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Exploring Uncut - May 26th, 2025
HWS+ livestream Saturday, May 17th marked another Hacking with Swift+ subscriber livestream. This time, Paul walked us through building a macOS application that uses the AppStoreConnect API to retrieve information about our published apps. It was the longest session I ever attended but was super interesting, both from a coding perspective and in terms of the resulting app. In fact, it was so compelling that Paul decided to open source the app, called ShipShape.
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Swiftly and SourceKit-LSP issue follow-up
Introduction A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Swiftly and mentioned that I experienced issues with code-completion and the likes when doing embedded development in VSCode. I pointed to a SourceKit-LSP error I was seeing but did not take the time to investigate much further. Last week, Kuba Mracek kindly tagged me in a GitHub issue he opened in the SourceKit-LSP project. The issue describes a similar problem and Ben Barham provided a workaround for it.
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Exploring Uncut - April 28th, 2025
It’s been a while since the last “Exploring Uncut” post, so without further ado, here’s a recap of some of the fun and important things from the past few weeks. Home Assistant I’ve been interested in home automation for a very (very) long time, nearly 40 years. As a teenager, I had seen an article on how to control your home using some custom electronics on your Commodore 64. That piqued my curiosity and I started researching the available products and technologies.
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Swiftly and Swift 6.1 released
Update 2025-05-04: There is now a workaround for the SourceKit-LSP issue mentioned at the end of this post, see Swiftly and SourceKit-LSP issue follow-up for more information. Introduction End of March was a busy time for Apple, with the release of swiftly 1.0 and a few days later Swift 6.1. Let’s explore what this means for toolchain selection, mostly when doing Embedded Swift development on macOS. Xcode toolchain Xcode 16.3 comes bundled with Swift 6.
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Exploring Uncut - April 7th, 2025
Battery low As you might have noticed, there was no post last week. I had a couple of bullet points in my note but come Sunday evening, I had not started writing any draft. I was also contemplating writing a more in-depth article on a particular topic, as I did before, but I could not decide on which one and commit to it. I just needed to disconnect and relax and did not have the energy for it.
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Exploring Uncut - March 24th, 2025
Structs, classes and memory I continued my reflection on how value and reference semantic impacts the memory allocation in the generated code. Given there’s now an active Embedded Swift channel on The Swift Programming Language Discord, I asked the question there. Some comments led me to revisite the test examples I made earlier and update them. It started to make slightly more sense but not yet totally. But then AliMark71 posted a link to the Explore Swift performance video by John McCall from WWDC 2024.
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Exploring Uncut - March 17th, 2025
Embedded Swift Community Hour Last Friday, Rauhul organized an Embedded Swift Community Hour call on Discord, where members of the community interested in Embedded Swift gathered, presented their projects and talked about the future of this topic. It was super interesting to virtually meet such a nice group of people, motivated to explore, share their findings and push the boundaries of Embedded Swift forward. I discovered super nice projects such as thelittlegame by Morten.
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Exploring Uncut - March 10th, 2025
A bit of a social life Not much happened this week in terms of exploration. Being an introvert, I try to space out social events so I have time to recharge in between. This week was a bit of a failure on that front, with one concert, two family dinners, lunch with a friend, and a GeekClub meeting. You might be wondering—what exactly is GeekClub? I’ve been a CoderDojo coach for several years now.
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Exploring Uncut - March 3rd, 2025
Introduction I would like to publish more often on this blog. I really do. In fact, I have a long list of topics to write about. I even have several draft posts that I should just finalize and publish. One main issue is that, as I reread a post to put the finishing touches on it, I ask myself more questions. Is it totally exact ? Does it need more background information ?
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Addressing previous oversights
Introduction Back in November 2024, as I closed my Blink them to death using Embedded Swift presentation at Pragma Conf, I promised to release the source code of the 3 projects I presented before the end of the year. I thought this would be an easy goal to achieve and that I’d finish way sooner. Of course the projects had been prototypes so far, so I wanted to cleanup the code and recheck everything was working as expected.
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