Weekly note ✏️
It’s the last week of the summer, and many of us are gathering energy, getting ready for autumn. Another page will soon turn on the calendar, and the trees outside will follow. Thankfully, Git doesn’t work like that.
Our team has just launched (or rather, restarted) an Indie App Devs newsletter—make sure to check it out and subscribe.
We've already worked with some amazing people: Teodora - Designerants, Damjan - dabo.dev & Grant - Pressdeck.
Also, in this issue we’re excited to highlight a new book from Natascha Fadeeva in our Friends section below.
So enjoy the final days of summer and take care! ☀️
Connect with the "Those Who Swift" team - Justas Markus & Anton Gubarenko 👋
Sponsor 🤝
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Swift Around the Web 🌐
APNs .p8 vs .p12: Choosing the Right Auth Method for iOS Push
When setting up iOS push notifications, you can use either a .p8 key or a .p12 certificate. Himali Marasinghe explains the pros and cons of each one and highlights the critical parts.
Read more.📍
What your app’s MVP needs to have?
Indie iOS developer Damjan Dabo shares his journey building and growing apps—including his wins, lessons learned, and experimental approaches. You will learn about a minimum fraction of features needed to ship the app.
Read more.📍
An Illustrated Guide to OAuth
Aditya Bhargava breaks down OAuth with clear illustrations, showing how it replaces password sharing with secure, token-based access. Using a YNAB–bank example, he explains the step-by-step flow of authorization and secure data sharing.
Read more.📍
Coding 👨💻
Setting Alarms for Calendar Events
Journey continues: article explains how to add alarms to calendar events using EventKit in Swift. You’ll learn the difference between setting alarms at an exact time or relative to an event’s start, helping you create reminders that notify users before events begin.
Read more.📍
iOS Personal VPN and Network Extensions: A Developer’s Guide
Detailed developer guide to iOS’s Personal VPN and Network Extension frameworks. The piece covers how to create and manage VPN configurations—including built-in protocols like IPsec/IKEv2—using system-level Network Extension providers that run outside an app’s sandbox
Read more.📍
Apple 🍏
New Apple Event
Apple has officially announced its fall product event, themed “Awe Dropping,” scheduled for September 9, 2025 at the Steve Jobs Theater, Apple Park. New devices are coming!
Read more.📍
Design 🎨
Custom Animations with Timing Curves in SwiftUI: Make Your UI Rock
Turn SwiftUI animations into powerful, expressive experiences. Wesley Matlock explores how to apply animations with timing curves—including spring effects, Bézier transitions, and shaking or flipping motions—to create intuitive interactions that feel dynamic and alive.
Read more.📍
Other cool stuff 🧰
UITabAccessory Backward Compatibility
Craig Hockenberry discusses how iOS 26’s new UITabAccessory feature complicates backward compatibility. He demonstrates a practical solution by subclassing UITabBarController and presenting the accessory view manually on older iOS versions.
Read more.📍
High-Level Anatomy of a Camera Capturing Session
A clear breakdown of how AVCaptureSession, inputs, preview layers, and outputs work together in SwiftUI. The post explains the path from AVCapturePhoto to CGImage to Image, helping developers better understand camera capture flow.
Read more.📍
AI 🤖
NotebookLM: Google’s AI Research & Note-Taking Assistant
NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that helps you make sense of your own documents—think PDFs, Google Docs, slides, web pages, even YouTube videos. It summarizes your sources, answers questions grounded in your content, and offers unique features like podcast-style audio and video overviews to enhance accessibility and engagement.
Read more.📍
Tutorials 📒
FoundationModels: Tool Calling for an Assistant App
Timur Badretdinov explores how to build a private, offline-capable assistant app using Apple’s FoundationModels framework with tool calling. The chat interface enables local searches via MapKit by defining a SearchMapTool that the model can call when needed, with the app parsing and displaying structured location results.
Read more.📍
Video 🎥
ChatGPT in Xcode 26: is it as good as Cursor or Claude Code?
Vincent Pradeilles observes and discusses a competition in AI tools for Xcode. Will there be a big shift in usage in upcoming time.
Watch here.📍
Friends 🤝
Natascha Fadeeva offers 10% off her new “Architecture & Design Patterns for iOS”.
This book serves as a hands-on guide to core architectural principles and design patterns in iOS development. Strategies for creating maintainable Swift and SwiftUI apps, with a focus on dependency injection, navigation, modularization, and commonly used patterns.
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