Not only Swift

Understanding how SwiftUI handles view state is instrumental (no pun intended) to performant and functional UIs.

For example, did you know that…

[… w]hen passing value types into a view, we should only include the values it needs to produce its content.

Natalia explains why, and also dives into all the other ways you can pass values to SwiftUI views.

If, after reading this article, you would like to learn more, consider attending iOSDevUK - Natalia will run a hands-on workshop about this topic.

When calling your backend system, it’s crucial to ensure the caller is using your legitimate app on an untampered device. This is true for just about any app, but even more so for financial apps and apps that use expensive resources like LLMs.

Firebase includes App Check, which allows you to seamlessly protect not just Firebase’s resources like Cloud Firestore, Firebase Auth, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, and - very important - Firebase AI Logic. You can also use it to protect your own custom backends.

But how does it work, and what’s the difference between App Attest and DeviceCheck?

Arsh explains.

We are in the agentic era of AI - agents can sift through our inboxes, prepare our taxes for us, and help us automate other mundane tasks.

As software engineers, we’re using coding agents that run circles around us, building features faster than we can dream them up.

But out in the real world, most people have never touched an AI agent.

Maxwell Zeff makes the point that most products these days aren’t created with the user in mind. We’re too obsessed with the technology, and not enough with creating good products that “are joyful, useful, and approachable”.

Is using AI for your writing a good or a bad idea? We all have developed a sense for what’s written by a human and what’s slop.

But there is a gradient in the middle, and as much as I hate reading AI slop, I’ve come to appreciate AI as a proofreader and sounding board.

Ian Vanagas makes the case that AI is a powerful tool that you should use for your writing - to help with your research, for example, but you as the author should be the one to write the actual words.

How do you hide a watermark in plain text? The answer has more to do with loaded dice than you would think.

There is something about paper that is magical. The sound of the pen as it glides across the sheet, the smell of the paper when you open a book, and the sensation of touching different qualities of paper all contribute to that special relation authors across the centuries have had with paper.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to blog on paper?” my colleague Jeff Huleatt thought.

What sounds like a crazy idea actually works remarkably well (minus some cramps - like most of us, Jeff wasn’t used to the physical exercise of writing by hand anymore), thanks to a skill he created.

Love Logitech’s input devices (like the excellent Logitech MX Master 4), but hate their apps?

This alternative might be just what you need. It’s implemented in Rust, doesn’t track you, and is flexible and open source.

We are surrounded by things that people just one hundred years ago would have considered magic. But even things that we consider commonplace - like light, heat, or even clean water - were out of reach for most people not long ago.

It is a perpetual miracle, which no familiarity can render commonplace.

Scroll through this whimsical site and take a moment to reflect upon all the marvels that we have come to take for granted.

Here is your updated list of conferences for iOS, Swift, and AI.