Top-notch video tutorials for Swift developers

Gui Rambo joins us to build a Mastodon Client for macOS using SwiftUI. In this episode we'll show the app we'll be building and then start from a blank slate where we will cover some topics about how a SwiftUI macOS app is set up, how we can define some build settings using xcconfig files, and how to deal with building for different Apple Developer teams.

When working on a large project with multiple developers, we often find ourselves in contention with the Xcode project.pbxproj file. Conflicts here are not easy to solve manually, and if you make a mistake Xcode won’t load the project at all, requiring you to fix it manually. In this episode we will explore migrating to a solution where the project file is generated using a tool called Xcodegen.

One of the most impactful things you can do to improve productivity is to improve turnaround time when iterating on features. Playgrounds and Xcode Live Previews are great, but both have their limitations. In this episode we will explore how to utilize hot module reloading to have the simulator automatically reflect your changes when you save. It's magic, and will blow your mind!

If you're using CocoaPods already, then mixing with Swift Packages can prove to be infeasible. You can create your modules as internal pods as well, however there are a few gotchas. In this episode I will cover how to do this, how to link up local pods and create example projects for demo UI and running tests, as well as how to overcome some of the rough edges you might experience.

One big benefit of modularizing an application is working on features as modules. Let's re-create the welcome screen experience as a feature module using Swift Package Manager and Xcodegen.

In this episode we create a modularized setup where our modules are Swift Packages and brought into the main app using Xcodegen and local path references to the packages.

One thing that can be a pain when splitting modules up into separate projects is maintaining the Xcode projects themselves. Not to mention the fact that as team sizes grow, merging changes in project files gets exponentially more painful. In this episode we will look at using Xcodegen to have a repeatable project generation that you can use to create consistent Xcode projects without much fuss.

Breaking your code into discrete modules will surface a problem if your code is tightly interconnected. Once you've defined your module boundaries you now are forced to not cause bidirectional dependencies. In this episode we will look at some strategies for breaking apart dependencies into abstractions first using protocols, then using protocol witnesses. We can then depend on those abstractions in our isolated module projects.

One way of achieving modularization is to build frameworks using nested Xcode projects. This has the benefit of having everything in one place and can easily build the entire thing. You can also zero-in on a single project and just work from there if you want. Each sub-project can have its own tests, sample application, etc.

Pluralization rules vary by language, so it's not as easy as just adding an "s". To properly handle these cases, we need to use a Stringsdict file and format our string using a special syntax.

Sometimes you may find that you want to localize images specific to a locale. In this episode we'll make up a contrived example where we want to change our splash image from a pizza to sushi if the locale if Japanese. We can easily do this with Asset Catalogs and provide a more tailored experience.

In this episode I will show two ways you can export all of the strings in your project. The first is using Xcode, but since this is a process you'll likely want to repeat, we'll also show how to do it via the command line so you can automate it. We'll then take the xliff files and send them off for translation using a translation service.

There's a bit of prep work we need to do to get our project ready to be localized. We'll start by defining which languages we want to support, localize any interface-based files like Storyboards, and then move on to localizing strings in code.

One of my favorite new features of Xcode 13 is support for Vim key bindings. In this episode we will see how to enable this and I'll give a quick tour of how to get around using Vim.

Now that Swift Package Manager has started to see some adoption and we have some integration inside of Xcode, I think it's time to take a deeper look at how to use it both as a consumer and as a library author. In this episode we'll create a DiceKit library using SwiftPM, then use it in a command line utility.