Those Who Swift - Issue 211
Your weekly dose of Swift!
Weekly note ✏️
If you’ve been noticing that AI-generated results are feeling a bit… off lately—you’re not alone. In fact, even OpenAI recently acknowledged that newer updates have shown degraded performance, and they don’t exactly know why.
But here’s the thing: AI researchers and engineers might have a few clues.
One of the biggest challenges in AI progress has always been training data quality. We’ve heard for a while that high-quality, human-written, and licensed data is in short supply—and now we’re starting to feel what happens when that well runs dry. Once the systems chew through most of the good stuff, what’s left is often lower quality or even AI-generated data—and training models on AI-written content is like making a copy of a copy of a copy.
From my own experience over the past two weeks, I’ve seen some clear signs of this degradation. A popular AI tool returned five different UIFont initializers—only two of which are actually real in UIKit. That’s not just a harmless mistake.
On the bright side, this forces us to review generated code more carefully, since it no longer compiles straight away. But there’s a deeper issue:
A syntax error is obvious and easy to fix.
A silent mismatch in parameters—like wrong font weight, name, or size—compiles just fine but doesn’t do what you expect.
And that’s dangerous. It erodes trust.
The lesson here? As AI shifts from shiny new toy to daily dev tool, we need to stay sharp, validate every line, and recognize that we’re not just using AI—we’re shaping how it’s used, and what standards it has to meet.
Connect with the "Those Who Swift" team - Justas Markus & Anton Gubarenko 👋
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Swift Around the Web 🌐
Is There A Better AsyncButton?
Danny Bolella explores the limitations of SwiftUI's standard Button when handling asynchronous tasks and introduces custom AsyncButton implementations to address these challenges. These enhancements aim to simplify asynchronous operations in SwiftUI, providing developers with more robust and user-friendly button components.
Read more.📍
Why Your SwiftUI App Is Slower Than You Think
Wesley Matlock explores common performance pitfalls in SwiftUI, such as excessive view modifiers and improper state handling, which can lead to sluggish UI updates. Using Instruments, he demonstrates how to identify and optimize inefficient views, emphasizing techniques like isolating subviews and leveraging EquatableView to minimize unnecessary re-renders.
Read more.📍
Coding 👨💻
Swift Actors: What Are They For? Basics
Ege Sucu explains how Swift's actor type, introduced in Swift 5.5, ensures thread-safe access to mutable state in concurrent environments once more. Unlike classes, actors serialize access to their data, preventing race conditions in asynchronous code.
Read more.📍
Building Type-Safe, High-Performance SwiftData/Core Data Models
Fatbobman explores strategies for constructing type-safe and high-performance data models using SwiftData and Core Data. He emphasizes modular design, testability, and thread safety, advocating for the use of Swift packages to encapsulate data logic.
Read more.📍
Apple News 🍏
Apple Rebrands Search Ads as Apple Ads
Apple has rebranded its advertising platform from "Search Ads" to "Apple Ads" to reflect broader ad placements beyond App Store search results. This shift signals Apple’s growing focus on digital advertising across more of its services.
Read more.📍
UIApplication Delegate Deprecation Coming in iOS 19 SDK
Jeff Johnson reports that Apple plans to deprecate several UIApplicationDelegate methods in the upcoming iOS 19 SDK, including applicationDidEnterBackground and applicationWillTerminate. This move aligns with Apple's ongoing shift toward UISceneDelegate for managing app life-cycle events, a transition that began with iOS 13.
Read more.📍
Meet with Apple: New developer activities are here
Apple has dropped a new events till the mid of May to join and attend. From online consultations to in-person meetings at available locations.
Read more.📍
Design 🎨
Automating Design Systems
In this episode of Manu Show, the discussion centers on automating design systems to enhance scalability and efficiency.The conversation delves into strategies for integrating automation into design workflows, emphasizing the importance of consistency and adaptability in large-scale projects.
Read more.📍
Other cool stuff 🧰
Advice to My Younger Self
Tjeerd in 't Veen reflects on 25 years in software development, sharing lessons on building resilient systems. He also advocates for addressing root causes rather than applying quick fixes, promoting sustainable development practices
Read more.📍
Swift Testing Challenge: Can You Refactor This?
This article presents a Swift testing challenge that encourages developers to refactor a given code snippet to improve testability and maintainability. It focuses on identifying dependencies and restructuring the code to facilitate more effective unit testing.
Read more.📍
AI 🤖
Krea AI Stage Updated
Krea has rolled out a fresh update to its Stage platform, bringing new tools and improvements for exploring generative visuals. You can now experiment with advanced image creation workflows and see real-time results from multiple AI models. A fun and interactive way to push creative boundaries.
Read more.📍
Tutorials 📒
Reading Data from HealthKit in a SwiftUI App
Matteo Altobello provides a comprehensive guide on integrating HealthKit into a SwiftUI app to access and display health data such as step count, active energy burned, and heart rate. By following this guide, developers can build a SwiftUI app that securely accesses and presents HealthKit data to users.
Read more.📍
Ensure Visual Accessibility: Supporting Reduced Motion Preferences in SwiftUI
And again Matteo explains how to make SwiftUI animations respect the user's "Reduce Motion" accessibility setting. While using @Environment(\.accessibilityReduceMotion), developers can detect this preference and adjust animations accordingly, ensuring a comfortable experience for motion-sensitive users.
Read more.📍
Video 🎥
How SwiftUI Tracks UI Changes With @Observable (Behind the Scenes)
Karin Prater is explaining how to make an efficient SwiftUI Views and Models with updates tracking. By expanding Observable macro we can check the inner logic behind the observed properties and why is it working like this.
Watch here.📍
Friends 🤝
Donny Walls is offering 15% off his Core Data book to our community members.
Yet, another thing… 🤩
Internet OS for Enthusiasts
Exciting Open Source and self-hosted OS easily maintained on Docker. Learn about we, cloud computing and many more with this free tool.
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