When building any kind of product it takes a little time before you figure out its shape. Famous games developer Sid Meier described this process as “finding the fun”. …

I read somebody recently complaining that installing Swift projects was hard because SwiftPM has no install command. Avoiding going into my opinion on that (I don’t want SwiftPM to go there), I disagree that maintaining a Homebrew tap is hard. …

As part of my one‐week‐one‐open‐source series this year I have released Workbench. Workbench is (currently) a small app that monitors changes in your “dotfiles”, uploading them to your private iCloud account when changed. There are many “dotfile” backup solutions out there, but I found they all were limited or tedious in some manner. Hence I made my own. Use of iCloud for services like Workbench is something I’d like to see more of from other developers. It is truly zero‐conf, giving your apps sign‐in‐less access to secure and private cloud‐data storage.

This year I will release a new open source project EVERY WEEK. I’m already at five projects this year: swift-sh: trivially run Swift scripts with third party dependencies. Path.swift a delightful, robust, cross-platform and chainable file-pathing library. LegibleError a tool for displaying Swift errors to the user that are less…

I have released Version. A real version object is essential as soon as you have to parse one. And this is often enough, I mean, every app you make has one in its Info.plist. I have for years used the Version.swift that is part of the Swift Package Manager, and…

LegibleError’s goal is to prevent you showing the user a string like this: The operation couldn’t be completed. (ThirdPartyModule.(unknown context at 0xx10d6b4a44).SomeError error 0.) That string is the default localizedDescription for a Swift Error. Instead use LegibleError and you’ll get something more like this: The operation couldn’t be completed. (ThirdPartyModule.SomeError.networkFailure) This way both you and the user are less confused and more informed.

If your Swift project uses swift test on Linux then you are aware that you need to run swift test --generate-linuxmain in order to get for free what you get on Apple platforms, ie. for XCTest to know which tests it runs. …

Last time I talked about deploying and maintaining a Linux server. This time we’re talking about how to commuincate with the APNs communication portal. What is Canopy? Canopy has apps for macOS and iOS, and it’s available here. APNs The Apple Push Notification service. Why is the “s” lowercase? Nobody knows. The service is…

Last time I talked about Swift on Linux from the Cloud provider side, this week is about the Linux side, and considering I expect my audience to have little to no server-side experience, we will be talking about Linux sub-systems. What is Canopy? Canopy has apps for macOS and iOS, and it’s available…