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Stewart Lynch News
2026 - 1
Please pass on the subscription link to others in your sphere so I can broaden my reach.
https://stewartlynch.kit.com
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Happy New Year!
I hope all of you had a great couple of weeks enjoying the holiday season and spending time with family and friends. I know I did, and I’m looking forward to the new year.
You may notice that the avatar I use for my YouTube channel, which is supposed to resemble me, looks a little different. I use Bitmoji to create these images (the ones used in Snapchat), and they’ve recently changed how they render them. I can’t recreate the original version, which I preferred, so this Happy New Year image is the best I can do.
I do have many of the older images saved, and I’ll continue using them alongside the newly generated ones in the future.
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Recent Videos
Since my last newsletter, I released two more videos. One of them is short and just a recap of what I have been up to for the past year. The second on PreviewTraits however, is one of my favourites. So powerful.
In Case You Missed it
If you’ve missed some of my work this year, you’re not alone. In this video, I’m giving you a clear, organized recap of everything I released, from deep-dive SwiftUI tutorials to multi-part series, tools, packages, apps, and even a full course I’ve now made free for everyone. Let’s take a look at what I created this year and where to find exactly what you need.
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Mastering Preview Traits
Preview traits completely change how you work with SwiftUI previews — but most developers barely scratch the surface. In this deep-dive, I’ll show you how to use them properly, how to build your own, and how to turn previews into a productive sandbox for real-world development.
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Upcoming Videos
I am returning to my Deeper Understanding series for a while now. This focuses on going deep into a specific topic. I do this more for my own benefit than for others as I use my videos and starter projects as my notebook that I can keep referring back to.
The first one is going deep into Observable classes and how to initialize and use them properly. This video was inspired by and leans heavily a blog post written by Natalia Panferova.
Mastering Switch Statements.
Swift’s switch statement is one of the most powerful and underused features of the language. It’s not just a replacement for long if-else chains, but a full pattern-matching engine that can dramatically improve the clarity and safety of your code. In this video, I’ll take you deep into the topic.
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A useful Date Extension
I often find myself working with dates, especially when I need a variety of values for mock data. You’re probably aware that Date.now gives you the current date and time, but when I’m building an array of objects for previews, I want a range of different dates, not a bunch of “right now” values.
There are many ways to construct dates. You can calculate them by adding seconds or time intervals from a reference date, build them from DateComponents using a Calendar, or parse them from strings using DateFormatter with custom formats. However, the easiest approach, by far, is using Calendar.date(byAdding:value:to:wrappingComponents:) to generate relative dates.
For example,
I found myself doing this so often that I created a small Date extension to make it quick and consistent, and I thought I’d share it with you.
With this extension, you can take any date and apply an offset to create a new date, so those same three dates above can be written like this:
If you’d like the extension and don’t want to retype it, you can copy it from this gist:
https://gist.github.com/StewartLynch/9ef8d017e83b5876d3b18374b9b02a63
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SQLiteData Update
I continue to be impressed by SQLiteData, and I’ve now completed the full 16 hours of content in the Modern Persistence series available through a Point-Free subscription:https://www.pointfree.co/
I now have a new app for my family and me to use to track items we care about in our respective homes. Thinking ahead, I want to make sure my son, who doesn’t live with us, is aware of what’s in our home: what things are worth, and what should be kept, donated, sold, or tossed when the time comes. It’s a bit morbid, I know, but at my age you start thinking about these things.
I’m able to share our house with my son so we can both update the contents, but I only recently learned how to restrict his access to read-only.
Here’s a short video that shows it in action before I set those permissions:
 The authors of this package are still actively working on it, and they have some exciting new features on the way that will use Apple Intelligence to reduce the intimidation factor of working with SQLite and writing SQL queries. Once it reaches a finalized state that I’m comfortable with, I’m considering creating my own video series on the topic for my YouTube channel.
If that’s something you’d be interested in, I’d love to hear from you. It won’t be 16 hours of content, but it will be substantial, and there’s a lot to learn.
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Supporting my Work
IIf you enjoy what I do and want to support my work, you can join my Ko-fi community and either make a one-time donation or become a monthly supporter for as little as $5/month. Monthly supporters get early access to my videos as soon as they’re uploaded to YouTube (as unlisted videos), sometimes up to a month before they’re made public. Monthly supporters also get priority responses to their questions, and I’m happy to help with coding challenges.
In addition to PayPal, Ko-fi now supports Stripe, which makes it easier to pay by credit card.
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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
The course is now Free to download from: https://stewartlynch.github.io/Smile4Me-Course-Content/
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Affiliate Links
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
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