Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the July update.
It's been a half a year, but I wanted to give you updates since the last
episode back in 204 about what I've been working on and how things are going.
So WWDC has come and gone, and the one app I'm working on that is heavily into the
foundation model stuff is my app Celestra.
I started building it after last year's WWDC and really haven't picked it back up
because, I just wasn't really satisfied with the suggestions I was getting.
So it's a RSS reader, and one of the key parts about it is suggesting RSS
feeds, and it tended to be kind of very repetitive about what it suggested.
So I'm gonna go through that again and see what I can do to improve that now that
we have a lot more tools in foundation models and core AI and all of those APIs.
I want an app that somebody who's kind of a novice when it comes to RSS can pick
it up and start reading articles from feeds that they don't even know about.
So that's kind of the gist of what I'm gonna be doing this summer.
There's a few things with VM stuff and virtualization I wanna pick up with Bushel
and some new, new stuff with workouts.
But otherwise, yeah, Celestra's gonna be the main focus as far as things
I'm gonna do that involve WWDC.
So be on the lookout for that.
Swift Build.
is my open source GitHub action for building Swift packages on multiple
operating systems and platforms.
Recently done some fixes to the way the caching works, added
support for nightly Swift versions.
So if you wanna go on Ubuntu and build it for what is currently nightly is
6.4, which will be coming out probably sometime in September or October.
So you can start building off of beta versions of Swift, 6.4.
Let's see, what else have I done?
We've auto-calculating Xcode schemes.
You had to put in the scheme for building a Swift package.
If you're doing anything Swift packages and you wanna test it on WASM or Android
or Windows, definitely check that out.
It's pretty solid there.
The big app I've been working on lately has been At Least.
At Least is what I like to call a reverse timer.
It's for folks who do meditations or exercises and don't wanna be
notified when the timer has gone off.
They wanna be notified when to keep going and when not to keep going.
For instance, like, I like to just have, like, a breathing
exercise that I do, and we'll do it
I'll say, "I wanna do it for at least five minutes." I don't want to have
the buzzer to go off at five minutes.
I just wanna know that I need to keep going.
And the way I do that is I use haptics.
So it taps your wrist when to keep going every minute or so.
And once it stops tapping you, you know you've met that minimum
time and can either stop or just keep going if you want to.
The big feature I'm working on is iPhone to Apple Watch communication.
I've been doing that a lot.
And what I've ended up building is a new package product called SundialKitContext.
And if you know anything about my suite of libraries when it comes to
SundialKit, they're specially for iPhone to Apple Watch communication
as well as network awareness.
And SundialKitContext has really improved the experience as far as
communicating between watch and phone.
It does a lot of stuff with, like, revisions, stale windows, and
things like that, so that way it's a much more cleaner experience.
So now you can go on the phone, you can pick, you know, your minimum time.
The watch will update, and then you just tap start on the watch to begin.
Eventually I'll be adding stuff like being able to do the timer with just the
phone or being able to use the HealthKit workout API to just be able to start
the timer right on the phone itself.
But for now that's what will be coming out in the next beta.
And then after that, I'm gonna really work on haptics.
I've had some feedback about haptics being too subtle, so be
on the lookout for that as well.
The other big project I've been working on is updating the website.
It shouldn't look any different, but behind the scenes I'm
working on doing a major upgrade.
It uses, Publish by John Sundell, a fantastic library.
But I'm in the process of upgrading it.
I created a fork, and then I'm upgrading it, and then I'm removing a lot
of third-party libraries in favor of first-party ones, for instance.
So like migrating from Shellout to Subprocess, Ink to Swift
Markdown, and things like that.
A lot of upgrades to my own open source libraries.
I'm trying to upgrade to Swift 6.4, which is still obviously in beta, or
Swift 6.3, and I'm working on that.
It's been working pretty smoothly.
The next step, I'm gonna try to see if I can work with the Swift-Node
Interop stuff there to get NPM to work.
So you wanna run like a node module or like some sort of
post-processing stuff with node.
You can do that as well.
I currently do that with the website with Tailwind.
Yeah, you can check out the brightdigit.com repo.
It's open source.
I'll put a link in the show notes.
So be on the lookout for that.
Part of the like the big thing that I've been doing lately is working on open
source libraries within certain products.
So brightdigit.com at least, and some of the other work I've been doing
I use what's called, Git subrepo.
So you probably heard of submodules and a few other ways of working on
multiple repos at the same time.
Ben Sherman got me into Git subrepo, so you can check that out.
And what is really great about it is it works.
It's like a lot better than submodules.
And so what I'll have is like a directory of packages, and each
will have been a subrepo clone.
And subrepo has its set of commands to do up pulls and pushes and dealing with
that, and sometimes I run into conflicts.
Thankfully, we live in a AI-assisted age that can help with that.
I use, local packages to refer to other dependencies.
So you can check out brightdigit.com for an example of how I do that.
If this is a topic you're interested and wanna hear more about, let me know.
I'd love to talk about how I can develop, say, a closed source product
with open source packages or multiple open source Swift packages
at the same time using subrepo.
Let me know if that's something you're interested in.
Before I go I wanted to let you know I'm still available for consultation.
Again, if you need help with Swift automation, AI-assisted development,
or just career coaching you can reach out to me, on my ZCal link and
just reserve a spot, and I'd love to see what I can do to help you.
I've had some really great meetings with some awesome developers who are just
wanting to know what's the next steps in their career, so check that out.
And, I can't go without saying thank you to my Patreon supporters, like
Steve Lipton, thank you so much.
It's been providing me a lot of the momentum that I need to keep going.
If there's anything you want , I highly recommend joining our Patreon.
Episodes come out early.
There's a lot of exclusives as far as things I'm working on and stuff like that.
Let me know also if you have any suggestions about topics you
want me to talk about as well.
I'll be posting the episode for Donny pretty soon, and then I'll be doing an
interview with Saleem who is basically the person behind Swift for Windows.
So I'll be setting up Windows sometime in the next, week so I can play
around with that before I talk to him.
So check that out.
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We'll talk to you later.
Bye, everybody