A project that I’ve always wanted to create: a library that enables the development of GNOME applications using Swift. While there are some similar libraries available, they appear to be incomplete or not actively maintained. Thanks to Vibe Coding, I managed to complete the project in approximately a week.

swift-adwaita is an imperative Swift 6 wrapper for GTK4 and libadwaita, built for creating native GNOME desktop applications on Linux.

It provides a modern Swift API over GTK and Adwaita with type-safe widgets, signals, property bindings, async operations, and ergonomic convenience helpers, while preserving the native behavior, styling, and feel of the GNOME platform.

• Native GTK4 and libadwaita application development in Swift
• Imperative API without a custom DSL
• Type-safe enums, signals, and property APIs
• Async/await support for common platform integrations
• Extensive widget coverage with a real demo application

Here’s a demo app built using swift-adwaita:

This is an open-source project licensed under the MIT license. The source code is available on GitHub. Documentation with guides is available here.

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Highlights

• Refactored the internal request pipeline in CouchDBClient to use cleaner async/await-style flows and reduce duplicated response handling logic.
• Improved buffering and decoding paths for raw and typed requests, with a focus on safer EventLoopGroup execution and better performance in response processing.
• Expanded test coverage around EventLoopGroup-backed request execution, including raw and typed get, raw and typed find, attachment download, Mango index listing, and Mango query explanation.
• Refreshed user-facing documentation across the README, DocC articles, and tutorials.
• Updated documentation tooling for newer DocC workflows, including Markdown export support.

API and Behavior Improvements

• Added and refined EventLoopGroup support across more CouchDBClient request paths.
• Improved internal error-handling paths and response decoding behavior for CouchDB operations.
• Simplified request helper layering and reduced duplicated request/response processing code.
• Improved attachment-related behavior and accompanying tests.
• Added visionOS to supported platforms in the package manifest.

Documentation

• Fixed and refreshed README examples for CRUD and Mango query usage.
• Updated DocC landing pages to better reflect the current API surface.
• Corrected the Advanced Mango Query tutorial snippets to match the current typed query API.
• Corrected Vapor tutorial examples.
• Fixed Hummingbird tutorial package setup and dependency snippets.
• Updated buildDocs.sh to support:
  • configurable output and hosting base path
  • static hosting content embedding
  • experimental Markdown output
  • Markdown manifest generation
• Added a post-processing step in buildDocs.sh that injects a relative Markdown link into generated DocC HTML pages.

Tooling and Dependencies

• Updated package dependencies in Package.resolved.
• Updated the Ubuntu build workflow Swift version matrix.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

Actioneer 1.0.8 focuses on making live GitHub Actions monitoring more reliable while using the GitHub API more efficiently.

Highlights

• In-progress workflow runs now keep refreshing while they are still active, so expanded jobs and steps stay current before the run finishes.
• Expanded run details are more stable and easier to read, with clearer badges, preserved job context, and contiguous step numbering.
• Workflow status badges are now translated more consistently across the app's supported languages.
• Background refresh is lighter on the GitHub API, reducing duplicate requests and helping preserve rate-limit headroom.

Technical improvements

• Fixed several live-refresh lifecycle issues in the detail pane so switching repositories or rebuilding rows no longer disables the active refresh loop.
• Removed duplicate initial jobs fetches caused by rerender races around freshly expanded runs.
• Reduced unnecessary polling pressure by tightening selected-repo refresh ownership and job-refresh reuse.

Actioneer for Linux has translations available in numerous languages, including Russian, Spanish, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Hindi, Simplified Chinese, Arabic, Bengali, Urdu, German, and Dutch.

It also includes a built-in crash reporter, which you can copy and paste the report or open an issue on GitHub. Additionally, there are some tweaks and improvements made under the hood.

There were a bunch of updates of Actioneer for Linux recently, which I forgot to post here. Here's what's new in these updates:

1.02

• Faster and smoother UI with refreshed repo/workflow lists and improved scrolling behavior.
• New run filtering controls with better caching, so switching filters is instant and doesn’t reload data.
• Better workflow auto-refresh and run status updates, including fewer duplicate fetches.
• Notifications are more reliable across Snap/Flatpak, with improved icon handling and fallbacks.
• Improved sandboxed credential storage using the secret portal for Snap/Flatpak.
• Offline-friendly cache persistence for workflows, runs, and jobs.
• Packaging and CI updates across Snap, Flatpak, and AppImage for better compatibility.
• Dependency updates and stability fixes.

