SwiftUI apps
We're highlighting SwiftUI apps. Get to know great app developers, that talk about writing apps in SwiftUI..
I’ve been swearing a lot at SwiftUI these days. That’s when you curse at a web UI that tells you that no more tickets are available for the concert, even though you waited for hours in a virtual line and orchestrated three people on five internet connections to try and get a good seat. 😤 #TaylorSwiftTheErasTour.
What’s making people a lot more happy (most of the time) is Apple’s SwiftUI framework, which is gaining more and more momentum in the Apple developer world for iOS and macOS. Today, we‘ve asked our customers what they love most about working with SwiftUI and how it has improved their workflow.
Please find the details about our Member Shoutouts (and the upcoming topics) here.
Cronica helps you keep track of your favorite movies and episodes
Cronica: Watchlist
Be reminded of upcoming movies
Cronica is an app that focuses on helping users build their watch list and keep track of watched episodes and their favorite upcoming titles. Built with SwiftUI at its core, Cronica is available on every Apple platform, including iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and soon visionOS. Users can enjoy smart features like Up Next, which provides a list of upcoming released episodes in the Home tab, making it easier to keep track of what to watch next. Additionally, Cronica utilizes The Movie Database and JustWatch to show users where their favorite content is streaming.
Alexandre: Cronica is my first SwiftUI app that has been published, and I learn so much with this project. What started as only an iOS app quickly expanded to all platforms (macOS, tvOS, watchOS), and all of this is thanks to SwiftUI and how it lets me reuse the UI code and rewrite what needs to be adapted without needing to learn another framework. What I find incredible about SwiftUI is how easily I can express my UI ideas with it thanks to its syntax, it feels like I’m describing the UI in plain English. The syntax and the community make the framework so approachable and enjoyable to work with. SwiftUI is awesome!
Cronica is an open-source app: GitHub
Control the brightness of your monitors with DisplayBuddy
DisplayBuddy
Control external displays directly from your Mac
DisplayBuddy lets users control the real brightness of their monitors directly from their Mac, without touching the buttons on their monitor, helping reduce the real energy usage of their monitor, while also reducing eye strain! Now also available for Windows.
Siddharth: DisplayBuddy just went through a complete redesign from the ground up using SwiftUI with a brand-new look, and even more new features that make it an essential app for folks using monitors with their Mac. We even released on Windows recently! We're very proud of these launches, and they are the culmination of the last 6 months work on Mac and Windows.
Working on SwiftUI on Mac has been a really refreshing experience, and I've been able to spend more time crafting beautiful interfaces than just dealing with AppKit quirks. Combined with SFSymbols, it has also allowed me to build delightful little interactions and animations into DisplayBuddy. While there's still components here and there which don't look as great on Mac as they do on iOS or iPadOS, it's still a great productivity boost and a lot of fun to work with.
Create flowing timers with TimeWave
TimeWave
Create flowing timers
Timewave is an app that allows you to create flowing timers, i.e chains of timers that fire one after the other. You can create workouts, cooking timers, pomodoro timers, etc. That means you can create a timer that fires after 10 minutes on your phone, right? But, what if you could create another one that started right after the current timer and fired 20 minutes after that, and another one that fires 5 minutes after that? And on on on…
Sahil already built an iOS 17 version of TimeWave. The beta is ready with full of iOS17 features like
- Interactive Live Activities
- Interactive Widgets
- Standby Mode
You can get the TestFlight here
Sahil: TimeWave has been a SwiftUI app since the beginning. Our v1.0 was built with SwiftUI v1 as well. Compared to those days, when technology was very limited, we have come a long way. At the time, making SwiftUI v1 work was a real challenge. There were a lot of bugs and not much help online as it was new technology. I had to resort to using UIViewRepresentable & UIViewControllerRepresentable quite a lot, which had its own issues. However, SwiftUI has matured really well over the past few releases and right now, I would say working with it is quite pleasant. I think SwiftUI really became a feasible tech to adopt in the v3 release. At this point, I really enjoy writing SwiftUI code and TimeWave would not have been possible without SwiftUI.
Manage your inventory of medicines with Ampoule
Ampoule
Manage your inventory of medicines.
Ampoule was developed by a doctor to help track the drugs in the medical bag. The first version was released in 2017, but Ampoule 2 was released in July 2022 and is built with SwiftUI. Now it helps healthcare professionals, rescue teams and first-responders manage their inventory of medicines.
Start your favorite shows conveniently in one place with TV Launcher
TV Launcher
Quickly launch channels within other streaming apps.
TV Launcher provides a way for users in the UK, US or Ireland to be able to quickly launch channels within other streaming apps. Designed primarily for tvOS, and available for all Apple platforms, there is support for a full TV Guide, Now & Next, an Up Next queue, Widgets, Shortcuts and more that make it easy to find something to watch and jump straight to it.
Adam: SwiftUI has made designing and building apps for Apple platforms a joy over the past few years - and it keeps getting better. After getting to grips with it, I’ve been converting all of my existing to it and any new ones, including TV Launcher, have been built using the framework.
