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Hacking with Swift+ is a subscription service that delivers incredible, hands-on Swift tutorials, so you can deepen your understanding of Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, and more, and take your career to the next level.
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Once you've subscribed for 18 months, you get free online access to over a dozen of my books to expand your learning even further, including:
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Our courses include…
- The Ultimate Portfolio App walks you through the process of building one app that implements best practices for architecture, accessibility, testing, documentation, and more, while also working across iOS, macOS, tvOS, and even watchOS.
- Advanced Swift focuses on improving your core Swift language skills, regardless of whether you use UIKit, SwiftUI, or something else.
- Algorithms helps you understand common algorithms in computer science, all implemented and explained step by step in Swift.
- Custom SwiftUI Components walks you through building a wide variety of reusable UI components using SwiftUI.
- Data Structures teaches you how to build stacks, lists, trees and more, while working with a variety of common Swift protocols.
- Funtional Programming walks you through hands-on examples of how to build smaller, composable more testable using functional approaches such as
filter(),map(), andreduce(). - High-performance Apps teaches you techniques for writing faster code, rendering faster views, and more, so you can make best use of your user's device.
- Intermediate Swift is designed to help push your skills further, giving in-depth explanations for generics, optionals, assertions, and more.
- Intermediate SwiftUI is packed with tips and tricks to help you write better SwiftUI code, including customizing common controls with styles, handling size classes better, and working with dynamic properties.
- Making the most of Foundation goes back to the basics of Apple's Foundation framework, exploring how best to use common code such as
UserDefaultsandMeasurement. - Networking covers a core topic in a fresh way, showing you smart ways to make your code simpler and safer using generics, Combine, and more.
- Remaking Apps walks you through building copies of well-known apps from iOS using SwiftUI, showing you how easy it is to get powerful effects with very little code.
- Rendering Charts in SwiftUI shows you how SwiftUI can be used to build complete types of charts from scratch, including pie charts, bar charts, and more.
- SwiftUI Special Effects teaches you how to add some surprise and delight to your user interface using particles, Core Motion, and more.
- Working with Data helps you get to grips with data input, such as creating a custom XML parser, or handling complex or messy JSON.
PLUS: A huge and growing collection of solutions for challenges in the 100 Days of SwiftUI and elsewhere, a complete archive of HWS+ live streams, access to videos from Hacking with Swift Live 2020.
Even more courses are on the way: debugging, testing, and of course lots more SwiftUI – I have an epic collection of tutorials coming, and I can’t wait to share them all with you.
Your Hacking with Swift+ membership gets you every subscriber-only article and video published now and in the future, plus an incredible amount of extras!
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Every subscriber gets immediate access to the full range amazing tutorials written for Hacking with Swift+ subscribers, plus the ad-free browsing experience, downloadable projects, monthly live streams, private forum access, and more.
But above and beyond all that you'll also receive exclusive subscriber-only thank you gifts every year – it's the least I can do to show how grateful I am that you're supporting my work.
This has some important terms and conditions, so please read the following carefully!
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FAQ
Does this subscription give me all your books?
The articles produced for Hacking with Swift+ are all new and exclusive to subscribers, but after subscribing for 18 months you'll also gain free online access to over a dozen of my books. This means your subscription grows as you do, making Hacking with Swift+ the largest and most comprehensive subscription around.
What are the free gifts?
Each year of your subscription we'll mail out free gifts, as a thank you for supporting the site. These include pin metal badges, magnets, stickers, coasters, and more – we think you'll love them! If you take out an annual subscription, we send out your first year's gifts immediately.
What happens in the monthly live streams?
Every Hacking with Swift+ subscriber is invited to join my private monthly live streams on YouTube, where I build a complete app from scratch while answering questions along the way. This is your chance to get involved and explore projects being written live, and these streams are always hugely popular.
What happens if I miss a live stream?
All live streams are recorded, and posted onto the main Hacking with Swift+ site afterwards. Even better, they include a full transcript alongside, so if you prefer text tutorials to video tutorials you have that option.
