Last year, I wrote a 3 part series of articles on using SwiftUI to build a Mac app. I would like to thank everyone who contacted me about this series. It was received very well and revealed that there is still a large amount of interest in programming for the Mac.

Some of the responses I got were pointing out different or better ways to do things, so I am going to list them here, adding to this post as I get new information. The relevant sections in the original posts will have links to the fixes suggested here, but I decided it was easier to list the changes in a separate post, rather than asking people to re-read the whole series looking for modifications.

In part 1 of this series, I created a Mac app using SwiftUI. The app uses a Master-Detail design to list entries in an outline on the left and show details about the selected entry in the detail view on the right. In part 2 I explored using menus, adding all the expected user interface elements and opening secondary windows.

In this third and final part, I want to look at the various ways to present dialogs to the user.

In part 1 of this series, I created a Mac app using SwiftUI. The app uses a Master-Detail design to list entries in an outline on the left and show details about the selected entry in the detail view on the right.

Now it is time to explore some more of the features of a Mac app with SwiftUI.

So far, nearly all the articles I have seen about SwiftUI show it being used for iOS, more particularly for iPhone. But SwiftUI works on all Apple’s platforms, and as I am primarily a Mac developer, I decided to try out a Mac app and see what happened.

At WWDC 2019, Apple surprised us all by announcing a completely new declarative UI framework called SwiftUI. Quoting snippets from the Apple announcements, “SwiftUI is an innovative, exceptionally simple way to build user interfaces across all Apple platforms with the power of Swift” and “SwiftUI uses a declarative syntax so you can simply state what your user interface should do.” But what does this mean and should we all adopt it now?

I sometimes like to focus on aspects of the Swift language that get less publicity, but that I think are really useful without adding a lot of complexity. This time I am looking at tuples.

There are many different ways of collecting data together in Swift, but for small amounts of transitory data, I find tuples to be an extremely convenient data structure.

I think I wrote the first version of Pic-a-POD in 2003 and have been updating and maintaining it ever since, but the time has come to shut it down.

Now that most of my Mac apps have been updated to support macOS Mojave’s dark mode, it was time to turn my attention to this web site.

With the release of macOS Mojave on 24th September 2018, I have started updating my Mac apps, mainly to enable support for dark mode if appropriate.

And now I have updated this site too. Click the light bulb icon at the top right of the page to toggle between light and dark modes for this site.

Hands up everyone who can remember how to work with Swift strings, especially when it comes to substrings and ranges? ….

Nobody?

Me neither. So I decided that I would work it out once and create myself a library to make it easy for myself in the future. And then I thought that other people might like it too. So I have created my first open sourced project.