Hello again, Swift

Just a short little update because I have been quite silent on this blog the past few weeks.

Currently, I am in between the two exam seasons after my second semester at uni. I still work part-time during the summer and obviously have to start preparing a bit for my upcoming math exam in September, but I still enjoy doing a bit more stuff just for fun.

Right now, that “fun” mainly consists of getting back into iOS app development with Swift and SwiftUI. I already started learning it 3 years ago when I completed the well-known 100 Days of Hacking with Swift challenge. But after finishing it, I never really pursued that path, and, apart from one or two demo apps, never published anything.

A lot has changed since then, and picking up developing with Swift again is an even better experience right now. For two reasons:

For one, SwiftUI received some pretty substantial upgrades since I last touched it. Most notably, SwiftData for data storage and @Observable, which makes creating ViewModels way easier than it was back in 2022.

And secondly, LLMs like Claude or Gemini are now a way bigger thing than during my last adventure into Swift territory. Since there isn’t as much content on the internet about writing apps with Swift (at least compared to writing web apps with Next.js, for example), I remember getting stuck pretty often on some weird Swift peculiarities when I last tried to build an app. Things you don’t remember or can’t know as a beginner.

This has changed pretty substantially since then. With (currently) Gemini as my learning partner, I move much faster now and also don’t get stuck as frequently. On the other hand, because of the smaller training data on Swift that Gemini has, it’s not really able to write my code for me like it would when writing a web app. It has a solid knowledge of the foundations, but can’t always connect the dots just right.

I’d argue that this is actually a great thing for me right now: I can quickly ask questions and get answers about the main APIs that Swift and SwiftUI provide but am still forced to try to understand them to the point that I can combine them into a fully functional app. A classic win-win situation, I’d say.

Still, having the foundation from completing that 100 day SwiftUI challenge (and my general programming knowledge as well) proves quite helpful, no matter how much weight Gemini can lift off my shoulders.

After roughly one week of getting back into the tools, following some tutorials and diving into the new APIs, I am now in the process of building my first proper iOS app! One that I actually plan to release. I don’t want to reveal too much yet, but once I have a somewhat functioning MVP, I’ll talk about more details.

And if you’re interested, I’ll also provide a TestFlight link, so you can try it out yourself and let me know what you think about it.

I’ll keep you in the loop :)