How do I remove adverts from the site?
Every subscriber can enjoy an ad-free experience on Hacking with Swift – all you need to do is log in, and the site will automatically remove the adverts. To give you the fastest reading experience, we also remove the gray bar under the menu, plus the right-hand bar that sits next to every article.
Is Hacking with Swift+ suitable for absolute beginners?
If you're an absolute beginner you should start with my free 100 Days of SwiftUI course, which teaches you the fundamentals of Swift and SwiftUI. However, Hacking with Swift+ includes complete solutions to all the checkpoints and milestones in the 100 Days of SwiftUI series, making it the perfect companion as you're learning.
What's more, Hacking with Swift+ will grow with you once you've finished learning – it has a wide range of intermediate to advanced Swift techniques and tutorials that will keep pushing your skills further, no matter what your goal.
Some sites claim to have thousands of videos – why is HWS+ better?
Hacking with Swift+ focuses firmly on two things:
- Giving you the depth you need to get a strong grasp of each topic. Where other sites make hundreds of three or four minute videos that touch lightly on each subject, we prefer to go into much more detail – 20 or 30 minutes, and often longer – so you get to understand why things work as well as how.
- We teach Swift, Swift, and more Swift. We don't do Kotlin, we aren't interested in Dart, we won't try to squeeze in Flutter, and you won't find any React Native. That's not to say those other technologies aren't interesting, only that you're here to take your Swift skills further and that's exactly what we care about most.
How much does it cost?
Hacking with Swift+ costs $20 a month or $200 a year. Your membership includes all subscriber-only videos and articles available now and published in the future, for as long as your membership remains active. You can cancel your membership at any time, and your access will continue until your term ends.
What's the difference between Monthly and Yearly subscriptions?
Hacking with Swift+ is $20 per month, and you can cancel whenever you want. If you intend to work through many articles and really push your learning forward, you should consider the yearly subscription option, which is $200 for 12 months – a saving of $40.
Both tiers get access to exactly the same high-quality videos, articles, and source code. The only difference is that with the Yearly tier you save $40 every year, making it better value for money.
Are there exercises?
Yes! Many Hacking with Swift+ articles end with challenges to help you take your learning further – code to try, problems to solve, questions to consider, and more.
Why do I need a Hacking with Swift account?
Your Hacking with Swift account links your Gumroad purchase to this site, so we can unlock your subscription. This account also allows you to post to the forums if you want to.
Can I switch from a Monthly to Yearly subscription?
Yes, you can upgrade at any time, and we'll discount the annual subscription based on how much of your monthly subscription remains.
How can I cancel my subscription?
If at any point you want to cancel your Hacking with Swift+ subscription, you can do so directly through your Gumroad account. Your access to the subscriber-only content will remain active until your subscription term ends, at which point it will cease.
Will there be sales tax or VAT added to the price?
If you live in a country or state where tax is applied to digital purchases, that will be added to your subscription price. As you might imagine there isn't a lot I can do about that.
Will you still make free tutorials?
Yes, absolutely! I believe it's important to help everyone learn, so I will still be publishing as many free tutorials as I can. This won't be affected by Hacking with Swift+.
Or start a free trial
Here's a sample of what's waiting for you…
19:21
INTERMEDIATE SWIFTUI
Creating completely custom buttons using PrimitiveButtonStyle
SwiftUI’s ButtonStyle lets us focus on how our buttons look, but not how they work, which in many situations is valuable. In this article we’ll look at a more advanced protocol, PrimitiveButtonStyle, and see how that gives us complete control over button functionality.
23:09
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
Making projects and items feel at home on the Mac
Now we need to turn our eyes to the first significant piece of work porting to macOS: adjusting the Open and Closed tabs so they look and work better on macOS. This means adding some Mac-only modifiers and views, but it gives us a big step forward as you’ll see.
18:42
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
Adding and deleting
At this point you can get a basic idea for the UI of our app, but it has a fatal flaw: although we can add test data, we can’t do the same for user data. Let’s fix that now – there’s more to it than you might think!
