Issue 730

10^th October 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Apple announced a trio of new packages at last week’s ServerSide.swift conference. First up, and worthy of a blog post on Swift.org, is swift-profile-recorder, a new sampling profiler for server-side Swift apps.

Next, swift-configuration is also primarily intended for server-side apps, but it fills an important gap for defining and accessing configuration data for command-line tools.

Finally, swift-temporal-sdk is a client for Temporal, the open-source workflow orchestration engine for building durable and distributed apps. This package is notable since it’s rare to see Apple write and host a package for a commercial service, even if it is based on an open-source product. Don’t get me wrong, though, I don’t mean to imply that endorsement is a bad thing! It’s great to see Swift able to interface with products like Temporal. It’s just notable. 👍

It’s great to see Apple announce more packages to expand what’s possible with server-side Swift. It’s also great to see Apple continue to make announcements and give talks at community conferences like ServerSide.swift and FOSDEM. I call it out every year, and if you agree with me, you should do the same on your blog or social media. I’m sure the people responsible for deciding whether it continues in future years read the community reaction.

Oh, and I promise not to talk about server-side Swift again next week. 😬 I’m aware that it’s been dominating this “Comment” section for the last few issues.

– Dave Verwer

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News

It’s been a while since I mentioned AltStore PAL, the (currently) EU-exclusive third-party app store developed by Riley Testut and Shane Gill and funded by Epic. This week saw them post an update covering their progress so far and some of their plans for the future, including securing new funding, changing their company to a public benefit corporation, and potentially expanding into other countries. They are also launching ActivityPub support, starting with a Mastodon server, but they have interesting plans for pushing typed SoftwareRelease data around.

This announcement from Apple only applies to developers in South Korea, but it actually made me notice some features of Sign in with Apple that I wasn’t aware of. Did you know that Apple will notify you via an API endpoint when someone deletes their Apple account or when they change their email forwarding preferences? The news article recommends this WWDC session video or this documentation for more information. If you use Sign in with Apple for account creation, I’d give them a look, even if supporting these features is only mandatory in South Korea so far. It sounds like all apps should react to these events.

Code

This new Technote from Apple contains a whole host of tips on how to manage the 4K context window in Apple’s foundation model. If you’re using the model in any of your apps, this should be essential reading. It’s straight from the source.

You must know the rules by now. If you’re embedding an AI-related text area or other control in an Apple platform app, you must surround it with a purple, pink, and orange glow that gently pulsates. How do you make one? Well, you could start by reading Artem Mirzabekian’s latest post. The technique in the post doesn’t get the effect quite right, leaving the middle of the control a little muddy, but it’s a great start.

Natalia Panferova:

Text truncation can still occur even when the UI element containing the text is inside a scroll view and can grow infinitely. I had run into similar truncation issues before, but they seem to have become more frequent in iOS 26.

Interesting article on a little quirk of Dynamic Type. It’s also a great reminder to add SwiftUI Previews for different Dynamic Type settings.

Jobs

iOS Product Engineer @ Tolan – At Tolan, we’ve built the world’s first voice-native embodied AI companion in a Swift 6 app, working alongside an Apple Design Award winning creative team to bring the Tolan characters to life. We work hard, with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. We work together in-person in downtown SF. – On-site (United States in CA) with some remote work (within US timezones)

And finally...

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.