Issue 742

6^th February 2026

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I received plenty of feedback on my comment from last week about Swift for Wasm and Windows, and wanted to start this week by highlighting the projects that I heard about.

First up, Yuta Saito told me how Goodnotes has built their whole tech stack on Wasm, enabling them to re-use more than 100k lines of code between platforms. They are even hiring for a couple of roles (1, 2), if you’re interested in using Swift and Wasm together every day. Pedro Gomez also spoke about how they’re using it at NSSpain a few years ago.

Also on the Wasm side, Geoff Pado’s Barcode Generator for his Barc app uses Wasm to generate the barcode images. The project is even open source if you fancy learning from a real-world example.

I also heard about a significant Swift on Windows project, Spark, and I chatted briefly by email with Viktor Gedzenko and Alexander Smarus from Readdle this week about it. I first remember Spark as a native AppKit app back when it launched in 2016, and I also remember them launching a rewrite as a cross-platform Electron app in 2022. What I didn’t realise is that much of that Electron app is backed by Swift code. They use Electron’s N-API to interface with Swift, and there’s even a full tutorial available if you’re curious to give it a go. The process they described certainly had a few rough edges and they were clearly very early adopters, starting to use Swift on Windows in 2019. That said, both Viktor and Alexander were enthusiastic about their decision to use it.

Last week I was curious as to what the next “flagship” product might be for Swift on Windows, and you might be asking yourself if an app with an Electron front-end can ever be that? I absolutely think it can. I know I refer to my comment on things being 100% anything too often, but I still believe that we grow as a community whenever we open to the possibility of integrating Swift with other technologies rather than trying to keep everything Swift-only.

– Dave Verwer

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News

The fact that the Xcode 26.3 release candidate has built-in agent support for Claude Code and Codex has been widely covered this week, so it might not be news to you, but I’ll still link to it along with Apple’s introductory video. I’ll likely write more about this in next week’s newsletter. I have a half formed idea already, so let’s see what 7 days does to it! 😂

What’s potentially even more exciting than the built-in agent support in Xcode 26.3 is what Rudrank Riyam discovered by digging a little deeper into the release. The new release allows Xcode to interface with any agent or agentic IDE, not just the Claude Code and Codex agents that are now officially integrated into Xcode’s UI. Apple even documented the feature, although that article seems to be offline at the time of writing, which may mean that the article was published too early and been taken down.

If you’ve been holding off on building your releases with the version 26 SDKs for iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, visionOS, and watchOS, now is the time to start preparing. The deadline for adopting the new SDKs is the 28th of April.

Code

This new package from Grant Isom doesn’t need much summarising, as the purpose is right there in the title. Simple access to HealthKit data from a SQL-like language. There’s a DSL included, too, in case you crave type safety.

Design

I had missed that Sketch added MCP support at the end of last year, and it’s not just for letting your agent see what you’re working on. It gives full read/write access to your entire document hierarchy, and in this article Freddie Harrison details a selection of workflows that the MCP server enables.

Business and Marketing

This is a good idea from Filip Němeček and seems to already have some traction. If you’d like to promote your app to other developers, here’s a good place to start.

Omar Albeik:

I tried the existing tools but none of them handled RTL or complex scripts well, so I built Birwaz to fix it for myself.

It runs entirely in the browser, no uploads, no accounts, no backend. You pick your device, write your text, import translations (it reads .xcstrings natively), and it renders everything live across all your languages at once. It also uploads directly to App Store Connect through the API so you skip the drag-and-drop dance.

It has a beautiful UI and helps with a persistently annoying task. ❤️

And finally...

A keyboard for work that’s mysterious and important. Please enjoy each keystroke equally. 💼