Swift by Sundell - Swift by Sundell Newsletter #28

👋 Hi everyone

A few weeks ago, I announced that my upcoming 200th weekly article will be my last, but of course that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop writing articles completely. Quite the opposite, really.

While I’ll soon share more details around how Swift by Sundell will evolve once I hit that 200 mark, and what my overall plans for 2021 are, I just wanted to assure you all that my commitment to sharing my work with the Swift community is as strong as it has ever been.

Basically, as long as you keep reading, listening, sharing and occasionally checking out my sponsors, then I’ll keep writing and podcasting. But I think it’s important to mix things up every once in a while, and after writing weekly articles non-stop since the beginning of 2017, I feel like 200 is a nice number to wrap up that particular series on.

But now, let’s get started with the recap of November’s articles and podcast episodes. And like always, if you’d like to send me any questions, comments or feedback, then just hit the reply button. I read every single email that I get through this address.

📖 Weekly articles

For 198 weeks, I’ve been publishing a new article about Swift every Sunday. These articles were added during the past month:

Formatting numbers in Swift

Formatting numbers into human-readable strings can often be tricker than expected. Let’s explore why that is, and what kind of tools and techniques that can be good to keep in mind when formatting different kinds of numbers.

SwiftUI and UIKit interoperability - Part 1

A closer look at how SwiftUI and UIKit can be combined in various ways, starting with how we can bring increasingly complex UIKit-based views and view controllers into the declarative world of SwiftUI.

SwiftUI and UIKit interoperability - Part 2

In this second article about integrating SwiftUI and UIKit, we’ll take a look at how SwiftUI views can be embedded within UIKit-based view controllers, and various ways of sharing state between them.

Extending Combine with convenience APIs

How custom Combine operators and convenience APIs can be implemented using extensions, and how doing so can let us eliminate common sources of boilerplate when implementing things like networking and data validation.

Sorting Swift collections

A look at the various sorting APIs that the Swift standard library offers, and how we could augment those APIs in order to make more advanced sorting tasks easier to perform.

🎧 Podcast episodes

The Swift by Sundell podcast is a bi-weekly show featuring special guests from all around the Swift community. You can find it in your podcast player of choice, for example Apple Podcasts or Overcast. These episodes were published during the past month:

85: “Cross-Apple platform development”, with James Thomson

James Thomson, creator of PCalc, returned to the show to discuss how developers can bring their apps to multiple Apple platforms using technologies like Catalyst and SwiftUI, and how and when it can be a good idea to share code across platforms.

86: “Map is a design pattern”, with Daniel Steinberg

Daniel Steinberg joined me to discuss how various functional programming patterns can be adopted in Swift, and how many of those patterns can be found in both the standard library and in frameworks like Combine and SwiftUI.

⭐️ Swift tips

I love to share shorter tips, tricks and techniques with the community. These are the tips that I shared during the past month:

Creating custom SwiftUI container views

Although SwiftUI ships with a quite large number of built-in container views, such as VStack, HStack and List, sometimes we might also want to define our own custom containers as well. Here are some tips on how to do that.

Statically computed default property values

Various ways of defining default property values, and how static methods and properties can be really useful in that context.

🧭 New discover page

Swift by Sundell Discover is a new feature that lets you easily explore everything that the site has to offer on a given topic. This topic was added during the past month:

Unit testing

Discover a wide range of tools, tips and techniques for building comprehensive, fast and stable unit testing suites using XCTest and Swift.

😊 Until next time

That’s it for this edition! I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. I always love to hear your feedback, so feel free to either reply to this email, or contact me on Twitter @johnsundell. I read every single piece of feedback that I get, and I try to reply to as many people as I possibly can.

Thanks for reading! 🚀

- John