Those Who Swift - Issue 223
Your weekly dose of Swift!
Weekly note ✏️
We're back with another partnership. This time with Paul Hudson! 💪
To mark the launch of his new book “Everything but the Code” we’re giving away 5 copies.
Paul Hudson is someone who truly needs no introduction—he’s a driving force in the Swift community, the creator of Hacking with Swift, and a developer who’s helped thousands level up their skills.
His new book covers the real-world essentials beyond just code: interviews, mentorship, communication, productivity, and more. The first chapters are available now, with more coming every week until the book is complete, at which point the price will go up!
Five books will be given out to those who reply to this newsletter. It's first come, first served! Just reply and the first 5 people will get the book.
Don’t miss your chance to get one of the most insightful new reads for developers!
Connect with the "Those Who Swift" team - Justas Markus & Anton Gubarenko 👋
Sponsor 🤝
What’s working in mobile subscriptions RIGHT NOW
Adapty just dropped a report, built on 215M transactions, 1.7B users, and $1.9B in revenue across 11,000+ apps.
Inside: LTV, conversion rate and refund benchmarks by plan, price, and region, Adapty Pricing Index, top-performing paywalls & A/B test results (based on 70k+ paywalls).
It’s a quick read with a lot to unpack your roadmap for the next 3 months.
Swift Around the Web 🌐
Windowing on iPadOS (Or How I Learned to Love the Backlog Bomb)
Danny Bolella dives into iPadOS 26’s powerful new windowing system—complete with resizable, tileable windows, a Mac-style menu bar, pointer support, and even Exposé for multitasking. He explores how SwiftUI now supports multiple windows, showing techniques to open, position, and manage them natively across iPad and Mac platforms.
Read more.📍
Handling WebView Navigation in SwiftUI
Artem Novichkov demonstrates how to use the new WebView and WebPage APIs in SwiftUI for URL loading, progress tracking, and redirect handling. He walks through adding navigation via Toolbar items which controls the history of requests.
Read more.📍
Coding 👨💻
Creating and Customizing the Menu Bar of a SwiftUI App
Matteo Altobello demonstrates how to use .commands(content:) in a WindowGroup to add custom menu items—complete with keyboard shortcuts—on macOS and iPadOS 26. You’ll learn to define new CommandMenu sections, integrate built-in command groups, and dynamically enable menu options by observing focused scene data (e.g., deleting a selected item).
Read more.📍
Presenting Secondary Windows on macOS with SwiftUI
Gabriel introduces the Window scene API in SwiftUI, enabling macOS apps to create additional standalone windows beyond the main WindowGroup. A concise, practical guide to building richer desktop app experiences.
Read more.📍
Apple 🍏
EU App Store Store Services Tiers
Apple has introduced a two-tier system for App Store Store Services in the EU. By default, apps use Tier 2, providing the full range of App Store features (distribution, personalization, analytics, marketing). Apps promoting or communicating offers can opt into Tier 1, paying a reduced services fee but losing capabilities like automatic updates, editorial curation, performance insights, and ratings/reviews.
Read more.📍
Design 🎨
Icon Composer Notes
John Brayton shares his findings from WWDC on using Apple’s new Icon Composer for crafting multi-layered app icons. He walks through a step-by-step process—from preparing PNG layers instead of SVGs, to configuring colors for light, dark, and monochrome modes, grouping effects, and saving your output as a .icon package.
Read more.📍
Other cool stuff 🧰
Swift Macros in the Wild: Building Reusable SwiftUI Views with @expression
Wesley Matlock shares how he used Swift’s new @freestanding(expression) macros to eliminate boilerplate in his PushTo100 SwiftUI app. A hands-on example of how compiler-driven macros can simplify SwiftUI workflows with cleaner syntax and better performance.
Read more.📍
Supporting Reduced Motion Accessibility in iOS
Natascha Fadeeva explains how to honor the system’s “Reduce Motion” setting in SwiftUI, using @Environment(\.accessibilityReduceMotion) to detect user preferences. A practical guide to making your app inclusive and responsive to motion-sensitive users.
Read more.📍
AI 🤖
Grok 4 & Grok 4 Heavy Launch
Elon Musk’s xAI has released Grok 4, their most advanced AI chatbot yet, alongside Grok 4 Heavy, a multi-agent version available via a $300/month SuperGrok Heavy tier. Despite impressive benchmark performance, the launch was overshadowed by controversies: recent tests revealed the model occasionally echoes Musk’s own viewpoints when queried on sensitive topics.
Read more.📍
Introducing Kiro: Agentic IDE for Spec‑Driven Development
Kiro is a new AI-powered IDE from Amazon that guides you from prompt to production with spec-driven workflows, turning ideas into structured requirements, designs, and implementation tasks. Built on a Code OSS core, Kiro supports Mac/Windows/Linux, integrates with VS Code settings and plugins, and is free during its preview phase.
Read more.📍
Tutorials 📒
FoundationModels: Basic Prompting for an iOS Reader App
Article walks through building an iOS reader app powered by Apple’s on-device Foundation Models framework. It’s a full demo of balancing privacy, usability, and Swift-native AI—with practical tools like model availability checks, tool calling, streaming outputs, and performance profiling
Read more.📍
Video 🎥
Swift’s Measurement API — From Miles to Meters and Beyond
Swift’s Measurement API introduces a powerful way to perform unit conversions—like miles to kilometers or Celsius to Fahrenheit—without manual calculations. This video explains how to model values with Measurement, convert between units seamlessly, and leverage type-safe arithmetic for cleaner, more reliable code. A solid walkthrough for anyone enhancing apps with scientific or regional formatting.
Watch here.📍
Two Practical Ways to Use matchedGeometryEffect() in SwiftUI
Natalia Panferova demonstrates two effective use cases for SwiftUI’s matchedGeometryEffect(), showcasing how to create seamless animations when views transition or change layout. This video is ideal for developers looking to elevate UI transitions with minimal code.
Watch here.📍
Books 📚
Alice’s Adventures in a Differentiable Wonderland
The author titled the work “Adventures of Alice in the Differentiable Wonderland”—a true fantasy journey through the world of neural networks and deep learning. Nearly 300 pages cover everything from basic math to the evolution of language models and transformers, blending theory, code examples, and playful storytelling to make complex topics accessible.
Read more.📍
Yet, another thing… 🧮
CalcGPT.io
Imagine a tools that fully relies on current mood, cloud-processing and LLM. Big analytical service or AI-agent? No, it’a calculator based on ChatGPT. Math will never be the same 😀
Sources here.📍
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Awesome news
Nice work!