Swift Dev Journal

Xcode 27 changed the way you create new projects.

In Xcode 26.4 Apple added a Top Functions mode to the Time Profiler and CPU Profiler instruments to help you quickly find the functions where your app spends the most time.

This post is part of the May 2026 Swift Blog Carnival that asks people to write about the limits they ran into with SwiftUI when developing their apps.

By customizable I mean letting the people using your app add, remove, and move toolbar items.

One of the selling points of the swift-parsing library is that you can create small parsers that do one simple thing and combine them to parse more complex data.

Take the following steps to measure your app’s launch time with Instruments: Press Cmd-I or choose Product > Profile to profile your app.

Why would you need to add an Open Recent menu?

When handling the sidebar selection in a SwiftUI app, the usual approach is to add a @State property to the view to store the selection.

The Swift language group’s Subprocess package lets you spawn processes in Swift apps.

Showing sheets is something most SwiftUI apps do.

When profiling a SwiftUI app with Instruments, one thing you want to know is what views update the most.

The swift-parsing library helps Swift developers parse data.

If you find your Swift app is running slowly, Instruments includes a CPU Profiler instrument to help you find the code causing your app to run slowly.

SwiftUI provides an .alert view modifier you can apply to a view to show an alert in your app.

Why would you need to open document-like windows without using SwiftUI’s document architecture?

Apple added flame graphs to Instruments in Xcode 16 to let developers visualize call tree statistics.

Last update: January 2026 Jujutsu, also known as jj, is a version control system that is growing in popularity with developers.

If you run into a performance problem in your SwiftUI app, the cause could be your app’s views redrawing too often.

When you use a navigation split view in a SwiftUI Mac app, you normally have a sidebar in the left column.

Last update: March 2026 Those of you running older versions of macOS will run into problems if you try to install Xcode from the Mac App Store.

A problem that people learning to develop iOS and Mac apps run into is being unable to load files they include in their app, such as image files, sound files, and text files.

A problem many SwiftUI developers have is their views not updating when the data changes.

I received a review copy of the new version of Sarah Reichhelt’s macOS by Tutorials book and decided to share details about the book so you can determine if it’s right for you.

Apple provides a PropertyListEncoder class to save data as a dictionary in a property list file.

Apple provides the Process class that lets you run Terminal commands and command-line programs inside a Mac app.

A common problem people learning UIKit have when following a tutorial is that what they see in Xcode does not match what the tutorial shows.

A common complaint I hear online from Mac developers is that all the SwiftUI learning material focuses on iOS development, and there’s nothing on Mac development.

Deleting a git repository for an Xcode project is relatively easy: move the folder that holds the git repository out of the project folder.

Recent versions of Xcode do not add an Info.plist file to new iOS app projects.

People starting out with SwiftUI development may get a message like the following from Xcode when building their project: `init(destination:isActive:label:)’ was deprecated in iOS 16.0: use NavigationLink(value:label:) inside a NavigationStack or Navigati…

Many people learning Core Data take the following steps when creating their first Core Data app: Create a new Xcode project that uses Core Data.

If you use a button for list items in SwiftUI, the list item does not highlight when you select it.

Many toolbar buttons in Mac and iOS apps include an image and a label.

When you create and run a SwiftUI Mac app project, the Help menu has a menu item named AppName Help, where AppName is the name of your app.

Most articles on showing sheets in SwiftUI apps show an example of a button with a .sheet modifier that shows the sheet.

Apple provides the WKWebView class to show web content in Swift apps.

When you are developing a Mac app, you run it often from Xcode.

The inspector for the scene editor has separate SwiftUI views for each kind of item in a SpriteKit scene.

When you create a SwiftUI Document App project, the Swift file for the document contains a struct for the document that conforms to FileDocument.

I ran into a problem where I was unable to open the scenes I created in the editor.

In the last article, I wrote about how I couldn’t use the PropertyListEncoder class to save scenes because SpriteKit’s classes don’t conform to the Codable protocol.

For a SpriteKit scene editor to be usable, it must be able to save scenes.

I have the following main view in the scene: struct ContentView: View { @Binding var document: Level var body: some View { NavigationView { SceneGraph(document: $document) SpriteView(scene: document.scene) Inspector(node: SK…

This article talks about the first big problem I encountered when starting to develop a SpriteKit scene editor in SwiftUI.

AppKit has the NSOpenPanel and NSSavePanel classes to let people choose files to open and save in Mac apps.

As a fun side project, I’m starting to develop a SpriteKit scene editor for iPad and Mac using SwiftUI.

You have a Mac with Xcode and an iPad with Swift Playgrounds.

SwiftUI provides a sprite view to show a SpriteKit scene in a SwiftUI app.

When to Wrap a UIKit or AppKit View There are two cases where you would wrap a UIKit or AppKit view in a SwiftUI app.

You must do the following to store a Swift enum in Core Data: Create an enum with a raw value with a type Core Data can store, such as an integer or a string.