The ability to use shared components across multiple Apple platforms has made it far easier to support devices like the Mac and soon Apple Vision Pro. It is of course not without its quirks, but the ability to fall back to UIKit/AppKit has meant I’ve been able to create the apps exactly how I’d like.
Organize your PrEP intake with Preppy
Preppy
Track your PrEP (Pre-exposure prophylaxis) intake
Preppy is built for sexually active gay men to track their PrEP (Pre-exposure prophylaxis) intake - a pill taken to prevent HIV infection - as well as their sexual activity and doctor's appointments with test results. The app was featured as App of the Day for World AIDS Day 2022.
Compare price per unit with Per
Per
Compare price per unit
Per helps you shop smarter by figuring out what gets you more for your money. It's the easiest, fastest way to compare price per unit. Just enter the price and quantity for each option, then tap the Compare button to find out which one costs less per unit. Use the built-in calculator for basic arithmetic and let the app handle unit conversion for you while you compare! Per is free to download on the App Store.
Angelo: Per was originally written in Swift 2. Last year, I rewrote the entire app in SwiftUI (and integrated TelemetryDeck, of course!) and released v1.3.
I originally wrote Per to learn Swift, Apple’s new (at the time) programming language. Around the time Swift 3 was released, I found I didn’t have the time to update the app anymore, so it spent some years in a “works well enough” state — until Apple sent an email saying it needed to be updated, or it would be removed from the App Store.
The amount of work required to update the old codebase to modern Swift wasn’t worth the effort, so instead I reached for SwiftUI, having already built a few apps of varying complexity with Apple’s declarative framework. In a few days, I managed to rewrite the entire app with several new features. SwiftUI is now my go-to for any new work I do on Apple’s platforms.
Watch the latest Movie Trailers for free with Front Row Trailers
Front Row Trailers
Watch the latest Movie Trailers
Watch the latest Movie Trailers for free, without ads! Front Row Trailers presents the latest previews in a beautiful way, while remaining very easy to use. Simply scroll to browse available trailers, then click the name of the movie to play the trailer. You can see more information like release date, director and actors, and read a synopsis.
Conath: When working with SwiftUI, I love the fast iteration speed and reduced boilerplate compared to UIKit. There are some issues, though. There have been changes between iOS versions that cause my CoverFlow to break, requiring me to make an app update to fix it. And when I tried to add widgets to the Mac app, it would always open a new window when the widget was clicked, instead of showing the existing window. I couldn’t find an easy fix, and since this is a side project, decided to abandon the Mac widget feature.
Front Row Trailers is an open-source app: GitHub
Record your blood glucose to HealthKit with Glucomate
Glucomate
Glucomate is an app for people who record their blood glucose to HealthKit.
Glucomate is an app for people who record their blood glucose to HealthKit, and want to use an app to help visualize, analyze and make sense of the data collected over time.
Zach: How is SwiftUI going for Glucomate? It's going very well. SwiftUI, and in particular the Swift Charts framework introduced at WWDC22 was great motivation to finish off parts of the app I'd been putting off until then which was how to visualize/display certain types of data. Glucomate is all about visualizing your blood glucose data, and so having a robust charting library built to be used in a SwiftUI app has enabled faster development, and made certain things easier along the way by not having to manually build all my own charts which comes with complexities such as handling weird sates and edge cases, needing to scale down to smaller device screen sizes such as Apple Watch, etc.
Track your life's progress
Life Progress
The Life Progress app empowers users to track their life goals and visualize their progress, facilitating a journey of personal growth and achievement.
Bartosz: Life Progress is an iOS app built with SwiftUI. It utilizes TelemetryDeck for analytics purposes. I used TelemetryDeck here for the first time and I was shocked how easy it was to integrate a private analytics service into my app.
Control your Tesla from your iPhone and your Apple Watch with S3XY Watch
S3XY Watch
Control your Tesla.
You no longer need to pull your iPhone out of your pocket every time you want to check your Tesla or tell it what to do. With S3XY Watch, you just need to raise your wrist to interact with your Tesla.
Discover parks and find hikes with Rheaparks
Rheaparks
Discover parks, find hikes and plan your trip or vacation.
Rheaparks is a free app that helps you discover parks, find hikes and plan your trip or vacation. We provide many details to the user, including statistics about the hikes, rules, and trail maps. We currently cover 11 natural parks in France, and we’re always working on adding more. For now, we're focusing on France before expanding to Europe.
Recently, we’ve added a new feature that allows anyone, anywhere, to record a hike on their iPhone. Which allows you to use tools such as 3D maps, and save your progress on Apple Health.
Clément: I’m a huge fan of SwiftUI. Ever since I started working with the framework, I’m twice as productive and coding is much more fun. Rheaparks is a huge project for two people, so speed is of the essence. SwiftUI allows us to code faster, and that’s a great help.
Thanks to all the awesome developers who shared their apps and their experiences with SwiftUI. We hope that others can also benefit from these reports.
Psssst: The next member shoutout is about our Web SDK. Stay tuned to read more in our newsletter or visit our member shoutout page.