Issue 735

14^th November 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It’s been a few years since the closure of the Swift Weekly Brief newsletter. If you don’t immediately remember it, it was a fantastic, community-run newsletter that covered the Swift language open-source project. It regularly covered detailed information on Swift Evolution proposals, topics from the Swift Forums, and other Swift community news. It even called out interesting commits and pull requests from time to time.

There have been a couple of efforts to replace Swift Weekly Brief over the last few years, but even the Swift Evolution Substack, which showed great promise, has now been quiet for more than a year. I cover Swift news, of course, but I mainly stick to the larger announcements rather than covering anything still going through the Swift Evolution process.

That’s why I’m delighted to see the Swift team tackle this with a new series on the official Swift blog. It started at the very end of October with What’s new in Swift: October 2025 Edition. Written by Dave Lester, with Joe Heck providing a guest contribution, the post does a great job of getting you caught up on what’s happening with the Swift open-source project. It has details of notable Swift Evolution proposals and their status, interesting packages that are either new or recently updated, updates on community projects, and even some links to talks from the recent ServerSide.swift conference. I really like the format, and the reason I opened with memories of Swift Weekly Brief is that this post reminded me of that newsletter in the best way.

The post finishes by asking for community suggestions for items to include in future issues in the Community Showcase section of the Swift Forums. It’s worth noting that this forum has been a great place to let others know about what you’re up to that’s related to Swift, and while it gets a few posts a month, it’d be great to see more shared there, whether you’re looking to try to get what you’ve been doing into a “What’s new in Swift” or not.

I have only one suggestion to make this series even better. Send it by email! I’m biased, but people really like having this kind of round-up content show up in their inbox. Apple already publishes “Hello Developer” via email, and I’d love to see this series of posts go the same way.

– Dave Verwer

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News

There’s been plenty of progress with Swift on Android recently, and this week, Skip.tools has followed up with the announcement that Skip Fuse is now free for independent developers with revenue below $30,000 per year. As a reminder, it’s a tool that enables you to write for both iOS and Android with a single Swift and SwiftUI codebase.

Code

Alex Ozun doesn’t think that Swift Testing’s parameterised testing feature is bad or that you shouldn’t use it. He just has some things to consider before jumping into using the feature with both feet. I especially like his point that parameterising your tests has the potential to introduce logic into your test code that mirrors the code you’re testing.

Chris Eidhof:

However, there is a subtle bug in the initial code that is really hard to spot. The problem is that task runs the code exactly once — when the view appears. When the url property changes, the view’s body will be re-rendered, but the task will not be re-run as the view has already appeared. If you use onAppear instead of task you’ll have exactly the same problem.

The post takes a good look at the problems with task, but make sure you read all the way to the end for Matt Ricketson’s comments on the design behind this API.

I think we’d all be horrified if we thought about how much time and effort had gone into making “pinch-to-zoom” gestures work. It’s such a core feature of iOS and has been present in apps since the very first day the iPhone became available. Did the introduction of MagnifyGesture in iOS 17 solve all our problems? Not quite, even if it is a huge step forward. Gabriel Theodoropoulos explains.

Videos

Here’s another wonderful set of conference videos, this time from #Pragma Conference, which happened just a couple of weeks ago! You should watch them all, of course, but if you need to pick just one then make it Arkadiusz Świętnicki’s incredibly inspiring talk, Joys and challenges of a sightless coder.

Jobs

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And finally...

Did you know both the App Store and Shortcuts logos are actually made up of 3D icons? Proven with 3D printing. 🖨️