit and App Intents: Logging a Brew Without Opening the App

Day 25 of the 30-day iOS series. A real App Intent that logs a brew from Spotlight or a widget button, the @Dependency crash that nearly cost me an evening, and the honest line between what's tested and what's still a mechanical Xcode step.

9 min read
A red and black Swiss Army knife fully opened, blade, bottle opener, and corkscrew all fanned out at once — one handle doing five jobs, which is exactly the problem this post is about.
Swift SOLID Principles

SOLID Principles in Swift: One Bad Class, Five Real Fixes

Day 24 of the 30-day iOS series. Skip the acronym slide — here's the 70-line class I'd have shipped on day one of BrewLog, broken against all five SOLID principles, and the five already-tested files in this same repo that actually fix it.

11 min read
A relay runner mid-sprint on an outdoor track, baton in hand, captured at full stride — the same shape as a request that has to keep moving forward through a dropped connection, an expired token, or a second caller asking for the same thing.
Swift Networking

Retry, Token Refresh, and Request Deduplication in Swift

Day 23 of the 30-day iOS series. The three production concerns every 'build your own networking layer' tutorial skips, built as composable actors on top of Day 22's client — plus a real concurrency bug I found writing the test, not the code.

13 min read
A tangled mass of colorful telephone wires on the left resolving into a neatly organized black patch panel on the right — the same shape as replacing scattered URLSession calls with one clean networking layer.
Swift Networking

A Custom Networking Layer in 100 Lines of Swift — No Alamofire

Day 22 of the 30-day iOS series. URLSession, async/await, a generic Endpoint, and one typed error enum — the entire networking layer is 85 real lines, tested with a URLProtocol stub, and wired into a real BrewLog feature with a real local server.

11 min read
A red traffic light glowing above an unlit green light on a city street — the stop-then-go cycle that gives test-driven development its name.
Swift TDD

TDD for SwiftUI: A Red-Green-Refactor Workflow That Isn't Academic

Day 21 of the 30-day iOS series. I went looking for a BrewLog feature to drive test-first and found a real bug already shipped: the Streak stat has been hardcoded to zero since day one. Here's the actual red-green-refactor session that fixed it.

10 min read
Developer writing code with testing tools visible — a clean coding environment representing software quality and unit testing.
Swift Swift Testing

Swift Testing Framework: Why You Should Migrate from XCTest

Day 20 of the 30-day iOS series. @Test, #expect, parametrized tests, traits, and a side-by-side comparison on a real BrewLog test file. Plus: the one thing XCTest still does that Swift Testing doesn't.

11 min read
Colorful electrical wires and cables neatly arranged — red, yellow, blue, and green — representing connections and dependencies.
Swift Dependency Injection

Dependency Injection in Swift Without a Framework

Day 19 of the 30-day iOS series. Protocol-based DI, @Environment as a SwiftUI-native container, and the factory pattern — all without Resolver, Swinject, or any third-party glue. Includes a TDD example that shows why DI and testability are the same conversation.

11 min read
Colorful LEGO bricks — yellow, red, blue, and green — scattered on a white surface.
Swift Package Manager SPM

Modular Architecture With SPM: When to Split (And When to Absolutely Not)

Day 18 of the 30-day iOS series, opening Week 4 on architecture. Modularization with Swift Package Manager has a real cost in build time, package graph complexity, and maintenance overhead. I show the threshold rule I use across five apps — below which you don't split, above which you must — with a real Package.swift example from BrewLog and a pure Swift Testing suite that proves the point.

12 min read
A security guard in a dark uniform standing alert on a grey floor, arms at their sides.
StoreKit 2 App Store Server API

StoreKit 2, Part 3: Server-Side Receipt Validation in 2026 (App Store Server API)

Day 17 of the 30-day iOS series, the finale of three on monetization. You can't trust the client — here's the minimal App Store Server API workflow for BrewLog: Server Notifications V2, JWSTransaction decoding, a Cloudflare Worker, and three pure Swift tests that prove the entitlement logic without ever calling Apple.

13 min read
A coir doormat reading 'well, hello there.' on a red brick step in front of a blue door with red trim.
StoreKit 2 Swift

StoreKit 2, Part 2: Free Trials, Win-Back Offers, and Promo Codes That Actually Convert

Day 16 of the 30-day iOS series. I add a 7-day free trial, a win-back banner for lapsed subscribers, and offer-code redemption to BrewLog's paywall — concrete App Store Connect configuration plus the Swift code, all covered by Swift Testing.

