Those Who Swift - Issue 240
Your weekly dose of Swift!
Weekly note ✏️
This week, for once, we’re happy to report no new tax policy changes — globally or in the U.S. in particular. That’s a relief for developers, as managing taxation and regional compliance is already challenging enough. Many of us still expect Apple, with its considerable service fees for in-app purchases, to handle more of the heavy legal lifting on our behalf.
Even with the rise of AltStores and direct web-based purchasing, App Store revenue remains Apple’s main source of income, and the ecosystem’s rules still shape much of how we distribute and monetize apps.
Meanwhile, over at Swift.org, the community continues to bring exciting updates. You might have heard that Skip Fuse is now free for indie developers, supporting one closed-source app and unlimited open-source ones. It’s the kind of partnership that feels genuinely developer-friendly.
The more stable tools and innovative features we get, the stronger our competitive edge becomes compared to other platforms. Current data still shows that frontend and mobile development roles declined between the 2024–2025 season, so every advantage matters. Flutter and KMP jobs are out there, but with growing multiplatform support and better community tools, Swift developers have more reasons than ever to stay optimistic.
Connect with the "Those Who Swift" team - Justas Markus & Anton Gubarenko 👋
Swift Around the Web 🌐
6 SwiftUI Components You Didn’t Know Existed
This article uncovers lesser-known SwiftUI views like ContentUnavailableView, PhaseAnimator, and more—tools that can simplify UI development by replacing custom hacks with built-in solutions.
SwiftUI Discardable Slider
Anton Gubarenko explores a custom SwiftUI slider that ignores minor changes to avoid unnecessary updates—ideal for reducing noise when the user drags repeatedly. He explains how to bind the slider value, throttle updates, and handle final change only when needed.
Coding 👨💻
How to Build a Modern Async/Await Location Manager in Swift
Vlad Butko outlines how to wrap CLLocationManager with Swift Concurrency, creating clean async/await APIs for permission requests, single-shot location, and continuous updates—making location management in Swift far more readable and testable.
Smoothly Switching Between Layouts in SwiftUI with AnyLayout
This tutorial demonstrates using AnyLayout to toggle smoothly between layout types like HStackLayout and VStackLayout in SwiftUI—preserving view state and enabling animated transitions when layout containers change.
Design 🎨
Creative Coding: Randomness and Noise
Antonella Giugliano dives into how to introduce randomness and noise into creative coding with Swift and SwiftUI—showing how smooth, organic variations over time and space can elevate designs and animations.
Other cool stuff 🧰
4 Ways to Create Professional Looking App Icons in Minutes Without Being Graphically Inclined
Teodora Dobre shares how to create powerful icon designs that convert better and how to plan your icon strategy. And shows how your competitors influence your icon strategy and four techniques to create more impactful icon designs that convert.
Building Closed-Source Binaries With GitHub Actions
Daniel Saidi offers a step-by-step guide to automating the build and distribution of closed-source Swift packages using GitHub Actions—covering CI workflows, protected artifacts, and license concerns.
GSoC 2025 Showcase: Extending Swift-Java Interoperability
As part of Google Summer of Code 2025, the Swift community extended the swift-java tool to support JNI-based interoperability—enabling Swift libraries to be used on Android without requiring JDK 22+.
Introducing Temporal Swift SDK: Building Durable Workflows
The new Temporal Swift SDK provides a Swift-native way to write fault-tolerant, long-running workflows using async/await and macros—ideal for server apps that must handle failures, retries, and recovery gracefully.
Tutorials 📒
Creating Ornaments in visionOS
This tutorial shows how to use the new ornament modifier in visionOS apps with SwiftUI to add contextual UI elements (buttons, toolbars, tab bars) around windows or volumes — covering visibility, attachment anchor, alignment and styling with Glass background.
Tracking Workouts With HealthKit in iOS Apps
Letizia Granata walks through integrating HealthKit to record workout sessions, monitor metrics like heart rate and calories, and handle authorization for custom workout types—enabling rich fitness features in your iOS app.
Video 🎥
Meet the new Swift Android SDK with Joannis Orlandos
In this episode of Swift Academy Season 2, Walid talks with Joannis Orlandos, CTO and member of the Swift.org Android Work Group, about the launch of the Swift Android SDK.
Using SwiftUI Foundation Models Transcripts to build a Chatbot
The fourth video in the Foundation Models series walks through creating a travel agent chatbot powered by Apple’s on-device intelligence. You’ll learn to manage chat history, display messages dynamically, handle errors, and apply guardrails — resulting in a natural, responsive SwiftUI chat experience.
Yet, another thing…👓
Say What You See — Google Arts & Culture Experiment
The Google Arts & Culture Lab-led experiment Say What You See teaches you the art of image prompting by showing AI-generated images and challenging you to describe them precisely — you have three tries per level and must meet a visual similarity threshold to progress.
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