Xcode tips & tricks, Swift, SwiftUI, Firebase, computing and internet history, and - of course - some fun stuff.
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Hi everyone,
Welcome to Issue #100 of Not only Swift! 🎉
When I wrote the first issue of this newsletter, I wouldn’t have imagined ever hitting the magic number of 100 issues. This is quite a milestone, and I want to take a moment to say thanks.
Thank you to Dave Verwer, who inspired me to run a curated newsletter in the first place. Not only Swift even ran on the newsletter engine he had built for his own newsletter, until my requirements outgrew what Curated was able to deliver and I decided to vibe-code my own engine.
Thanks to all the amazing authors who share their knowledge freely with the community week after week. I’ve learned so much from all of you (yes, many of them are subscribers 👋), and I feel most grateful.
And most of all, thanks to y’all, my readers. I’ve had the good fortune to meet many of you in person at Swift and iOS conferences all over the place. It’s always a magical moment to meet someone who you’re writing for, and I’ve enjoyed all the stories you’ve shared with me.
When I started Not only Swift, my goal was to give back to the community by providing my own perspective on things by curating the links and writing my own commentary. To this day, the newsletter is entirely written by hand (I do have a semi-automated process that makes scaffolding the newsletter easier), and I intend to keep it that way.
Thank you all for being part of this journey, and if you’d like, feel free to hit reply and share a personal story about you and the newsletter with me. I love hearing from you, and I read (and reply to) every single email.
You can also tag me on social media (I’m peterfriese everywhere).
And if you really like this newsletter, why don’t you share it with a friend?
Thanks for reading,
Peter
FlowDeck Studio is a native macOS workspace for building Apple apps with AI. Ship four things in the time Xcode ships one. Nothing waiting on a branch, nothing lost in a terminal.
You still make the decisions. FlowDeck handles the grind.
The Sendable marker protocol and the @Sendable attribute play a key role in helping the Swift compiler protect your code against data races.
But how does this work, and when should you use @unchecked Sendable, if ever?
Antoine breaks down everything you need to know about Sendable and @Sendable.
When the iPhone first came out, there was one screen size, one resolution, and one way to hold it right.
In 2026, there are 5 device categories, 12+ screen sizes, and a device with a new form factor on the horizon, being able to adapt to different screen sizes isn’t just nice to have any more.
In the OS 27 releases, Apple introduced the visibilityPriority view modifier to give developers more control over how toolbar items are placed and when they move into the overflow menu.
And thanks to toolbarMinimizationBehavior, you can implement scroll-driven minimization of your app’s toolbars, to make more space on devices with smaller screens.
Natalia explains how to use these new view modifiers.
by Tibor Bödecs
Tibor Bödecs touches on a sensitive aspect of AI and software development: the advances are massive (not long ago, we used to describe AI as “fancy” autocomplete, and now autonomous coding agents are routinely building entire features for us). But has it made us happier / more fulfilled?
Speaking from my own experience, I can say that I’ve massively enjoyed the productivity gains, but on the other hand I am deeply frustrated every single day by the lack of quality that coding agents deliver (yes, even with guardrails like AGENTS.md and skills in place).
The vertigo is real.
by Bruno Rocha
In the previous issue, I shared an article that asked “is AI ruining our skills”. It concluded that the only way to not lose your skills is to exercise your critical thinking.
This week, Bruno describes what this can look like for AI-assisted software engineering.
While building your own LLM to understand how these things work might be a bit time- and resource-intensive, the idea behind it is clear: instead of just using AI and treating it as a black box, try to understand how it really works. There is enough material out there.
On-device models are powerful enough to perform many tasks completely offline. Here is a fun project showcasing how a Raspberry Pi 5 can run Gemma 4 on-device, including speech recognition and text-to-speech. Bonus points for a cute 3D-printed case.
by Donny Wals
One of the cool things about agentic engineering is that your coding agents can do the work for you while you’re busy with other things.
Donny explains how he’s set up an agentic delivery pipeline that allows him to ship features while he’s literally working out.
I think this is a great example of a setup that helps you improve your app while you use it in the wild. Great work-out. (🥁 SCNR).
USB-C was meant as the standard to unify all cable needs for computers, phones, and other hardware.
So technically, you should be able to use any USB-C cable to connect to any USB-C compatible device, right?
Well, you and I know that’s not the case, but why?
Well, Darryl Morley set out to find out why, and he created WhatCable, the tool that tells you everything about your USB-C cable (and the connected devices) you never knew you needed to know.
Oh, and Darryl also has a bunch of other “What” utilities. Check out his GitHub.
by Peter Friese
Here is your updated list of conferences for iOS, Swift, and AI.