Swift Dev Journal

Mac text views support undo and redo for text editing without you having to write any code.

VoodooPad is a Mac app for building a personal wiki.

Sparkle is a framework that simplifies updating Mac apps.

People new to iOS development frequently ask how to save data in their apps.

A common issue iOS developers run into is dealing with the onscreen keyboard.

Xcode’s breakpoints pause your program so you can step through your code line by line and examine the values of your variables.

A common question new iOS developers ask is how to build their app’s user interface: code or storyboards.

Plot is a framework for creating HTML and XML documents in Swift.

If you find a bug or want to request a new feature in Xcode or one of Apple’s frameworks, you can submit a bug report using Xcode’s Help menu.

When you run into problems developing an iOS or Mac app, you can get help by asking a question online at sites like Stack Overflow, Reddit, Slack, and Apple’s developer forums.

I’m working on a Mac app that previews HTML in a web view, and it gave me a good idea for a tutorial.

Xcode 11 adds support for cherry picking commits.

Xcode 12 Note from the Author Xcode 12 made a bunch of changes to SwiftUI for document-based apps.

SwiftUI currently lacks native support for text views.

With the release of SwiftUI in iOS 13, a common question from people new to iOS development is whether they should learn SwiftUI or UIKit.

SwiftUI is Apple’s new framework for building user interfaces in Swift.

If you want to learn iOS development, there are many places for you to learn.

Are you running macOS 10.15 and trying to build a SwiftUI user interface visually?

A timer sends a message to an object after a certain amount of time passes.

I have seen a lot of questions recently from people who are creating iOS projects in Xcode and not being able to find the ViewController.swift file and not being able to find view controllers.

I sometimes see questions on forums from people who have developed an iOS app and want only friends and family to be able to install the app.

Xcode 11’s improved support for the Swift Package Manager simplifies adding and updating third party frameworks in your projects.

The Mac development series continues with an article on making document-based apps.

Why would anyone want to make Mac apps?

Many Swift developers dream of building a business developing their own products.

Displaying data in a Mac table view has the following requirements: Data to display.

It’s not too difficult to add menus and menu items to a Mac app using Xcode’s Object Library.

I see a lot of questions on forums from iOS and Mac developers having issues with their code not working properly or crashing with cryptic error messages, like the following: Thread 1: signal SIGABRT Thread 1: Fatal error: Unexpectedly found nil while imp…

If you read the Connections Inspector section of the article on how to build a user interface for a Mac app, you’ll notice I didn’t mention how to make connections in your user interface.

After creating a project, the next step in developing a Mac app is to build the user interface.

The first step in creating a Mac app is to create a project in Xcode.

Last update: December 2025 I’ve seen a lot of questions from people on Reddit and Slack looking for resources on Mac development in Swift.

When you add a folder of files to an Xcode project by choosing File > Add Files to “ProjectName”, you should see the following options at the bottom of the Open panel: As you can see there are two options for adding folders to a project.

I see this question come up a lot.

When you start out developing iOS or Mac apps in Swift, you run into a common problem.

I recently needed to add undo support for a Mac app after not dealing with undo for several years.

I continue my coverage of Instruments with the Time Profiler instrument.

Some iOS apps have items like cards or sticky notes that you can drag.

On Stack Overflow I see many questions from people who have trouble interpreting the data Instruments generates.

Last update: December 2025 A lot of people are interested in developing iOS apps but don’t know where to get started.

In a previous article I explained how to set up your Xcode projects to support older versions of iOS and macOS.

I recently answered a question from someone who wanted to know what version of Xcode and Swift to use to develop an app for iOS 9 and another question from someone who wanted to know what version of Xcode to use to develop an app to run on macOS 10.7.

I saw in a talk by Paul Hudson at NSSpain 2018 that optionals are what people learning Swift struggle with the most.

I have seen some questions from people looking for information on developing Mac apps in Swift.

Starting with Xcode 8, you can let Xcode generate the code for your Core Data entities.

In Part 1 of this tutorial, you learned the concepts of creating an iOS document-based app.

iOS support for document-based apps opens up new categories of apps for you to develop.

If you have done any iOS or Mac programming in Swift, you have probably had your app crash with the following message in Xcode’s debugger: Fatal error: Unexpectedly found nil while unwrapping an Optional value If you don’t understand this error message,…

GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab simplify working on projects with other people.