The ternary operator is one of those things that will exist in virtually any modern programming language. When writing code, a common goal is to make sure that your code is succinct and no more verbose than it needs to be. A ternary expression is a useful tool to achieve this. What is a ternary? Ternaries are essentially a quick way to write an if statement on a single line. For example, if you want to tint a SwiftUI button based on a specific condition, your code might look a bit as follows: struct SampleView: View { @State var username...

Allowing other apps and webpages to link into your app with deeplinks is a really good way for you to make your app more flexible, and to ensure that users of your app can more easily share content with others by sharing direct links to your contents. To support deeplinking on iOS, you have two options available: Support deeplinking through custom URL schemes like maxine://workout/dw-1238-321-jdjd Support deeplinking through Universal Links which would look like this https://donnywals.com/maxine-app/workout/dw-1238-321-jdjd To add support for option one, all you need to do is register your custom URL scheme and implement onOpenURL to handle the incoming...

It's no secret that Swift concurrency can be pretty difficult to learn. There are a lot of concepts that are different from what you're used to when you were writing code in GCD. Apple recognized this in one of their vision documents and they set out to make changes to how concurrency works in Swift 6.2. They're not going to change the fundamentals of how things work. What they will mainly change is where code will run by default. In this blog post, I would like to take a look at the two main features that will change how your...

A lot of modern apps have a networking component to them. This could be because your app relies on a server entirely for all data, or you’re just sending a couple of requests as a back up or to kick off some server side processing. When implementing networking, it’s not uncommon for developers to check the network’s availability before making a network request. The reasoning behind such a check is that we can inform the user that their request will fail before we even attempt to make the request. Sound like good UX, right? The question is whether it really...

Once you start using Swift Concurrency, actors will essentially become your standard choice for protecting mutable state. However, introducing actors also tends to introduce more concurrency than you intended which can lead to more complex code, and a much harder time transitioning to Swift 6 in the long run. When you interact with state that’s protected by an actor, you have to to do so asynchronously. The result is that you’re writing asynchronous code in places where you might never have intended to introduce concurrency at all. One way to resolve that is to annotate your let's say view model...

The Xcode 16.3 beta is out, which includes a new version of Swift. Swift 6.1 is a relatively small release that comes with bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and some features. In this post, I’d like to explore two of the new features that come with Swift 6.1. One that you can start using immediately, and one that you can opt-in on if it makes sense for you. The features I’d like to explore are the following: Changes to Task Groups in Swift 6.1 Changes to member visibility for imported code We’ll start by looking at the changes in...

On iOS 17 and newer, you have access to the Observable macro. This macro can be applied to classes, and it allows SwiftUI to officially observe properties on an observable class. If you want to learn more about Observable or if you're looking for an introduction, definitely go ahead and check out my introduction to @Observable in SwiftUI. In this post, I would like to explore how you can observe properties on an observable class. While the ObservableObject protocol allowed us to easily observe published properties, we don't have something like that with Observable. However, that doesn't mean we cannot...

When Apple released Xcode 16 last year, they made the Swift 6 compiler available along with it. This means that we can create new projects using Swift 6 and its compile-time data race protections. However, the big question for many developers is: Is 2025 the right time to adopt Swift 6 fully, or should we stick with Swift 5 for now? In this post, I won’t give you a definitive answer. Instead, I’ll share my perspective and reasoning to help you decide whether adopting Swift 6 is right for you and your project(s). The right answer depends on loads of...

Code has dependencies. It’s something that I consider universally true in one way or another. Sometimes these dependencies are third party dependencies while other times you’ll have objects that depend on other objects or functionality to function. Even when you write a function that should be called with a simple input like a number, that’s a dependency. We often don’t really consider the small things the be dependencies and this post will not focus on that at all. In an earlier post, I’ve written about using closures as dependencies, also known as protocol witnesses. In this post I’d like to...

We all know that print is the most ubiquitous and useful debugging tool in a developer’s toolbox. Sure, we have breakpoints too but what’s the fun in that? Sprinkling some prints throughout our codebase to debug a problem is way more fun! And of course when we print more than we can handle we just add some useful prefixes to our messages and we’re good to go again. What if i told that you can do way better with just a few lines of code. You can send your prints to more places, give them a priority, and more. Of...