First up this week, I want to thank you all so much for how you responded to my comments on funding the future of the Swift Package Index. Since last week, the Package Index has had new monthly contributions from 45 community members, almost doubling the number we had reached in the previous 18 months since first opening up for sponsorship in 2020. That’s fantastic. 🙏

It was also so lovely to see the call for help shared so widely. Your support is invaluable. I remember someone joking to me once that I didn’t need help promoting things as I had this newsletter. It’s not true! I only reach a small portion of the community, and someone else sharing something carries much more weight.

But the best part of the last week was seeing how people think about what we’ve built. It was wonderful to see the project talked about as being important to the Swift ecosystem and even better to see people put money behind those thoughts. Sven and I have thought it was important for a long time, but it’s easy to get bogged down in running something and forget that others view it the same way. Thank you again.

Finally, the Package Index also took on a new corporate sponsor last week, Emerge Tools. I know I said we didn’t want to add more advertising to the site, and that’s true, but they reached out and wanted to help. Given that we are in a situation where we need to make this financially stable, their help is very gratefully received.

Have I said thank you enough yet? 😅

With all that said, the project is still nowhere near financially stable. I promise not to talk about it here every week, I know you’re not here for that, and I thank you for indulging these last two issues’ comments! We do need to keep this momentum going, though, so if you read anything above and thought, “Oh, I meant to share that last week!”. It’s never too late.

Dave Verwer

Join a free training course for mid/senior iOS devs next week

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essentialdeveloper.com

Deploy server side Swift to Fastly

There’s quite a lot to unpack from Andrew Barba here! In the post linked above, he talks about his beta service Swift Cloud. It uses SwiftWasm through Compute to deploy code to Fastly’s Compute@Edge service.

Did you catch all that? If not, it’s a new way to run Swift in the cloud, which is always good. You should take a look!

swift.cloud

Hit the Reset Button

This tweet thread from Russ Maschmeyer is the first time I’ve seen Apple’s new RoomPlan API in use, and it’s fascinating to hear how he and his team solved some of the problems that cropped up. My favourite part was this video.

I can’t wait to stub my toe while using this! 😂

twitter.com

Open your terminal from Xcode

I hadn't ever used a Custom Behaviour before reading this post from Marco Eidinger that covers some useful behaviour scripts from Jercy’s Awesome Xcode Behaviors repository. I instantly wanted to use the “Open in Terminal” script, but it didn’t behave quite right with a Package.swift-based project. I think I’ll give it a tweak and submit a PR as it would be super helpful for me and presumably for others, too!

eidinger.info

Formatting your own types

Did Apple spoil you with all the new formatter APIs that arrived with last year’s operating system releases? Would you like to build similar formatters for your own types? You would? Well, by a stroke of luck, that’s exactly what Brett Ohland wrote about recently.

ampersandsoftworks.com

Multiline TextField in SwiftUI

I have seen so many different implementations of auto-expanding text fields in apps over the years, and it’s great to see SwiftUI not only add features and fix bugs but add support for what has become standard in many apps. Nikita Ermolenko has more information about what’s new with this feature in this year’s releases.

otbivnoe.ru

Every programmer should care about UI design

I’m going to sneak this article by Maxwell Anselm into the bottom of the Code section so that those who skip the Design section get tricked into reading it! 😂 It’s way more common for people working on iOS/macOS projects to care about design than with some other platforms, but I still come across an occasional “I don’t need to care about it“. The points raised by this article are certainly worth reading if you’re in that camp!

github.io

Senior iOS Engineer @ DuckDuckGo – You will work on the team responsible for an all-in-one privacy solution. You'll collaborate with Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers across Native Apps to craft a world-class browser with embedded privacy features that will revolutionise the way people search, surf, and exist online. – Remote (Anywhere)

Senior iOS Developer @ Storyteller – We're looking for an amazing Senior iOS Developer to join our growing team and help push this product on to the next 100 million users. You'll be working with the latest technologies across Swift using the latest equipment of your choice. – Remote (within European timezones)

iOS Developer @ Konrad – Konrad is an amazing community of the brightest minds in tech. We build bleeding-edge mobile applications for some of the largest, most exciting companies in the world. We have a team of 250+ developers that work with the latest technologies. – Remote (within US timezones) with some on-site work (Canada)

Senior iOS Engineer @ Sendwave – We currently have a 4.6-star rating on Trustpilot — people put their faith in us to deliver their money quickly, securely, and affordably. And we’re pretty darn proud of that. – Remote (within US or European timezones)

There are only a few featured jobs this week, but plenty more are available over at iOS Dev Jobs. You can filter the job listings to areas you’re looking for work in, too, so if you want a remote job in US time zones, that’s easy to configure!

Does anyone else miss boxed software? These are beautiful. 😍