Pol Piella's Blog

import Image from '@components/Image.astro' Over the past few months, I have shifted most of the time I spend building features to Cursor when working on client projects, and only really switch back to Xcode when I am doing the last bits of polishing and…

As of Xcode 26, the Metal toolchain is no longer included in Xcode's installation by default.

Debugging is a skill that is often overlooked by developers.

Swift is a powerful language that provides a bunch of built-in quality-of-life features that help developers write clean, efficient and readable code.

Menu bar items are a great way to provide quick access to your macOS app's features.

Swift's Observation framework provides a powerful set of APIs that allow developers to implement type-safe observation of properties in objects of their choice with very little code.

One of the features that Hidde and I have wanted to bring into Helm since its early days is the ability to have a menu bar item that allows users to quickly glance at their apps' status and open them with a single click.

Up until very recently, my app QReate was available in the App Store as a paid app.

import Image from '@components/Image.astro' import Video from '@components/Video.astro' With over 2 million apps available on the iOS App Store, competition is fierce and it has never been harder to penetrate the mobile app market and get users to download

As a maintainer of the appstoreconnect-swift-sdk library, I often find myself keeping an eye on new releases of the App Store Connect API and then manually updating the library's code based using the new version's OpenAPI spec.

import Image from '@components/Image.astro' import Video from '@components/Video.astro' Code signing is a crucial part of the app development process as Apple requires any third-party code to be signed and authorized before it can run on device on any of…

import Image from '@components/Image.astro' One of the most common errors that can happen when you upload a new build of your app to App Store Connect is that its version and build numbers are older than the ones that are already in the store.

import Image from '@components/Image.astro' import Video from '@components/Video.astro' There are certain times when a version of your app has a bug or crash in production that majorly impacts most or all of users.

import Image from '@components/Image.astro' Fastlane is a popular Open-Source tool for automating the build, testing, and deployment of iOS and Android apps.

Before the introduction of @Observable in WWDC23, the only way to make a class' property observable to SwiftUI was to use the @Published property wrapper and make the class conform to the ObservableObject protocol.

import Video from '@components/Video.astro' import Image from '@components/Image.astro' Core Data is a powerful framework that allows you to manage the persistent model layer of your application and, while it is a first-party solution that has been a stan…

I have recently shipped a new version of my app QReate that includes a complete redesign of the Safari extension.

In SwiftUI, it's common to display a list of items and allow users to navigate to a detail view when an item is selected.

I have recently been working on an app that allows users to save digital copies of football tickets for games that they have attended.

As a developer for Apple platforms, you probably work on multiple projects with different coding styles and conventions and have to find yourself adjusting Xcode's editor settings every time you switch between projects.

Swift is a mature and powerful language that can be used way beyond development for Apple platforms.

Back in WWDC21 and with the launch of Xcode 13, Apple introduced a new xcodebuild option that generates a memory graph whenever a UI test measuring XCTMemoryMetrics fails.

An XCResult bundle is a package or directory that contains detailed information about the results of running a set of tests.

A checksum is the result of applying an algorithm to a file's contents that is used to verify the file's integrity.

Recursive functions are functions that call themselves.

As developers, when we release a new version of our app with new features and bug fixes, we want our users to update to the latest version as soon as possible.

SwiftUI has a powerful API that allows you to insert a side panel view that shows alongside the view it's attached to called inspector.

During WWDC24, Apple announced Translation, a new first-party framework built using CoreML models that allows you to perform on-device translations in your Swift apps entirely for free.

Swift Testing is a modern, expressive and macro-based testing library introduced by Apple during WWDC 24 as a more modern alternative to replace XCTest when writing unit tests.

Up until WWDC 24, SwiftUI had no built-in way of creating floating windows or, in other words, windows that stay on top of everything on the user's screen.

We recently fixed a bug in our app Helm which occurred when trying to set the time of a scheduled release using the App Store Connect API.

We have recently added the ability to manage your app's phased releases in Helm.

I have recently learned that some of the breaking changes that will come with Swift 6 (like full data isolation and data race safety checks) will be part of the Swift 6 language mode, which will be an opt-in feature in the Swift 6 compiler.

Profiling your application and identifying areas where you can optimize your app's performance is crucial to ensure a smooth experience for your users.

This week I came across a situation where I had to pass the member of an optional struct held as a @State property to a child view as a Binding.

I have recently been working on a brand new screen for Hidde and my app Helm that allows you to see all builds available on TestFlight and lets you add them to beta testing groups.

The SE-0409 proposal introduced the ability to mark import declarations with any of Swift's available access levels to limit the types or interfaces that imported symbols can be used in.

I have recently joined a new team at work and I am still getting to know the team's domain and what parts of the codebase we own.

Swift's Sequence type has a powerful operator called reduce which allows you to combine all elements of a sequence into a single value.

I have recently been working on a new Swift Package library that supports iOS, macOS and Linux.

Apple has recently introduced over 50 new analytics reports with hundreds of new data points and metrics to help developers understand how their apps are performing.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article where I explained how to perform complex Core Data migrations using mapping models and custom migration policies.

Pkl (pronounced Pickle) is a new programming language from Apple designed specifically for configuration.

One of my main goals in the last few weeks at work has been to find and fix as many memory leaks as I can in our iOS app.

It is natural for your app to evolve.

I recently decided to spend some time automating the release process for NowPlaying and make shipping new versions of the app as simple as possible.

I have recently worked on a feature for NowPlaying that leverages iOS's SharePlay APIs to allow users to join listening sessions and discover new music with their friends.

I usually write about Swift and mobile app development but, as I have been working on an interesting and challenging project this week that is outside my comfort zone, I thought I would share it with you and write about it regardless.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about how to load Stable Diffusion models in Swift and generate images from text prompts.

I've been a software developer building iOS applications for the past 6 years and in that amount of time, I have seen numerous changes to the industry and the responsibilities of my role.