I recently modified one of my apps, Conjugar, to use SwiftUI rather than UIKit for its settings screen. I hereby present, for the reader’s edification and enjoyment, some observations and learnings from this process. I cover:
A significant portion of my workday consists of browsing and grokking code that other people have written. I have had the experience of being frustrated, upon encountering a trailing closure, not knowing the name or therefore purpose of the argument being passed. This frustration initially caused me to consider forswearing trailing closures in my side projects. But with the benefit of contemplation and research, I have concluded that trailing closures are sometimes useful. This post describes how I reached this conclusion, recounts the history of trailing closures, and describes an analog from Kotlin.
In the past couple of years, I have spoken to several aspiring iOS developers about what kind of hobby app they should make after escaping the tutorial trap. By “hobby app”, I mean an app for which one does not intend to be paid at all by an employer or enough by users to cover one’s living expenses. As someone who used hobby apps to jump-start his iOS-development career and who continues to develop hobby apps, I am interested in this question. I share my thinking in this post with the hope of providing thought-food to anyone considering development of a hobby app.