SwiftUI

Building apps for macOS offers developers a fantastic opportunity to expand their skills, create useful utilities to solve their problems, and begin their journey as indie developers. I've invited Jordi Bruin to write a guest article on this topic as he launched several useful Mac applications, such as MacWhisper and ...

Xcode 16 introduced the @Previewable macro for SwiftUI Previews, allowing you to use dynamic properties inline in previews. You'll be able to make richer and more dynamic previews of your SwiftUI views without the need to wrap any state inside child views. Swift and SwiftUI use macros to hide implementation ...

MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) is an architectural coding pattern for structuring SwiftUI views. The goal of the pattern is to separate the view definition from the business logic behind it. Your views will not depend on any specific model type if done correctly. While MVVM was mostly used in the UIKit/AppKit days, ...

The @Environment property wrapper in SwiftUI allows you to read values from a view's environment. You're able to configure an environment value yourself or make use of the default available values. Please read my article on Property Wrappers before diving into this one. Note that this is a different wrapper ...

The Identifiable protocol in SwiftUI allows you to add a unique object identity. The protocol requires a single ID property of any hashable type, making it a flexible protocol for all kinds of instances. While it's a relatively simple protocol, a few possible edge cases can cause unexpected bugs in ...

Key press events detection in SwiftUI allows you to respond to a keyboard key like return (enter), shift, command, and more. While mostly Mac apps use keyboard events, you must consider adding support for iPad apps since external keyboards can be used. SwiftUI offers several modifiers to listen to key ...

The @ScaledMetric property wrapper in SwiftUI allows you to adopt custom values to dynamic type settings. Your custom values will scale proportionally whenever the user changes the dynamic type setting. While elements like text scale are automatically based on the Dynamic Type setting, other values like padding or image sizes ...

A ScrollView bounce behavior configuration allows you to define whether a scrollable view bounces when reaching the end of its content. Whether it's a horizontal or vertical scrolling list, you can configure both directions using view modifiers in SwiftUI. There are common scenarios for us to build when it comes ...

The @Observable Macro was first introduced during WWDC 2023 to replace ObservableObject and its @Published parameters. The macro allows you to remove all published properties while still being able to redraw SwiftUI views when a change occurs automatically. I highly recommend replacing your ObservableObject instances since the new macro prevents ...

SFSafariViewController can be used to let your users open webpages in-app instead of in an external browser. While the view controller works great for UIKit, getting it to work in a SwiftUI app might be challenging. Whenever you're running into cases where a UIKit solution is available only, you want ...

Debugging SwiftUI views is an essential skill when writing dynamic views with several redrawing triggers. Property wrappers like @State and @ObservedObject will redraw your view based on a changed value. This is often expected behavior, and things look like they should. However, in so-called Massive SwiftUI Views (MSV), there could ...

App Intents have been new since iOS 16 and offer a programmatic way to service your app's content and functionality to Siri and the Shortcuts app. New in iOS 17 is the option to surface App Shortcuts integrated into Spotlight, making your app's functionality even more discoverable. App Intents are ...