@twostraws

Learning and sharing at Hacking with Swift. Creator of Kickstart, Unwrap, Ignite, and two small children.

 Bath, UK
hackingwithswift.com
Joined July 2009
  • Tweets61.4K
  • Following272
  • Followers123K
5.1KMedia
My new Mac app is out today! It's called Kickstart, and it has just one job: helping indie app developers make more money on the App Store. It is *packed* with features, many of which are completely free. Get it here: apps.apple.com/app/kickstart…
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The Hacktivate update for iPhone Duo is out! Just in time for release 🙂 It looks *fantastic* on the unfolded screen – lots of space to solve the challenges. Making it work folded took some careful thinking, but I'm really happy with the result 👌 apps.apple.com/app/hacktivat…
Hack the Planet: Solve 240 cybersecurity challenges with real skills.

ALT Hack the Planet: Solve 240 cybersecurity challenges with real skills.

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(macOS is still my preferred environment for the game, but it turns out 80% of people disagree 🙃 Fortunately, it's a universal purchase, with iCloud syncing across all your devices!)
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If you're using Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, the PHP fix finally landed. Better late than never…?
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Ubuntu 24.04 LTS also just got it.
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For HWS+ subscribers: Swift Argument Parser makes it easy to build useful macOS command-line tools, and a JSON tidier is a great first project. This one can prettify, compress, sort keys, and write output to a file, all in surprisingly little code. hackingwithswift.com/plus/co…

JSON Tidy – Hacking with Swift+

JSON is one of the most common file formats we deal with, so we can write a little macOS utility to make it nicer to work with – compressing the data, formatting the data, and even sorting the key...

hackingwithswift.com
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Bad news and good news about Kickstart Exchange and Kickstart Signal: - Good news: It's really popular! I'm glad it's helping so many indie developers. - Bad news: It's so popular I need to move it to a newer, bigger server. This means a few hours of downtime. Apologies!
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Turns out a few hours is actually only about 8 minutes – the upgrade is complete! The new server is absurdly powerful, which gives me lots of room for ✨activities✨ I'm planning a delightful new launch (more free stuff for indies!), hopefully next week if I can pull it off…
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Use @Attribute(.externalStorage) to hint to SwiftData that large data like images should live outside the main store. It handles everything transparently, just don't try using those properties in predicates. hackingwithswift.com/quick-s…
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I just used a Claude banked reset, and… it doesn't change my main reset date? YES. That's exactly how it ought to be – a bonus, not just a date adjustment. I only wish Codex did the same. /cc @thsottiaux
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In two hours I'm running an online workshop on building apps with AI. It's going to be *packed* – coding, yes, but also research, design, marketing, and more. Free to all Hacking with Swift+ subscribers, even if you sign up today! hackingwithswift.com/plus

Hacking with Swift+

Subscribe to Hacking with Swift+ and get advanced Swift tutorials to help take your career to the next level.

hackingwithswift.com
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Wow, I totally missed that over 400 apps are now using Kickstart Exchange! 🤯 It's a completely free advertising network for indie app developers, making it an incredibly effective way to find new users. exchange.kickstart.tools

Kickstart Exchange: free advertising for indie app developers

Your app shows ads for other indie apps, and every two shown earn one view of yours. Free, with no user tracking.

exchange.kickstart.tools
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Bonus: Signing up for Kickstart Exchange also gives you Kickstart Signal (and vice versa!) – Signal lets you collect user requests right inside your app. Both are completely free, both are privacy-focused, and both use the same open-source SDK ✅ signal.kickstart.tools

Kickstart Signal: feature requests and voting for indie apps

Add feature requests, voting, and comments to your app with one SwiftUI view. Free, with every submission reviewed by you.

signal.kickstart.tools
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In case Pokémon is your thing, the special edition Beats × Pokémon collab just went up on the Apple store: apple.com/shop/product/mkfn4…

Beats Pill – Pokémon Special Edition

The special-edition Pokémon Beats Pill is here to unleash the energy of your music, from the brightest spark of Pikachu to the deepest depths of Mimikyu’s mystery.

apple.com
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Arrived already – surprisingly fast!
A Pokemon-themed Beats Pill.

ALT A Pokemon-themed Beats Pill.

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Designed in California. Available in January. #iPhoneDuo
A sad child, with the text "No, you can't have a Duo." In the corner is a picture of the iPhone Duo, saying "Not yours".

ALT A sad child, with the text "No, you can't have a Duo." In the corner is a picture of the iPhone Duo, saying "Not yours".

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SwiftUI's Text view can format arrays, measurements, and currencies directly using the format parameter - no custom formatter needed. hackingwithswift.com/quick-s…
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Preordering an iPhone Duo today? Remember: use the Apple Store app on your phone! Almost always it comes up faster than the web store, and could be the difference between you getting one soon and not – it will sell out fast, guaranteed!
An iPhone Duo partly opened.

ALT An iPhone Duo partly opened.

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Best of luck, everyone 🤞
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BOOM. Done. 8am pick up!
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Tickets for @iOSConfSG are on sale now, with a startlingly low price – $60 SGD is just $47 USD / €42 / £35 😳 Their goal: a ticket price so low everyone can afford to come. Maybe see you there? 👀
iOS Conf SG
@iosconfsgOct 16
S$60. Not a typo. 🎟️ iOS Conf SG 2027 tickets are on sale. Foundation Models, App Intents, AI agents in Xcode and plenty of Swift. 20–22 Jan, Singapore. The whole region is invited for Swift, coffee and friendship 🧡 iosconf.sg/#tickets
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Paul Hudson retweeted
Shashank Prasanna
@shshnkpOct 15
Today we also published benchmarks and a deep dive into LLM inference on M5 Ultra Mac Studio, covering MLX, GPU Neural Accelerators, tensor and pipeline parallelism, and Thunderbolt 5 RDMA. machinelearning.apple.com/re…

Local and Distributed Large LLM Inference with MLX and RDMA on Mac Studio

MLX on Mac with Apple silicon lets AI researchers and developers experiment locally with the latest models and methods in a private…

machinelearning.apple.com
Mark Zuckerberg
@finkdOct 15
Muse Spark Open -- weights releasing today -- runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple.
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