Empower Apps

After ten months away, Leo's back. He covers Swift Craft 2026, the rest of his speaking year (Beer City Code, iOSDevUK), and his honest take on AI dev tooling. Plus updates on MistKit, SyntaxKit, swift-build, MonthBar, and a new watchOS app called AtLeast (in TestFlight now). He's open to work, offering free 30-minute consultations, and a live WWDC 2026 episode is coming. Subscribe so you don't miss it.

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Music from https://filmmusic.io "Blippy Trance" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Leo Dion
Swift developer for Apple devices and more; Founder of BrightDigit; husband and father of 6 adorable kids

What is Empower Apps?

An exploration of Apple business news and technology. We talk about how businesses can use new technology to empower their business and employees, from Leo Dion, founder of BrightDigit.

Actually Really Useful
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[00:00:00]

Hey folks, it's been a while, but welcome to another episode of Empower Apps. I got back from my wonderful trip to England and speaking and doing a workshop at Swift Craft just recovered from a wonderful case of strep, but I am excited to be here to talk to you about what's new and what's been happening in the last 10 months.

Obviously, the big thing in software development over the last 10 months has been AI and AI dev tooling, agentic-assisted development. So we'll definitely be talking about that today. But I want to start off by talking about my conferences this year. So that's essentially my plan for the summer is I just finished up Swift Craft That was wonderful. That was in Folkestone back in May. [00:01:00] I ran a three-hour workshop on Swift automation. I'm hoping to continue posting blog posts, videos about that. If you've seen my work on Tuist and Mise, I go into details about how to set up a project there, and hopefully that that will be a start of a blog series I'll be doing.

I'm working on a thing on Fastlane and Swift packages and CI, so be on the lookout for those. And then, of course, I did my talk on CloudKit for the server, and specifically talking about MistKit which we'll get into later. And I just had a really great experience. Kevin put on a great conference, and it was great to see folks like Joannis talk about WendyOS and Daniel do his talk on Breathe.

Which, you know, nowadays I find this myself, that, I feel like my work is more focused. I've ... If I can find the [00:02:00] article that I had read, but I find that my work is faster and more intense with AI. So, you know, I really appreciated pun intended, Daniel's f- breath of fresh air in regards to that, and just taking breaks and things like that.

Really great talks from Oliver Binz on foundation models, which I've just started playing around with, and I'm excited to see what more gets done next week at WWDC. And then Jan from the Apple Developer Academy in Naples, which was really cool, and stuff from Lucy about the about enums, which I totally agree with.

They'll sh- hopefully share videos, 'cause there were some really good talks. I can't even go and list them all. But yeah, and then that was Swift Craft and then I'll be speaking in Grand Rapids this August fift- 14th through [00:03:00] 15th. I'll be speaking the 15th at Beer City Code. I'll be doing my Swift automation workshop, but as a talk, and then I'll also be talking about vibe coding and agentic software development there as well.

So be on the lookout for that as well. If you're interested in getting a preview of that, I did that at the Boston and New York developer groups earlier this year. So if you I'll put a link to the Boston talk specifically so you can check that out. And then I will be in Wales this September to speak at iOSDevUK and there I will be giving my talk on CloudKit as the backend.

So, more stuff about MistKit so I'm excited for that as well. Just kind of want to give you, you know, my brief views on AI, [00:04:00] 'cause there's been a lot going on. I feel like we're current- sort of at a somewhat bubble phase with regards to it. I'm kind of hearing a lot more Companies are not really interested in getting you to spend as much on tokens as you used to.

And I was pretty skeptical of it at first, just with being burnt on VR NFTs in crypto. It felt like the latest new thing. But then as I started using ChatGPT in '22, you know, I could see, yeah, this is actually really useful for things. And lately I've deep dived into it. A lot of my work over the last year has been all done through Claude Code.

Starting to try to get more into Codex and other things I wanna learn, like skills and agents and that kind of stuff. And I think where it [00:05:00] really excels is a lot of boilerplate and tests and docs. If it, if there's a pattern, existing pattern out there, it's pretty good at applying that to what you're doing.

