Note: Before starting this week’s intro, I want to emphasise that I am not an impartial observer of today’s news. I would have covered this announcement no matter what the open-source project was, but I am directly involved in everything announced today, and my bias is unavoidable. Everything I write here is always my opinion, but I hope you’ll agree that this is hugely important news, regardless of my involvement!

You may have already seen the latest post on the official Swift blog, where Apple announced their support for the Swift Package Index. They announced both public and financial support for the project and asked us to write up the history and a behind-the-scenes look at what we have built over the last three years.

The most important part of this announcement is the public support of a non-Apple open-source project. This is a big deal, and the Swift team deserve so much credit for making it happen. Thank you to everyone from Apple who supported this, especially Ted Kremenek and Tom Doron, who have been a pleasure to work with at every stage. Yes, this is hugely important for our project, but it also feels significant for Apple. The community has been asking for more external support, and if this isn’t what we’ve been asking for, I don’t know what is.

The additional financial support that this brings is also critical to the project. Our sponsorship before today was (and still is!) hugely appreciated. Still, the time this project demands of us means we faced some difficult decisions about its future. Adding Apple’s financial support on top of our existing community, corporate, and infrastructure support ensures the availability and stability of this project. We’re here to stay. It doesn’t mean our funding is complete, but we can rest much easier at night.

I’d also like to thank everyone in the community who supported our site in any way to get us to this point. Whether through our existing sponsorship programme, creating and submitting open-source packages, or visiting the site to help find your app’s dependencies. We would not be here without you. Thank you all.

We also wrote up this news on the Swift package Index blog and updated the supporters page with that iconic logo.

Dave Verwer  

#1 in Developer Tools on Product Hunt

Waldo just launched a new, browser based developer tool to speed up mobile testing and help teams collaborate to squash bugs. See why developers are buzzing about Sessions by trying it yourself!

waldo.com  

Enabling Upcoming Swift Language Features

How will your app’s codebase fare with some of the changes being lined up for Swift 6? Marcel Voss walks us through Swift 5.8’s support for enabling experimental language features so that we can try them out.

marcelvoss.com  

Working with percentages in SwiftUI layout

As Ole Begemann mentions at the end of this post, the initial betas of SwiftUI had relative sizing view modifiers that were removed before the beta concluded. Does that mean it’s not possible to do percentage-based sizing? Of course not, at least not now we have Layout!

oleb.net  

Flyweight

Kelvin Tan has been implementing and writing up some of the classic GoF design patterns in Swift recently. I highlighted the Flyweight pattern above, but he also has posts covering Proxy, Facade, Decorator, Composite, Bridge, and Adapter.

daddycoding.com  

Improving multiplatform SwiftUI code

I liked the simple solution that Jesse Squires has come up with for a problem you will have encountered if you have written any cross-platform SwiftUI.

jessesquires.com  

The Command Line Is the GUI's Future

They say fashion is cyclical, and there are certainly parallels between UI design and fashion, so this post from Lukas Mathis makes perfect sense.

ignorethecode.net  

App Store Quirks

What a useful App Store submission FAQ from Akshay Gupta, Pratul Kalia, and Nivedita Priyadarshini. It covers all sorts of slightly obscure questions that you won’t find in the official documentation.

github.com  

Can ChatGPT write better SwiftUI code than you?

There are a great many blog posts and YouTube videos on using ChatGPT to help you write SwiftUI code, but this one from Paul Hudson is the one you should watch. It’s a balanced look at an incredible tool and how to use it carefully.

I opened it intending to skim through it and ended up watching the entire 40-minute video.

youtube.com  

SwiftUI and TCA Developer @ MFB Technologies, Inc. – We make Align, an enterprise platform used by top trial lawyers. Looking for a motivated dev to join our iOS team and help us add new features and integrations to our iPad client. The client app is written entirely in SwiftUI using The Composable Architecture (TCA) framework. U.S. residents only. – Remote (within US timezones)

You all know what I will write here by now, so I'll just leave you this link. If your company is hiring, please click it! 😂

This is my biggest hope for this year’s WWDC announcements. 😴