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The SwiftUI Lab
Personal blog · swiftui-lab.comprogrammingdesign
The SwiftUI Lab is a personal blog at swiftui-lab.com about programming and design. Since 2019, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “Custom Styles in SwiftUI”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
21mentions?
11HN people?
2019–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link The SwiftUI Lab for in-depth SwiftUI material, code examples and explanations of framework behaviour such as equatable views. Commenters value it as a time-saving learning resource for iOS developers.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
When the documentation is missing, we experiment.
Most-linked posts?
- /4 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-11-05
- /2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-03-05
- Custom Styles in SwiftUI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-11-11
What Hacker News says?
SwiftUI's docs are a nightmare. Here's a pretty damn cool app: https://swiftui-lab.com
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on “On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation”Submitted Impossible Grids with SwiftUI as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Have you ever tried to implement drag and drop, animations (like accordions), modals, gradients, and custom elements? not to sound like a salesperson but its not too hard in (apple) appkit [1] using cocoa and core animation [2] (and all of this is even easier in swiftui especially animation and styling [3]) [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppKit/drag-and-dr... [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/…
Comment linking /custom-styling/
on “20 years working on the same software product”Submitted SwiftUI Alignment Guides as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI am not a fan of the SwiftUI docs, but I have yet to do a full-fat SwiftUI app. I was introduced to this app, which I think is a great help (I referenced it above): https://swiftui-lab.com/companion/
Comment linking /companion/
on “The Elephant at WWDC”Submitted Custom Styles in SwiftUI as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI do want to give a shout-out to this tool[0]. The "official" SwifUI docs leave something to be desired, so a developer wrote an awesome doc tool. I found out about this tool from an instructor at a class I took. [0] https://swiftui-lab.com/companion/
Comment linking /companion/
on “The Elephant at WWDC”Context: I’ve been working with iOS full time since a few years before Swift came out. A few startups ago we built our app using SwiftUI 1.0. At that time, while 90% of it was fantastic, 10% was either unworkable or extremely unreliable, causing for some maddening bugs. The documentation was laughable so for these reasons I chose to do the app for a subsequent startup in UIKit. Fast forward to my most recent company…
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on “SwiftUI in 2022”SwiftUI's docs have been notoriously bad. I have heard that they are improving, but I haven't done anything "ship" in SwiftUI yet, so I don't have much to go on. I know that the docs were so bad, that one chap wrote this site and app: https://swiftui-lab.com They are really nice.
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on “Apple’s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 15”See this answer: https://swiftui-lab.com/digital-lounges-2022/#data-15 > Surely on a modern computer you can redraw a couple of text fields at 30fps? Yeah this is the tricky thing, with how (I'm guessing) the code looks, you would think it's only updating the text fields. But in reality it's probably re-rendering the entire hierarchy using the @EnvironmentObject. So the SceneKit view gets setup and rendered every up…
Comment linking /digital-lounges-2022/
on “Why I quit using SwiftUI”I see it like Swift itself, which took at least 3 years to fully come into its own. Apple's lack of documentation and communication doesn't help; the best resources have been from fellow developers who were groping around in the dark like the rest of us and managed to figure things out by themselves. [0,1] But again, I've already been able to do many things in SwiftUI that I don't even want to attempt in AppKit/UIKi…
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on “Apple’s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 14”> Bringing a new language into the world requires massive amounts of high quality documentation. Very much agree. Not just a new language. Any complex endeavor requires this. I have written a server-based framework, including spending a great deal of time developing API documentation, and was relatively recently introduced to Postman. I have been using Postman to communicate the API to another engineer that is not R…
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on “Swift Regrets”> historically Depends on how far back you go. Apple's current docs suck, and they have, for a long time (SwiftUI was so bad, that someone came up with this[0], and it was a lifesaver). But I'm old enough to remember Inside Macintosh [1], and that was a thing of beauty. Apple used to take technical documentation very seriously. Many of their technical writers had better tech chops, than the engineers making the stuf…
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on “Xcode 27.1 Beta Release Notes”Anyone who has managed to figure out anything substantial about SwiftUI has done so purely through a labor of love. It's a really amazing system, but the sparseness of proper official documentation, Xcode bugs (like marking errors on a line far away from where the problem actually is) and the seemingly secret Swift magic that's used to implement some features, means everyone is stumbling blindly in a labyrinth, rely…
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on “Static Types in SwiftUI”I was thinking this might have been a treatise on prompt engineering, or something like Rational Rose. I was actually pleasantly disappointed. I am glad to see documentation treated as a "first class" engineering Discipline. I would say the same goes to creative authors, such as graphic designers, or 3D modelers. I'm fairly big on good documentation[0], myself, and feel its absence, whenever I look at most codebases…
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on “What docs-as-code means”Been using SwiftUI pretty in depth for a side project. It's been 80% awesome and 20% super frustrating. I can do so much more with SO much less code, but there are definitely a lot of gaps & annoying issues (particularly around documentation and in depth customization). Fortunately it's easy to fill in the gaps with UIKit & there are some amazing people out there doing documentation (shout out to the guy at https://…
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on “Export SwiftUI code from Figma designs”Excellent list of resources. Only addition I'd suggest making to that list would be https://swiftui-lab.com and the companion payware app. No affiliation, just someone who has found the information and large number of readily runnable code examples a huge time saver.
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on “Useful iOS Things GitHub Repository”There is a lot of deep material on SwiftUI, for example https:// swiftwithmajid.com and https://swiftui-lab.com . The latest edition of the excellent Stanford course also uses SwiftUI, and the tutorials by Apple are great.
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on “A deep dive into Swift’s function builders”Thanks! A few sites that I've found really helpful in building this include: - Hacking With Swift ( https://www.hackingwithswift.com/ ) - Swift by Sundell ( https://www.swiftbysundell.com/ ) - Swift with Majid ( https://swiftwithmajid.com/ ) - The SwiftUI Lab ( https://swiftui-lab.com/ ) - The Lost Moa blog ( https://lostmoa.com/blog ) The community has been great, too — there are countless other little blog posts,…
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on “Show HN: WriteFreely SwiftUI Client for iOS”https://swiftui-lab.com and https://swiftwithmajid.com have been a great help.
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on “macOS Internals”This Equals behavior seems terribly unintuitive as well: https://swiftui-lab.com/equatableview/ When an object contains plain data, the equals interface is not used. That would so rough to debug the first time.
Comment linking /equatableview/
on “30k lines of SwiftUI in production later”
