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. To help those who want to contribute, he also opened up the livestream recording to everyone.

You might already be using Helm for this purpose. I tested it in the past, it works great and I have a lot of respect for the work done by Pol and Hidde. But being able to participate in the creation of the application and somehow drive where it’s going is really interesting. Plus, enabling the application to be available to the widest audience possible feels really rewarding.

If you have some ideas, design or coding skills or a bit of time, join me in contributing to this great initiative.

SwiftCraft

SwiftCraft held its second edition last week, and as for the first one, I was there.

The conference takes place in Folkstone, UK at a great venue call the Leas Cliff Hall.

They made some changes compared to the previous edition, the major one being that it was now a single track, which I appreciated very much.
The speaker lineup was diverse, featuring returning speakers, high-profile keynotes presenters and new speakers who where taking their first stab at presenting.
Overall the quality was excellent and I connected with most sessions.

They also hosted a one-hour slot for lightning talks, and I had the privilege of giving a 5-minute presentation on cryptography basics. I was thrilled to receive positive feedback afterward and will probably submit a longer version to upcoming conferences.
If you want to check it out, the slides are available on GitHub.

I was surprised attendance wasn’t higher for this second edition, but honestly, I didn’t mind. The cozy vibe was a great opportunity to talk with the speakers and the participants. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to familiar faces and meeting new ones.

Creating a badge

Of course, when going to a conference, I always have an idea for a specific project, and of course it’s always a last minute thing.

When presenting at #pragma 2024 last year, I had created the Arc Reactor to show case an Embedded Swift project but also as a high-tech conference badge. It turned out rather un-practical, with the finished contraption being quite heavy.

This time, I tried another spin on the badge concept, using a lightweight and power efficient eInk screen.

It is still powered by Embedded Swift, running on a nRF52840 microcontroller. It displays typical badge info, a logo of the conference or a QR code linking to this blog. All of this is controlled from an iPhone app over BLE.

While I reused some code from the Arc Reactor project, it was still done in a rush, with some code debugging on-site during session breaks.
As with my other projects, I intend to fully open source it, including the 3D models that I created for the enclosure. It might take a while though, as the code is really not in a “share-worthy” state.

Embedded Swift documentation effort

A few weeks ago, Rauhul posted on the Swift forums about Evolving Embedded Swift Documentation and invited community contributions.

Given my involvement with Embedded Swift and my interest in writing about it, I was immediately on board.

Last Thursday, just after returning from SwiftCraft, I joined a call with some community members to discuss the next steps. Over the week-end, I reviewed the existing documentation and submitted some early fixes.

I believe the current state of this documentation is already a major step forward compared to what was available last year when Embedded Swift was announced. But we must, as a community, continue the effort, in order to foster a wider adoption of Swift in this space.

It doesn’t have to be big, even just indicating what you feel is missing from the doc or which part you had trouble understanding, are incredibly valuable. Take a look at the aforementioned post and welcome on-board.

Tech news

A lot has happened in the tech world over the past few days.

Anthropic announced Claude 4 models, and they look promising. While I still mostly use ChatGPT, I’ve started trying Claude for programming related tasks.

Google hosted its Google IO conference, during which they made a ton of announcements related to AI but also in the AR/XR space. I’ve only watched a quick recap but I get the feeling Android is not the star of the show it once was.

And of course, it was difficult to miss the Sam and Jony show, OpenAI acqui-hire of Jony Ive’s io company.
That last one reignited my interest in AI wearables and I finally took a bit of time to do a quick, super long overdue, update on the list of such products I maintain (more updates to come).

Conclusion

That’s it for this time, and honestly, it’s probably too much. I should limit the number of projects I’m working on. But then again, who’s counting when you’re having fun?

If you’d like to share which one is your favorite, ping me on Mastodon.