I think what's gonna end up being a problem in the next couple weeks is Apple is not gonna have a lot of... Well, Apple will have some example code, but the models at least won't be trained on it. So I think that's gonna be a problem next week. We'll see if new APIs and various things are gonna be available.

I know it took me six months to teach it that macOS 26 and iOS 26 were actually real and released, but hopefully we don't run into that again with 27. We'll see. But yeah, in my talk I go over more stuff like power grabbing issues and misaligned testing and things like that. So we'll, yeah, we'll talk about that in a future video hopefully.

And you can also check my talk as well at Beer City Code, or check out the video I did at Boston. [00:06:00] So when it comes to s- the Swift automation stuff, what I talk about there is kind of how we have this great AI tool available to us, and what I'm trying to set up now is a way to like automate a lot of the process that takes away from the creativity, I guess, and the coding of developing a, an app.

Things like setting up your Xcode project, setting up your App Store, Fastlane stuff so you can get a smooth delivery to the App Store CI, your developer tools, et cetera, and have it easily re- repli- replicatable, not only in CI, but for other developers on your team. One of the things I do is I've built and I just released a new version, 1.5.5 I believe, of swift-build which allows you to easily build a Swift package for any platform or OS.

And that [00:07:00] means for visionOS, for Windows Server 2025, for Android, for WASM if you're doing web stuff. It does all that. And it makes it really easy for you to set up a Swift package CI for all those OSs. So yeah, I'm kind of working on that. That was basically the crux of my workshop and it is what what I'll be doing my blog series on and hopefully we'll get some videos out on that as well.

So yeah, that would be the Swift automation side of things as far as AI is concerned. And then as far as projects that I've been working on, so we've got packages. I jumped back into MistKit I did a whole talk about how I jumped back into it, thanks to Cl- Claude Code and the OpenAPI generator. Hopefully that'll come out, and then you probably will see my blog post on that as well.

But basically, the idea behind MistKit is I've run into [00:08:00] situations ... Previously with Heartwitch I had been doing some stuff where I was allowing you to link your Apple Watch to the website using CloudKit, and so I had to use MistKit for, of the Vapor app to pull your Apple Watch essentially from that.

And then the, that way your Apple Watch can easily authenticate and send health stats. So, that was the private database, but then I've started more dabbling into the public database stuff. With Bushel, I wanna move over all the restore images and that, that database to a public CloudKit database, and then that way there's a central repo where you can pull up all the versions of macOS that you can run in a Bushel VM.

So I'm working on that. And there's another app I'm working on, if you've heard about, where I was gonna u- have MistKit use that to pull RSS feeds and store that in CloudKit. [00:09:00] So there were a lot of things where CloudKit on the server made sense, and that's where MistKit is. I'm, like, got ... I wanna say there's a few things with Zones I gotta finish up and some stuff with sharing that I need to get into.

I just added subscriptions and notifications, which is really sweet. So yeah, we talked about swift-build SyntaxKit I want to keep working on that. Building a DSL for creating Swift code. It'll be really helpful for folks who are doing anything with macros 'cause they can h- basically write Swift code using s- kind of like a SwiftUI-type syntax.

I'm excited for that, and I'll be... It's a really great way to experiment with AI and agentic coding, so yeah, that's gonna be awesome. And then as far as apps, obviously I'll keep working on Bushel. I'm working on some really cool stuff with guest tools and the thing with CloudKit, so that'll be moving along.

And then I've run into an issue [00:10:00] where there's some tools, agentic tools, where the tokens reset every month. So I've begun a r- launch an app called MonthBar which allows you to see how much is left in the month, and that way you can kind of gauge whether what type of model you wanna use and whether you want to use a more high effort, expensive model, or you want to use a cheaper model until your time is up and then start switching.

