{Shadowfacts}

A while ago I wrote about some trouble I had getting Xcode to cooperate with my efforts to bring my app file size back under control after adding a new Swift Package dependency. Well, I’m happy to say I finally have: the most recent TestFlight build of Tusker has a 6.7MB install size, down from 25MB.

Ultimately I did take the route of turning my framework into a Swift Package. I revisited it because I noticed in another project that local packages inside the same folder as the main project worked perfectly fine. The only difference I found was that the project where it worked used only an .xcodeproj, whereas Tusker used an .xcworkspace. So, I deleted the (for unrelated reasons, no longer necessary) workspace and found that, after quitting and relaunching Xcode, the local package worked perfectly fine.

I briefly started writing a feedback report, but upon further testing I found that xcworkspaces in general weren’t the problem—a new project and workspace worked fine. So, I gave up trying to reproduce it and assumed there was just something weird about the 3.5 year old workspace.

The alpha release of Asahi Linux, a project to run Linux on Apple Silicon computers, came out a couple days ago. And out of a combination of boredom and curiosity, I thought I’d give it a shot.

Tusker is divided up into two main parts: the app target itself and a separate framework which encapsulates everything that deals with the Mastodon API. I recently added a Swift Package to the app for uninteresting reasons. But, because the package is used both by the framework as well as the app itself, this caused a surprising number of problems.

As my luck would have it, just a few weeks after I published my last post on this topic, the iOS 15.4 beta came out which broke that hack and once again made my scroll indicators invisible in dark mode.

I recently started building a new iOS app and found myself with a need to parse HTML in order to extract some information. My goto tool for this in the past has been SwiftSoup. In this app, I have to deal with larger documents than I’d used it for previously, and unfortunately, its performance leavse something to be desired. Much of the issue comes from the fact that I only want to extract the first paragraph of a document, but SwiftSoup always needs to parse the entire thing—for large documents, potentially a lot of unnecessary work^[1]. And, as far as I could find, there are no streaming HTML parsers written in Swift. One I did find, however, was CloudFlare’s lol-html. It’s specifically designed for speed and low latency, exactly what I want. But it’s written in Rust.