18:43
REMAKING APPS
Tinting our clouds
Now that we have a working day/night cycle, we’re going to follow that up with a subtle but beautiful effect: we’ll dynamically tint our clouds so they glow with sunrise and sunset, and look darker at night time.
5:33
SOLUTIONS
Views and Modifiers
This challenge asks you to back and adjust both project 1 and project 2 based on what you learned, then try your hand at creating a custom view modifier. Let’s tackle it now…
56:38
HACKING WITH SWIFT LIVE 2020
Adding matched geometry effects to Journeys
In this part we’re going to look at an example solution to implement matched geometry animations in our Journeys app.
21:29
REMAKING APPS
Bringing the sun out
Okay, so the lightning effect took a lot of work, but now we’re on to something much easier: adding some sunshine. This is place ripe for experimentation, but we can get something good with remarkably little work.
40:37
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
UI Testing with SwiftUI
Even after writing stacks of unit tests, chances are your test coverage is still well below 40%. Those units tests are really important, but if you really want great test coverage you need to add some UI tests and that’s exactly what we’re going to work on here.
1:23:29
LIVE STREAMS
TinyDraw
In this article we’re going to build a small drawing app for iPad, but along the way you’ll see how to load and save documents into iCloud, add support for undo, and more.
1:26:39
HACKING WITH SWIFT LIVE 2020
UIKit updates: UICollectionView lists
In this part we’re going to build an app to explore SF Symbols, all built using the massive new updates to UICollectionView that let it act like a table view.
21:32
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
Storing your code somewhere safe
At this point we have something very simple working, so now is a great time to stash your code away somewhere safe using source control. If you already know how to use Git then you’re welcome to skip this part.
41:58
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
Documenting our code
Good documentation describes not only what code does, but provides context on why it works a certain way, what assumptions you made, any optimizations you made, as well as describing subtleties in the implementation if you’re dealing with difficult code. In this article we’re going to be documenting our project for other developers and beyond!
14:19
SOLUTIONS
Friendface, part 1
This challenge asks you to create an app that downloads and decodes JSON from the internet, then shows it in a list. Let’s tackle it now…
34:39
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
Querying data from iCloud
In the previous step we added the ability to upload projects and items to iCloud, then used the iCloud Dashboard to check the data had arrived safely. In this step we’re going to load shared projects, and let users browse them.
26:05
WORKING WITH DATA
Parsing difficult JSON
If you have nice, clean JSON then using Swift and Codable is like a dream come true. But what if you have messy JSON, or JSON where you really don’t know what you’ll receive ahead of time? In this article I’ll show you how to handle any kind of JSON in an elegant way, without relying on third-party libraries.
12:19
ADVANCED SWIFT
Why opaque return types are so important
Opaque return types are a powerful feature in Swift, and are also critically important for writing SwiftUI. In this article I’ll be explaining how they work, and why they give us more power than returning a simple protocol.
1:21:46
HACKING WITH SWIFT LIVE 2020
Expanding lists and iPad sidebars
In this part we’ll be looking at upgrades to SwiftUI’s List view that let us expand and collapse rows, then try out the iPadOS sidebar style.
31:09
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
Cleaning up CloudKit, part 2
The second part of cleaning up CloudKit involves tackling error handling head on, and along the way I’ll show you a useful trick for making this process easier. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating that getting error handling right is the key to a great CloudKit app!
17:58
MAKING THE MOST OF FOUNDATION
Converting measurements safely
Apple’s Foundation framework makes it easy for us to convert any kind of measurement into any other kind of measurement. In this article I’ll show you how to make the most of these APIs, but also why it’s so useful that they work with Swift features such as operator overloading, plus important protocols such as Comparable, Equatable, and Codable.
1:01:31
HACKING WITH SWIFT LIVE 2021
Continuing SwiftUI
Now that we have covered all the changes in Swift concurrency, we can start to look at the changes in SwiftUI, starting with refreshable() and searchable().