17 min read
A heavy brass padlock fastened through the latch of a teal metal door.
StoreKit 2 Swift

A StoreKit 2 Paywall From Scratch: Subscriptions, a Transaction Listener, and a Restore Button That Works

Day 15 of the 30-day iOS series, first of a three-part run on monetization. I built BrewLog's real paywall with StoreKit 2 — two subscription products, a transaction listener, and a restore flow — with zero third-party SDKs. Every number the paywall shows comes from one pure, tested function.

13 min read
A stack of labeled cardboard moving boxes and houseplants against a wall, mid-move.
SwiftData Core Data

SwiftData Two Years Later: What's Solid, What Still Bites, and the Migration Test You're Not Writing

Day 14 of the 30-day iOS series. SwiftData is about two years old now, and the honest verdict is mixed. I already wrote the long field report on where it broke in production — this post is the part that report didn't have room for: a VersionedSchema + SchemaMigrationPlan test that proves a schema change is safe BEFORE TestFlight finds out for you.

12 min read
A laptop screen showing a dark-mode analytics dashboard with line and bar charts tracking load time, bounce rate, and session metrics.
Swift SwiftUI

@Observable vs ObservableObject: What 1,000 Rows and a Redraw Counter Actually Showed Me

Day 13 of the 30-day iOS series. I built a redraw counter into BrewLog, put 1,000 rows in two identical lists side by side — one backed by @Observable, one by ObservableObject — and toggled a single favorite ten times. The row counts tied 10-10. The list counts didn't. Here's the real number, and exactly where it comes from.

13 min read
A flat lay of overlapping vintage paper maps at different scales — local town plans layered under a wider regional survey of the Isle of Wight.
Swift SwiftUI

@State, @Bindable, @Environment: The Complete Map for @Observable (and the Question You're Actually Asking)

Day 12 of the 30-day iOS series. With @Observable, SwiftUI lets you slap @State, @Bindable, @Environment, or a plain let on the same class — and compiles all of them. Here's the question that actually decides which one is correct, one map that resolves 95% of the confusion, and three real BrewLog bugs (one silent, one a compile error, one a runtime crash) that come from picking wrong.

11 min read
A person leaning into a coin-operated lookout telescope, observing a savanna in the distance — you keep feeding the machine to keep watching.
Swift SwiftUI

ObservableObject → @Observable: The Migration Guide That Skips the Marketing (and the Autoclosure Gotcha Apple Forgot to Mention)

Day 11 of the 30-day iOS series. Apple's migration guide makes ObservableObject → @Observable look like a find-and-replace. It mostly is — except for one quiet behavioral change: @StateObject only ran your initializer once, and @State runs it on every render. Here's the multiple-init bug that causes, why it's worst in exactly the init you were proud of, and how to fix it with a test that turns 'no side effects in init' into a hard, green invariant.

12 min read
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
Before/after comparison of an Invoize view model migration to Swift 6.2 — 86 errors on the left collapsing into 3 nonisolated annotations and a fixed race condition on the right.
Swift Swift 6.2

Migrating a Real App to Swift 6.2 Strict Concurrency: 86 Errors, One Afternoon, One Race Condition I Didn't Know I Had

I migrated Invoize from Swift 6.0 strict mode to Swift 6.2 approachable concurrency on a Sunday afternoon. Every warning, every fix, the one real race condition the compiler finally surfaced — and the TDD seams I leaned on so the migration wasn't just compiler-driven guessing.

14 min read
A massive tree with branches spreading in every direction — a visual metaphor for choosing between Swift 6.2 isolation modifiers.
Swift Swift 6.2

@concurrent vs nonisolated vs @MainActor: The Swift 6.2 Decision Tree That Fits on a Napkin

Four real scenarios — UI update, network call, image decode, file IO — and exactly which Swift 6.2 isolation keyword each one needs. A TDD walk-through with Swift Testing, no whiteboard ceremony required.

13 min read
A glowing 'One Way' street sign at night — a visual metaphor for Swift 6.2 making the main actor the default direction
Swift Swift 6.2

MainActor by Default: Why Apple Just Reversed Swift's Concurrency Story

Xcode 26 flips the default — your code now runs on the main actor unless you say otherwise. Here's why Apple changed direction, what it actually means for your existing project, and a TDD walk-through showing the migration in real Swift.

11 min read