Not only Swift

I’m excited to bring you the next episode of our Second Brain app journey! In this episode (S2E9), we’re making a significant architectural improvement to our project. I’ve been promising this for a while, and now we’re finally doing it: we’re refactoring our codebase into Swift Packages!

In this livestream, I’ll walk you through:

• Breaking down our current monolithic codebase
• Creating and configuring new Swift Packages
• Sharing my best practices for modular iOS development

This refactoring is crucial for making our app more maintainable and scalable in the long run. I’ll show you exactly how I structure my iOS applications for better organization and reusability.

Join me live as we transform our project structure! 🚀

Using custom bindings (like the following from one of Apple’s very own tutorials) comes in handy when you need to bind to a dynamic value.

private var recipe: Binding<Recipe> {
  Binding {
    if let id = recipeId {
      return recipeBox.recipe(with: id) 
        ?? Recipe.emptyRecipe()
    } else {
      return Recipe.emptyRecipe()
    }
  } set: { updatedRecipe in
    recipeBox.update(updatedRecipe)
  }
}

However, as Chris points out, this might lead to unexpected performance implications caused by the fact that SwiftUI needs to evaluate view identity by comparing each of a view’s fields, which isn’t possible for closures, and thus leads to the view being recreated on every update.

We all want to write be good citizens when it comes to concurrency, and not block the main thread. Task.sleep and Task.yield are two of the tools we have at our disposal, but which one should you use, and what do they do, exactly?

Antoine explains the difference between the two, and when you should use each.

The dismiss action is one of those little gems in SwiftUI we tend to take for granted all too quickly. “It dismisses the current view, so what’s the big deal”, you might be thinking to yourself.

But don’t dismiss 🥁 the power of this action too quickly. After reading Natalia’s article, you will realise just how powerful it is - not only can you use it to dismiss sheets and popovers, it also pops views from the navigation stack, and it also works with UIHostingController.

This article really helped me out when I had to dismiss a UIHostingViewController from inside a share extension. Thanks, Natalia!

Navigation in SwiftUI has come a long way since its introduction, and with the latest updates, we have more control over navigation patterns than ever before. But navigation is still hard - for example, how to you deal with deep linking, or how do you prevent a view from being dismissed if your app is in the middle of a transaction that must be finished?

Michael Long (known for his work on the Resolver and Factory dependency injection libraries) has created a library for navigation patterns - Navigator: Advanced Navigation Support for SwiftUI.. This article is part of a series of articles he wrote about the library, and covers how to use the library to implement a dismissible navigation pattern.

This is a great read for anyone who wants to learn more about how to navigate in SwiftUI, and how to make navigation more intuitive and user-friendly.

Join me on March 26h at 18:00 CET for a special livestream on Firebase Authentication and Android credential management on the Firebase YouTube channel. I will be joined by Marina Coelho (a Senior Developer Relations Engineer on the Firebase team) and Diego Zavala (a Senior Product Manager on authentication experiences on Android), and we will be talking about Android Credential Manager and Firebase Authentication.

Bring your questions! This is a live stream, so you can use the live chat to ask your questions, and we will answer as many as we can.

When working with SwiftUI, it’s easy to end up re-inventing the wheel for common UI components. Cihat Gündüz has created a library with a collection of common UI components that are not yet part of the SwiftUI framework, but should be. It includes both small and larger components (such as a view modifier that makes it easy to create a confirmation dialog).

The library is well documented, and is being used in a range of production apps.

It’s not often that you get the chance to learn from one of the key figures in the field of AI how they use LLMs in their own life. This more than 2 hour long video by Andrej Karpathy covers a lot of ground, from basic LLM interactions to more advanced use cases like tool calling, vibe coding, image and video generation, and more. It makes generous use of YouTube chapters, so you can jump around to the parts that are most relevant to you.

Developers’ reactions to LLMs are mixed, especially when it comes to using them to write code. The experiences people are having are rather mixed: some people are bragging about having vibe coded entire apps, while others are frustrated about the quality of the AI-powered code completion they get.

Simon Willison has written about LLMs and how to use them effectively for an extended period of time, and recently said that using LLMs allows him to “run circles around the average developer” when it comes to writing code.

In this article, he shares his tips and tricks for using LLMs to write code, and how to get the most out of them.

Apple is famously known to be very secretive about the products they are working on. This thread by @jdluk87 is an excellent example: spinning up a team within a team that secretly works on a new architecture for Siri without anyone else on the team knowing about it - 🤯

In his article, Alex Kantrowitz makes the case that Apple’s culture of secrecy is holding the company back in the era of AI development and innovation. It’s an interesting point - if any of the claims that “people should come back to the office, because this will make it easier to innovate” are true, then trying to keep teams from knowing about each other’s work sounds… counterintuitive at best.