Stewart Lynch News
​2025-5

Please pass on the subscription link to others in your sphere so I can broaden my reach.
​https://stewartlynch.kit.com​

This Week's Video

In this week's video, I take my original Overtop Picker View solution that was released last week and improve upon it using Swift protocols. I’ll show you how to create a flexible view modifier that allows you to present a custom edit view using a picker, a date picker, or even a struct for editing.
Topics Covered:
✅ Using protocols to define reusable OverTopable views
✅ Creating generic view modifiers for multiple edit types
✅ Building Overtop Color Picker, Profile Editor, and Date Picker views ✅ Improving code organization and reusability with code snippets
✅ Handling optional values in SwiftUI

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What is Coming?

Next week I am releasing a video on a topic that I really enjoy and that is Crafting Effective SwiftUI ViewModifiers.

I’ll show you how to leverage SwiftUI ViewModifiers to improve code readability, flexibility, and maintainability. We’ll create three custom view modifiers that you can start using in your SwiftUI projects today. Each modifier enhances different aspects of UI development, from embedding views in a navigation stack to styling text editors and applying customizable background views.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a deeper understanding of how ViewModifiers work and how to make your SwiftUI code more reusable and efficient.

What I am planning

I really got into the weeds over the last week or so. I always wanted to have a better SF Symbols browser for my Mac as a menu bar app, but I also wanted to have the same features of the app in an iPhone and an iPad app too. I discovered how to source all of the symbol names, categories, release dates and search terms from Apple's SF Symbols app as plists (Property Lists). I just load them into the bundle of my multi-target solution and decode them so I can present the content in the apps. Though there are 3 different apps, I share about 80% of the source code among all three. Once I had the plists decoded and my models created, the UI is pretty basic. The challenge was the MacOS MenuBar app. I could not use a MenuBar extra in SwiftUI because I wanted more flexibility so I had a prolonged conversation with ChatGPT which really helped me. The MenuBar app window is resizable and can be detached from the menu bar itself to remain on the screen. This is something that I always wanted.
Here is a very short video of my progress to date.
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I was originally thinking about creating a course around how to build the solution but it has grown a lot and instead, I will likely just show you how to locate, load and parse the plist files into your own projects and show you how you can create your own custom SF Symbols picker that you will be able to use in any of your own apps.

My Other Stuff

Channel Listing App

A Searchable Mac app containing a list of all of my YouTube videos including the ability to watch them in the app and download starter and completed source code

Free on Gumroad

CustomGPT

A custom ChatGPT that has indexed the transcripts of my videos.
Add to your ChatGPT Sidebar​

Smile4Me Course

Learn how to build a multi-targeted app using a Jokes API.
Don't let the low cost of the course fool you into believing that low cost means low content. 6.5 hours of content and 56 videos.

​Enrol in the course

Affiliate Links

Affiliate Links

Below are a number of affiliate links for products that I not only endorse but use all the time. I will never endorse something that I do not believe in.

RocketSim - Build Apps Faster 

This is an invaluable tool when working with the simulator in Xcode.

   https://gumroad.com/a/122988499/ftvbh 

BigMountain Studio Books 

Mark Moeykens is a master at creating SwiftUI reference books. I have purchased every one of these books and refer to them all the time.

Use this link and we both will benefit

​https://www.bigmountainstudio.com/a/77jt8​