Re: 🎯 AI, SwiftUI, and the Future of Development
Hey everyone!
This week, I had the pleasure of speaking at SwiftHeroes 2025 in Turin. It was great to meet so many of you in person! If you missed my talk about “Why every SwiftUI developer should care about the environment”, you can find the slides here.
The conference season is in full swing now, so I’ve included an overview of upcoming conferences in this week’s issue. If there are any conferences I’ve missed, please let me know!
The next chance to meet me in person is AI Heroes 2025 in Turin. I will be giving a talk about the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how you can use it to build amazing apps with LLMs. If you are interested in attending, you can find more information here.
Speaking of conferences, did you see all the updates Google shipped at Cloud Next this week? The Firebase team shipped a ton of exciting new features, including Firebase Studio, our cloud-based IDE that helps you build and ship production-quality full-stack AI apps. Give it a try at firebase.studio and let me know what you think!
I also published a new tutorial on how to build a movie review app for iOS using Firebase Data Connect. More on this below!
Join me for a special live stream event on April 15th with special guest Antoine van der Lee, creator of RocketSim and the mind behind SwiftLee!
If you’ve been following my weekly live streams on building Sofia (my second brain app), you’re in for a treat! Antoine will be sharing exclusive tips and tricks for using RocketSim to supercharge your iOS development workflow. I’ve been using RocketSim for taking screenshots and screen recordings of the iOS Simulator, but there’s so much more this powerful tool can do!
What we’ll cover:
Getting the most out of RocketSim’s features
Improving your development cycle with practical tips
Behind-the-scenes insights from Antoine himself
Live Q&A - bring your questions!
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn directly from one of the iOS community’s most innovative developers!
The Swift website states that “Swift is a general-purpose programming language that’s approachable for newcomers and powerful for experts. It is fast, modern, safe, and a joy to write.” And while most of us use Swift for iOS and macOS apps, Swift is also a great language for command-line tools.
Distributing iOS and macOS apps is relatively simple, and familiar to most developers, thanks to Xcode and the App Store. However, distributing command-line interface (CLI) apps with Swift is a different story. Pedro provides a good overview of the different methods to distribute your Swift CLIs, and then goes into detail on how to distribute CLI apps via GitHub Releases.
Very topical in the context of building MCP servers with Swift!
SwiftUI’s Text view might seem like a very simple view, but don’t be fooled - it really packs a punch!
Natalia is one of the best people to explain this - she worked on the Text view implementation, after all!
In this article, she explains how one of Text’s powerful features (concatenation) actually might fall on your feet if you’re not careful. Not surprisingly, the example involves localization, and the ordering of text segments in different languages. Read the article to learn which approach works better in this case.
Gradients are a great way to add visual interest to your app. In this article, Maksym shows how to create dynamic gradients in SwiftUI that adapt to the colors of an image, based on the average color of the image.
If you’ve ever wanted to use this visual effect in your app, this article is for you!
Firebase Data Connect is a new feature of Firebase that allows you to connect your iOS app to a Cloud SQL database. You write your app’s database schema in GraphQL, and Data Connect generates the Swift code to read and write to the database.
In this codelab, you will build a movie review app for iOS using SwiftUI. You will learn how to connect your iOS application to a Cloud SQL database using Firebase Data Connect, enabling seamless data synchronization for movie reviews.
Need to write an IDE? Not many of us do, but for those of us who are, this looks like a great place to start.
Based on TextKit 2, CodeEditorView provides a SwiftUI view implementing a code editor for iOS, visionOS, and macOS. The visual style is inspired by Xcode
The currently supported functionality includes syntax highlighting with configurable themes, inline message reporting (warnings, errors, etc), bracket matching, matching bracket insertion, current line highlighting, common code editing operations, and a minimap.
On last week’s live stream, I implemented an MCP server that can interact with Keynote. At the end of the live stream, I was able to talk to Claude and ask it to generate a Keynote presentation based on the title and abstract.
MCP (short for Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to large language models (LLMs). It allows you to connect LLMs to data sources and services that provide additional context for the LLM.
Being able to call APIs locally opens up an entire new world of possibilities for LLMs. For example, there is an MCP server for Blender which allows you to create amazing 3D scenes without being an expert in Blender (check out this tutorial to see how it works).
I will be giving a talk at the upcoming AI Heroes conference in Turin, Italy, to talk about MCP and how you can use this in your apps. I will also demonstrate how to build MCP servers using Genkit (Google’s AI integration framework), and Swift.
Will I be able to use my own MCP server to create the slide deck for my presentation? Who knows!
If you’d like to attend, use this discount code to get 30% off of the ticket price: AIH25-SWIFT-SPK30.
If you’re excited about the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and would like to learn how to build your own MCP server, this article is for you. Stefan explains the core concepts, and walks you through the process of building your own MCP server. While the use case is specific (the Stream API), the concepts are applicable to any MCP server, and it should be easy enough to adapt the code to your own use case.
VS Code now also supports MCP servers, so if you’re not a Cursor user, you now use MCP servers in VS Code’s agent mode.
The guide explains how to add servers, how to start/stop/restart them, and - most importantly - how to use the tools that the respective MCP servers provide.
It’s also worth noting that VS Code supports a URL protocol for registering MCP servers, which is particularly helpful for install scripts.
I’ve compiled a list of iOS and Swift conferences happening in 2025. Whether you’re looking to speak, attend, or just stay informed about the community, here’s what’s coming up:
Upcoming conferences
Deep Dish Swift, 27th-29th April, Chicago, Illinois 🇺🇸
iOSKonf25, 13th-15th May, Skopje, North Macedonia 🇲🇰
SwiftCraft, 19th-21th May, Folkestone, UK 🇬🇧
Some conferences are still finalizing their dates and details. I’ll keep this list updated as more information becomes available. If you know of any conferences that should be included, please let me know!
WWDC25 is around the corner, and people are compiling their wishlists. As per tradition, Majid has three main wishes:
AI Tooling. I like the idea of an MCP server for Xcode - it would help keep Xcode’s position as the best IDE for iOS development, while still enabling other AI tools to use Xcode as a Service. Xaas - you heard here first, people…
An updated format for Xcode’s Project File, making use of Swift Package Manager’s approach.
SwiftUI Recycling Views, similar to UITableView or UICollectionView.
What are your wishes for WWDC25? And, do you think Apple will replace Xcode with VS Code?
