Issue 750

8^th May 2026

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

This is the seven hundred and fiftieth issue of this little newsletter, so I hope you’ll forgive a little introspection. 😱

When I first started tinkering with Objective-C in 2006, I had no idea it would set me on a whole new career trajectory. I’d recently left a job working with C# and ASP.NET to start a small business writing Ruby on Rails apps on the brand new Intel Mac I’d just bought.

It was Ruby on Rails (along with SubEthaEdit) that brought me to the Mac, but once I had arrived I wanted to learn more about how it worked. I put my free time into learning Objective-C, wrote some little Mac widgets and apps, and learned everything I could about Cocoa.

I really loved what I found, and not just in the language or frameworks, but in the community. I met wonderful people online, attended a few conferences in the UK, and made my way out to WWDC for the first time to meet even more while queuing in the cold around the back of Moscone West, waiting to see Steve Jobs take the stage.

When I started this newsletter in 2011 it was partly because I wanted to become even more involved in that community. I enjoyed other community-digest email newsletters, and with no one else covering Apple-platform development in that format, I figured it might be something I could do. I had no idea I’d still be writing it almost 15 years later in 2026.

But as much as I did become a bigger part of that community, what I built would not have been possible without you all. I did a very rough calculation and I’d say I’ve probably read around half a million blog posts/articles over the years and turned that into almost 20,000 links back to the community over 750 issues. It is a privilege to be so connected to the community through reading everything you all blog about each week, and I’ve only been able to keep writing for this long because you all continue to read. ❤️

The community is so much richer and more diverse than it was back in 2011 when iOS Dev Weekly started. So many more people are writing about Swift and Apple-platform development, and I’d like to think this newsletter played a small part in helping that to happen.

– Dave Verwer

News

Apple announced this year’s Swift Student Challenge winners this week. There are 350 winners in total, and this post highlights four outstanding entries covering everything from helping people with hand tremors to paint again, to helping people who get nervous when speaking in public gain confidence. Worthy winners, all of them!

Code

I can’t believe I’ve not yet linked to Cupertino, the MCP server that crawls, indexes, and serves Apple’s developer documentation to AI agents. Now seems like a great time to change that with the release of 1.0.0, which Mihaela Mihaljević Jakić describes as:

The first release I’d actually call stable.

Sounds like a perfect time to check it out if you’ve not already.

Josh Adams:

Hardening ios-build-verify was the part of the development arc I least anticipated and the part that most changed the artifact. The skill itself took about a week to write. The hardening cycle that followed took about three days, and the artifact at the end of those three days was meaningfully different from the artifact at the start.

Give your agent the ability to test its changes out in the simulator using the accessibility APIs and Josh’s ios-build-verify plugin for Claude Code. The article itself is a highly detailed look at why you need something like this, and some of the issues he faced when developing it.

I loved Paulo Andrade’s post where he dives into adding that last layer of macOS polish. Is it possible to get there with SwiftUI? It really should be, but unfortunately he concludes that we’re still not quite there yet. Depressingly, he concludes that it might not even be a priority:

Looking through past Apple Design Awards, Agenda in 2018 may well have been the last truly Mac-assed winner. That feels revealing.

I really hope we get there one day, with this level of polish becoming possible in SwiftUI. I love a good Mac-assed Mac app.

Business and Marketing

Mike Swanson:

One of the most dangerous things about analytics is that they feel objective. A chart is a chart. A number is a number. They have the aesthetic of truth.

I really enjoyed this look at how software has evolved over the years, and whether it’s any better as a result. My view is slightly less critical than Mike’s, but it made me think, and I’m sure it will make you do the same.

Videos

One of the things I love about try! Swift Tokyo is the completely (well, mostly) different lineup of speakers. If you didn’t manage to make it to Japan, give some of the videos a watch this weekend!

And finally...

Swift on a Game Boy Advance? Yep!