Issue 740

23^rd January 2026

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

The best part of this week (related to the industry, at least!) was finding and using Marcin Krzyzanowski’s beta of his new Commander app for Claude Code and Codex CLI.

The headline feature is a macOS native interface to the agent with support for multiple projects, session history persistence, and easy access to open other editors and tools you might want to work with after the agent does its thing. It also supports working with git for committing changes, or managing work trees. There’s even a basic project view in the right-hand sidebar.

I know all the cool developers are managing armies of coding agents from their phones, but I’m one of those dinosaurs that still sit at a desk when I’m working. 😂 A Mac app is perfect for me, and a native one is even better.

Obviously, Claude Code is great for long sessions working on a codebase, but I’ve also started using it for smaller tasks in directories with lots of text files, like the iOS Dev Weekly site source code directory. I open it up and ask it questions like “when did I last link to X” or “how many times have I talked about Y recently” as I’m writing each issue. The combination of the LLM deciding what terms to search for and the accuracy of the search being performed by command line tools is fantastic. It’s also great for working with non-code text files if you need to process them with command line tools in any way. Commander is great for use cases like this, where opening up terminals and launching a session there might feel like too much trouble.

It’s clearly early days for Commander, and it really is a beta rather than a finished product. There are also features I’d love to see, like being able to see what Claude is doing, as you can in the terminal app, rather than it being a pure chat interface. That said, I’ve reached for it several times this week and it has made me glad I did every time. I’d recommend giving it a try.

– Dave Verwer

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News

Marc Prud’hommeaux on the future of Skip.tools:

Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool. What if the company goes under? Gets acquired and shut down? What happens to their apps? We get it.

This has been the biggest issue facing small companies building developer tools for a long time, and I wish them luck supporting the project through sponsorship. Skip is a genuinely important project for cross-platform Swift.

Code

I enjoyed this balanced look at coding agents from Benj Edwards that he wrote after creating fifty projects using them. Some of what he says is common sense, but I’d say it’s still worth reading if you want something that’s neither overly pessimistic nor gushing.

Of course, I hope it goes without saying that if you’re interested in AI, iOS Dev Weekly shouldn’t be your first port of call, as it’s not the primary focus of this newsletter. I’d thoroughly recommend Simon Willison’s Weblog as the best place for AI-related news and analysis. I also really like the idea of his “Pay me to send you less!” newsletter.

I’ve talked about SwiftGodot several times now, and with Xogot (which I also wrote about) now released, I feel confident saying it’s the best supported high-quality game engine if you want to write your code in Swift. But what if you wanted to write ResultBuilder style code? SwiftGodotBuilder by John Susek should meet your needs.

Gestures? Sure, I can do those! Oh, you want multiple gestures? Yeah, I can … erm … yeah, I can do that. What? You want simultaneous, in-sequence, and exclusive gestures? 🫨 Well, you had better talk to Gabriel Fernandes Thomaz and Tiago Gomes Pereira about that. 😂 You might want to check out their previous article, Understanding gesture hierarchy, too.

Design

Ryan Ashcraft:

Meanwhile, the search tab’s button-like appearance is training users to expect a primary action button in that position. Apps are delivering on that expectation, whether by hijacking the search tab or emulating the tab bar entirely. Users see those apps, then open mine, and wonder why it looks wrong. The line between navigation and action is blurring—and with it, the predictability that makes iOS feel coherent.

It’s a valid problem, and while I think the HIG would probably recommend placing the button in the navigation bar, I agree that’s not the right place for it in 2026.

Videos

I had missed that NSSpain had finished releasing videos from last year’s conference. As always, they had a great line-up of speakers, and you’re sure to find at least a few talks here that will interest you.

Jobs

Senior iOS Engineer @ alba – We have a unique approach to identifying opportunities, entering markets, and scaling our products. This approach puts us on a fast trajectory for maximizing the reach and delight our products create. Founded about three years ago, our products have been used by more than 50M users. – Remote (within European timezones) or on-site (United Kingdom)

And finally...

There are only two hard problems in software development: cache invalidation and naming things.