This is insane. Is there any way I can also report the apps?

Ever since Apple released the iPhone X, using the safe area has been a must-do for developers. You don’t want your work hidden under the notch or clipped beneath the status bar or under the rounded corners, etc.

The launch of the iPhone X along with the safe area came back in 2017, so I think it’s safe to say every iOS developer knows how to use it — if not, here’s the documentation.

But sometimes you need to dive deeper. You might want the safe area present in some views but not in others — maybe a blur partially…

In 2016, Apple released an iPad version of Swift Playgrounds. Paired with an external keyboard, it’s almost as good as Xcode and a lot faster, but it’s slightly oversimplified. Sure, you can write code, but what about adding files or playing audio?

When I was coding my playground for this year’s Swift Student Challenge, I started out using my iPad. It was extremely fast. Pressing “Run My Code” would yield the result in less than a second! But I hit some snags — the most significant one being there was no way to play audio! …

I launched my first app in April, which is three months ago. It’s still my only app. Well, I made other apps, but that was the only one I launched.

Right after the launch, there were problems. Bugs. I fixed them in a following release, 1.0.1. That release got “metadata rejected,” which for me meant my promo video violated the guidelines. I re-rendered my video and released another version quickly, 1.0.2. That was approved.

And now, after almost three months of inactivity, version 1.1.0 is here. I translated my app into Chinese. I made new screenshots and refreshed the video.

SwiftUI is a very new and rapidly evolving framework — which is great, but that also means it lacks lots of nice features, including touch events.

So what’s a touch event? If you’re coming from UIKit, you’re probably familiar with them. Really, they’re just a fancy way of saying “Press detected!”

However, because iPhones and iPads are advanced, multitouch-capable devices, sometimes “Press detected!” isn’t enough. You might want to detect when the user first touches down or maybe when they release … or maybe when they drag and release.

Back in the UIKit storyboard, these touch events were easy to…

Before SF Symbols, making icons for iOS apps used to present a major hassle for both the designer and the developer. A workflow would often look along the lines of this:

1. Plan the icon.
2. Design it and make sure it aligns with your app’s message.
3. Or go online and find an icon instead…
4. … which would probably mean purchasing a license.
5. After all the work, you can finally embed it into your app — only to find the font weight is off and you need to tweak it.

Google’s Material Design icons have been around since 2014, and websites like…

SwiftUI is a great way to build apps. It’s simple, concise, and fast. What’s made in UIKit can be recreated in SwiftUI with half the lines of code. What used to take weeks now only takes hours. But until today, it um… still depended on UIKit.

To display a view made with SwiftUI, you had to wrap it in a UIHostingController, which had to be wrapped in a UIWindow, which had to be defined in SceneDelegate:

For a framework designed for simplicity and performance… all that code doesn’t make sense. …