During a conversation at work, it became apparent just how disconnected modern software development is from the underlying hardware, or even from the Operating Systems the application processes run on. Coincidentally, I was getting ready to finish up my first SwiftUI introductory book. I decided to push the release of that book a bit farther, and capture the information I wanted to convey in that conversation, in a better articulated manner and through the lens of Apple’s systems.

Learn how SwiftUI Text Input Controls work, from basic functionality to advanced use cases. Explore the security benefits of using a SecureField over a TextField.

In this short for post, we are going to explore the basic mechanisms by which you can create a very basic application, which keeps running until you close it. The idea is to explore how a rudimentary loop can be used to control the lifecycle of an application. This technique is foundational to almost every application you would run and build, from iOS apps to browsers to video games.

Although it’s not the primary use of the language, Swift can be used to accomplish a wide range of tasks, from cli tools to macOS and iOS applications, to web servers. In this section, we are going to explore how to build a very simple cli in Swift, while also looking at Swift’s package manager and build tools.

All journeys have to start somehow, somewhere. This post and this space are as good as any…