Pol Piella's Blog

I have recently been learning about how to use Stable Diffusion models in an iOS app using Apple's open-source ml-stable-diffusion Swift package.

As the year is coming to an end, and as I did last year, I want to take a moment and reflect on what I have been up to in 2023, how I have performed against my goals, and most importantly set some public goals for 2024 to keep myself accountable.

It is that time of the year when music streaming services provide users with a recap of their most played songs and albums.

The SE-0362 Swift Evolution proposal, implemented and available from Swift 5.8, allows you to adopt upcoming Swift features in your code on a per-case basis.

In the last article, I showed you how you can compile a Swift macro into a binary and import it into your Xcode project without using Swift Package Manager.

Swift Macros are a powerful new feature introduced in Swift 5.9 that allows developers to generate code at compile time.

As an Apple app developer, you will be familiar with cross-compiling code for different platforms such as iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS with very minimal setup and directly from Xcode.

If you have a Core Data store set up for your iOS app in its default location, you must know that widgets won't be able to access it.

Swift is a great language for writing cross-platform libraries and command-line applications.

While there is a lot you can display in the terminal, there is certain information that is better conveyed in a graphical user interface.

I have recently made a command-line tool to retrieve information about a given song from Apple Music using MusicKit.

I have recently been looking at how to set up Core Data and Swift Data in NowPlaying to point to the same persistent data store so that I can use both frameworks side by side.

Last week I published an article about how to create an App Clip for your app where I mentioned that App Clips have a set of limitations such as the amount of memory they can use and the amount of permissions they can request.

An App Clips is a reduced version of your app that allows users to perform specific tasks without having to download the full app.

As Swift developers, we tend to focus exclusively on developing Swift packages for Apple platforms but the truth is that Swift is now a cross-platform language and we should embrace it where possible by making our Swift packages available to Linux clients…

Xcode 15 introduces a way of automatically performing accessibility audits on your app through UI tests.

I have recently been working on a new feature for my app QReate that will allow users to create different kinds of QR codes from a set of templates.

There are some very exciting improvements coming to MapKit in iOS 17 that will make working with maps in SwiftUI much easier.

I have recently finished a new feature for my app QReate that allows users to add images to their custom QR codes.

A while ago I wrote an article about how I use GitHub Actions scheduled workflows to post a tweet every Friday with a list of that week's most read articles on my blog.

Displaying the app icon and version in your app is a great way to provide users, both internal (e.g. testers or stakeholders) and external, with a quick and easy way to identify both which version and variant of the app they are using.

If you're an indie developer or you're part of an organisation with multiple apps that share a common design language and find yourself using the same fonts over and over again, you might want to consider creating a Swift Package to contain the shared font

During WWDC 2023 Apple announced a new long-awaited refresh to persistence in Apple platforms in the form of a new framework: SwiftData.

Before the introduction of mergeable libraries in this year's edition of WWDC, we had to decide whether to make a framework static or dynamic.

Apple announced numerous new features and improvements to the Swift language and ecosystem during WWDC.

During the Simplify distribution in Xcode and Xcode Cloud WWDC23 session Chris D'Angelo and Jason Wu from the Xcode team introduced a new Xcode Cloud feature that allows you to set TestFlight test notes for beta builds.

I have been using a Swift AWS lambda for some time to automatically post a tweet whenever a new issue of the iOS CI Newsletter is sent to all subscribers.

At work, we have recently started to use Swift packages to share common code across iOS apps maintained by different products and teams.

I have recently used Swift's @_exported underscored attribute in a real-world project to minimise the impact of the changes I was making and keep the risk of introducing bugs to a minimum.

This week I have added a Safari extension for my new app QReate.

I have recently been working on an app which allows users to create, edit and export QR codes as images.

One of the features that I like the most about GitHub Actions is the number of different events that you can use to trigger a workflow.

Last week I wrote an article on how you can deploy beta versions of your app to TestFlight and an external service like Microsoft's App Center.

In preparation for my talk at NYSwifty next week, I have been writing about all things Xcode Cloud on my blog.

I have recently open-sourced a Swift command line tool called chatty that allows you to use Open AI's ChatGPT directly from the terminal.

Xcode Cloud has three kinds of webhooks which allow users to perform custom actions at different stages of a workflow's lifecycle: Whenever a workflow build is created.

Apple uses lists with editable text items in a number of apps such as the macOS finder or SF Symbols.

Webhooks are automated messages which allow you to build custom applications and integrations that extend a website's default capabilities.

I have been writing command-line tools with Swift for a while now and, while I find the developer experience to be great, I have always found the number of libraries to handle user input to be lacking compared to other languages such as Javascript.

The 2.211.0 release of Fastlane comes with a brand new action: xcodes.

The merge of PR #6114 in the Swift Package Manager repository confirms one of the features I have long been waiting for: the ability to make network requests in Swift package plugins.

This week at work we have been looking into migrating third-party CocoaPods dependencies to Swift Package Manager.

App Store Connect API allows developers to create, manage and trigger Xcode Cloud workflows using network requests.

Last week, we started to migrate the playback feature in iPlayer to our brand new SwiftUI navigation.

I have recently started a new tradition on Twitter where I post the week's top three most-read articles from my blog every Friday: I have been doing this manually by generating aggregate page view reports from Fathom, the tool I use to collect analytics f…

Fastly's Compute@Edge is a service which allows you to build and deploy serverless applications at the edge.

I have recently had to set up a Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) pipeline for one of my side projects to upload an app to Testflight using Fastlane.

Xcode Cloud is a CI/CD service made by Apple which is deeply integrated into Xcode.

As the year is coming to an end, I wanted to reflect on everything I have done this year and set a few goals for 2023.

The most common way of installing a version of Swift is by downloading Xcode.