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.

What is Functional Programming and how can we use it in Swift?

Search online for any definition of functional programming and you will find many different definitions, few of which are practically helpful. I have no claim to be an expert, but as a Swift enthusiast, this is what I have distilled out of the morass.

Its been a long time since the last update to Time In Words for iOS but after prompting by Apple (update or we will remove it from the App Store), I finally did it. I was never really happy with the last design of Time in Words for iOS, particularly for the iPad, so this was a good opportunity to do a complete re-design, bringing the app more into alignment with its Mac counterpart. And it got a new name to match its new direction and is now called World Time in Words.

TL;DR: I don’t track you either on my web site or through my apps. If you want to contact me, please do so but I will not initiate any contacts.