When I sit down at my computer at the start of a work day, I typically like to plan out the broad outline of my work. This is the three or four major tasks for my day. I don’t want a minute-by-minute plan, just a list of the major items, so that I can check them off as I work, and get to the end of the day without feeling like I’ve forgotten anything.

There are a ton of todo apps and web services available, but they all provide much more than I need. When I factored in how I wanted to learn about writing a Mac menubar app in SwiftUI, the solution was obvious - write my own.

As we round out the year, there are several new addresses I’d like people to use to contact me or get my book.

In December 2019, I wrote a series of articles about using SwiftUI to build a Mac app . And in July 2020, I re-visited the sample app to apply the new SwiftUI features made available in macOS BigSur. Now that macOS Ventura and Xcode 14 are in beta, it’s time to build the app again while learning how to incorporate the new APIs.

If you read my blog or tweets, you will have detected that I recently wrote a book called macOS by Tutorials , published by raywenderlich.com . in this post, I’m going to show you what hardware and software I used to write it.

Apple has announced that their 2022 World Wide Developers Conference will again be an online event from June 7 to 11. The poster shows a very dark Swift logo in a coloured circle. While I have long since given up trying the read the tea leaves of Apple’s graphics to work out what they will announce, I always enjoy speculating. But this year, I thought that instead of trying to guess what Apple will have for us, I’d think about what I would like them to announce, with my main focus being the Mac.

I can finally reveal the reason I have not been blogging. I have been busy writing a book. It’s finally out, so here it is: macOS by Tutorials , published by kodeco.com (formerly raywenderlich.com).

Not much action on the site lately as I work on other projects. But I have finally got around to adding a search option to the site.

So I gambled…

I hoped Apple would do the right thing by developers who paid for access to the Developer Transition Kit (DTK) to get the first Apple Silicon Macs, but I was wrong and I lost.

UPDATE - 6 Feb 2020: Apple has responded to feedback from me and other disgruntled developers and so I didn’t lose as much as I thought. Apple is now giving US $500 credit, which is what developers in the US paid for the DTK, and they are extending the time limit to the end of the year. I am quite certain they will release a desktop M1 Mac before then, so I will get credit for most of the cost of the DTK (after exchange rate losses) and I will be able to use the credit towards a Mac that I want.

Thanks Apple for listening and reacting.

With the option to create apps using the SwiftUI App life cycle, we get a new way to set up menus in Mac apps. This post will explore some of the ways to do this as well as look at the default menu groups that Apple gives us.

SwiftUI gives us a completely new way to lay out out user interfaces, in a declarative and responsive way. Your data dictates what is displayed. But this leads to a new problem - how should the data models be constructed and how can they be passed around between the various views that make up your app?

In this post, I intend to discuss the possibilities with examples.

Update - January 2021: I think the information in this post is still all valid except for one change. When you are initializing an ObservableObject, you should use @StateObject instead of @ObservedObject. Your views can receive objects that are owned by other views as @ObservedObject or @EnvironmentObject but the owner of the data should always create the data object with @StateObject.