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A couple of announcements combined to inspire this week’s comment.
First, yesterday’s announcement of the Swift on Windows Workgroup. This feels long overdue since Swift has supported the Windows platform since 2020, but I’m still glad to see it happen.
It was always going to be an uphill struggle for Swift adoption in Windows apps, and while the Arc Browser was the flagship Swift on Windows project, its discontinuation was a real shame. Not only for Swift on Windows, but also for me personally, as I loved it and had used it as my default browser for years.
Flagship projects like that are so important for showing people what technology can do on a platform, which brings me to my second announcement. It was a few weeks ago now, but Simon Leeb’s announcement of Elementary UI also caught my eye. It’s a Swift front-end framework that runs in the browser via Wasm.
I’m not aware of any current and significant Wasm projects built with Swift¹, and even if I missed some, the ecosystem would certainly benefit from more!
I don’t dislike JavaScript, and actually quite enjoy its simplicity when working client-side in the browser. In fact, I’ll be even more honest and say that I would need quite some convincing before I would consider a Wasm-based framework that interacted with the DOM, especially knowing that all DOM access from Wasm still needs to go through JavaScript. That said, I’m delighted to see a real-world open source project that is pushing Wasm into real use-cases.
We need flagship projects for all these new platforms, and I’m happy to see Wasm might have one in Elementary UI. What will replace Arc as the flagship for Swift on Windows? I hope the newly formed workgroup is already asking this question. I’m sure they are.
– Dave Verwer
¹ Please let me know if I missed any Wasm or Windows projects built with Swift. Open source or commercial, it doesn’t matter to me! Just hit reply.
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Code
Introducing FabBar: The Liquid Glass Tab Bar I Wish Apple MadeI linked to Ryan Ashcraft’s post criticising the liquid glass tab bar last week. It turns out he is a man of action, publishing FabBar this week, a replacement tab bar that adds a single, floating, action button next to a tab bar while keeping the Liquid Glass effects. Read the full post for how he got here, and to see if it might suit your app.
Migrating an iOS app from Paid up Front to Freemium
Regardless of how you implement in-app purchases, you can use StoreKit to check when a user first installed your app. This lets you identify users who paid for the app before it went free and automatically grant them lifetime access.
There’s some great advice in this post if you’re looking to make the switch from paid-up-front to freemium.
Reverse masking in SwiftUI using blend modes
Here’s a nice quick tip from Artem Mirzabekian if you want to let your background shine through!
Design
Backseat SoftwareIf you want to announce a feature, fine. Put it somewhere predictable.
If you want to educate, fine. Let me ask for help.
If you want to survey me, fine. Ask at a sensible moment and accept “no” as a real answer.
Most importantly, if I turn something off, it should stay off! A tool should not require me to keep saying “not now.” Or conveniently “forget” my choices in its next update.
This is a fantastic essay, worth reading all the way to the end. I don’t think we will ever get back to truly “quiet” software, but it’s worth considering how we could all take steps towards it.
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