Swift challenge mode – Dynamic Data

This isn’t something I’ve solved, more of something I’m working on, but I thought there were some interesting things to share with anyone else “walking this path”. The Swift programming language is a static, strongly-defined language with a huge emphasis on leveraging types to help provide programmatic safety. It’s not always something I remember, asContinue reading “Swift challenge mode – Dynamic Data”

Creating an XCFramework

In the past couple of years, I’ve had the occasion to want to make an XCFramework – a bundle that’s used by Apple platforms to encapsulate binary frameworks or libraries – a couple of times. In both cases, the reason wasn’t that I didn’t want to ship the source, but because the source was fromContinue reading “Creating an XCFramework”

Large language models and Search

Microsoft’s made an aggressive and delightful splash in the search market by deeply integrating the guts of OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT with Bing Search. There’s an impressive interview by Joanna Stern on the topic (hat tip to Daring Fireball for the link). There’s a potential there that’s amazing, and others that are truly frightening.Continue reading “Large language models and Search”

RealityKit on macOS

Guessing which frameworks are going to be updated, and which aren’t, is — I think — a part of developing software on Apple platforms. Sometimes it’s clear based on what’s been updated over the past three or fours, as is the case with RealityKit. I started my experiments with SceneKit, another lovely high-level API toContinue reading “RealityKit on macOS”

Tips for getting the most out of DocC

1 – Start by adding doc comments to your types. The starting point is adding a single short summary sentence as comment (using the ///) for each public type in your library or app. Feel free to add more: if you add a “blank line” (meaning include another line with /// but nothing else inContinue reading “Tips for getting the most out of DocC”

Hosting your Swift Library Docs on Github Pages

The beta for Xcode 13.3 dropped yesterday. With it came a released version of Swift 5.6 and a bunch of neat additions that the 5.6 release enables. A feature I was watching closely was two-fold: the capability for plugins to extend the commands available within swift’s package manager, and a static hosting option that wasContinue reading “Hosting your Swift Library Docs on Github Pages”

API Design decisions behind Lindenmayer in Swift

Procedural generation of art is fascinating to me. The scope of efforts that fall into the bucket of procedural generation is huge. Quite a lot of what you find is either focused on art or video games. Within procedural generation, there is a topic that really caught my eye, I think primarily because it wasn’tContinue reading “API Design decisions behind Lindenmayer in Swift”