So definitely check out MonthBar there. And then I am currently working on a watchOS app called At Least. I do s- stuff like exercises or meditations where it's not really a... Like I don't want to set a timer for when to stop. I want to set a timer for how long I want to do it for at least a certain amount of time.

And so the idea would be is like I want to do like pushups [00:11:00] for a minute, but I, if I do it more than a minute, like b- better for it, right? Or I'd want to do a meditation for 15 minutes, but at least 15 minutes. But if I go over, that's fine. If I go under, that's a problem. And so the idea behind At Least is it uses haptics to tap your wrist while you're active doing something.

And you could set how strong you want those taps are, and then the taps will... It'll stop tapping you when the timer is up. And then you can tap it on your wrist to stop the timer, and it'll let you know if you're done or not, basically. So that is currently in test flight, so you can check that out.

I'll post a link to the website. It's atleast.app, and MonthBar is month.bar. Really memorable names for domains. So check that out. I'm looking forward to more testers and users of these apps and ideas, so let me know in the comments [00:12:00] below or in the reviews or social media, whatever. So, as far as, like, work right now, I I am looking for new work.

I am looking to help your team when it comes to Swift, agentic development. It could be freelance, contract, part-time, full-time dev relations, SDK work. Let me know. Reach out to me. I am available for that this summer. And then I'm gonna be offering my time for free to folks who need help with their software development career, need some guidance or coaching.

Or if you want some help with AI-assisted development automation, CI automation, Swift-specific automation yeah, let's chat. I'm offering my time to you. It's 30-minute slots. I'll post a link to the consultation s- calendar through ZCal. It's zcal.co/leogdion/consultation. Or you can just email me leo@brightdigit.com or reach out to me on social.

But if you [00:13:00] wanna get a slot, get them quickly it... 'cause they're gonna be going fast. So free 30-minute consultation, zcal.co/leogdion/consultation last but not least, as far as podcasts, I'll be recording episodes at least this summer. With WWDC coming, I wanna get those in, and I wanna talk about what's new, and I wanna talk about AI, I wanna talk about what the future of Swift.

So reach out to me if you're interested in coming on. I'd love to hear from you. The next episode will be the one with Joannis which I'm recording tomorrow. So I'm excited to talk to Joannis His stuff with WendyOS is really interesting. I enjoyed his show- his showcase, his what do you call it?

Workshop. So I'm really excited to check that out and talk about that on the podcast about Swift Everywhere. So we did that episode w- with Mark on Android, so we'll be kind of expanding on that. And [00:14:00] then, I will be doing another episode with Peter next Monday June 8th. The ... We'll figure out a time, but basically another keynote and platform state of the union discussion.

If you're on Patreon, you can check out the live stream we'll be doing. We might even do it on YouTube for everybody else, so check that out for sure. And then I'm working on getting the newsletter back up, moving that from Mailchimp to Buttondown, which is gonna be so much nicer. So if you're not a subscriber to the newsletter, I'll post a link in the notes, so check that out.

And then I just wanna thank everybody first of all, my Patreon supporters, like Steve Lipton, who've really helped me a lot with everything and that's been fantastic, but the folks on social media as well who've been really encouraging and loved some of the stuff I've been putting out this year already.

If you're not a Patreon supporter, definitely consider it, because more and more [00:15:00] stuff is gonna be going there and early access to episodes, discussions, you know, first access to stuff. So check that out. Subscribe to the newsletter https://buttondown.com/brightdigit Link again in the show notes. And then if you like my show, a review would be super helpful.

Please leave a review in your podcast player or subscribe. Like and subscribe, I believe is what they say on YouTube, so that would be super helpful as well. Thank you again. I am glad to be back, and I'm looking forward to chatting with Joannis tomorrow and chatting with Peter next week. So subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube channel if you wanna make sure you don't miss those.

And then, yeah, follow me on social media @leogdion, @leogdion@c.im. My company is BrightDigit. Again, if you wanna chat with me, I'm available. You can schedule a time at [00:16:00] zcal.co/leogdion/consultation. Thank you everybody, and I look forward to talking again. Bye.