1.03

• Job logs now render ANSI colors, grouped workflow sections, and clearer command/output formatting.
• Aligned timestamps and command prefixes improve scanability, with stronger error highlighting.
• Packaging CI refreshed with multi-arch updates for AppImage/Snap/Flatpak builds.
• Dependency updates and demo log refreshes for improved accuracy.

1.04

• Handle expired job logs (HTTP 410) with clearer messaging instead of a broken view.
• Strip BOM markers in job logs so first-line timestamps render correctly.

1.05

• Manual workflow triggers now support workflow_dispatch inputs with dynamic parameter fields.
• Dependency updates for ryu, unicode-ident, and zmij.

Recently, I've been playing with Clawd / Moltbot / Openclaw bot. Of course, it ended up with asking it to write some code. Since I'm running it in a VM with Ubuntu Linux, I've been playing with developing some apps for it. And at some moment, I realised that I'm sending screenshots of an app, but each time I have to do it manually.

So I decided to automate that part. I tried some console apps for Linux that promised they can do screenshots, but none of them worked for me for some reason.

So I decided to write my own. I picked Rust, and Openclaw did some research for me about how it should be done. It ended up with a console app that uses the FreeDesktop Screenshot portal. It required creating a .desktop file so I could see that Gnome permission request and click Allow. That is required just once, so now I've automated it.

That's a pretty cool thing to be honest, which I already tried with an iOS app using UI tests - the AI agent just runs UI tests, gets screenshots from a report, analyzes them, and understands what is wrong with the app UI.

I pushed the app to GitHub and published a release with binaries, .deb, and .rpm packets for arm64 and amd64. And it got a nice automatic installation script. Since I made it using Openclaw, I called it Claw Screenshot.

Check it out: https://github.com/makoni/claw-screenshot

Вышло обновление AppMetric версии 1.14.0.

Новое

• Окно настроек с переключателем «Запускать при входе».
• Обновлённые иконки приложения для Liquid Glass.

Улучшения

• Более быстрые и стабильные обновления: параллельные запросы с backoff при лимитах и учётом дневной квоты.
• Поповер подстраивается под контент.
• Улучшено форматирование дат в графиках.

The first update for Actioneer has been released. Here's what's new:

• Workflows refresh in the background so newly-dispatched runs appear automatically.
• Reduced API usage and fewer rate-limit hits with ETag-based caching — lists load faster and your quota lasts longer.
• The app remembers the repository you were viewing between launches.
• Better diagnostics and reliability for smoother everyday use.

Follow updates on X: https://x.com/ActioneerCI

This week I've released a new version of CompareShots. Nothing special, just updated the user interface to support Liquid Glass. Also, sharing the result image will not capture UI elements anymore.

Hard to believe, but this year CompareShots turns 10 years old. Time runs fast.

Actioneer is a native GNOME desktop client for GitHub Actions. It combines a GTK4/libadwaita interface with a Tokio-powered API client so you can browse repositories, inspect workflow runs, watch job logs, and receive notifications without leaving your desktop.

Key features

• Browse your GitHub repositories and view Actions workflows and recent runs quickly.
• Inspect run status (success, failure, queued, in progress) with clear badges and counts.
• View job logs: download and preview run logs for quick troubleshooting.
• Dispatch workflows, cancel running workflows, and re-run failed runs directly from the app.
• Favorites and quick search let you focus on the repositories and workflows that matter most.
• Desktop notifications for run completions and failures so you never miss important results.
• In-memory caching and efficient refresh make the app responsive while respecting GitHub rate limits.
• Secure authentication using OAuth, tokens are stored securely in keyring.

Acntioneer for Linux is an open source project, source code is available on GitHub.

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Actioneer — a lightweight macOS app for developers and DevOps engineers who want fast, reliable access to GitHub Actions from the desktop.

Key features

• Browse your GitHub repositories and view Actions workflows and recent runs quickly.
• Inspect run status (success, failure, queued, in progress) with clear badges and counts.
• View job logs: download and preview run logs for quick troubleshooting.
• Dispatch workflows, cancel running workflows, and re-run failed runs directly from the app.
• Favorites and quick search let you focus on the repositories and workflows that matter most.
• Desktop notifications for run completions and failures so you never miss important results.
• In-memory caching and efficient refresh make the app responsive while respecting GitHub rate limits.
• Secure authentication using OAuth (PKCE); tokens are stored securely in the macOS Keychain.

Privacy & security

We only request minimum GitHub scopes required for the features you use. Authentication uses OAuth PKCE and tokens are stored in the macOS Keychain. We do not send your logs or tokens to third-party servers without your explicit consent. See the app’s Privacy Policy for details.

Getting started

Sign in with your GitHub account (OAuth), grant the requested scopes, and the app will list your repositories and workflows. For CI/CD administrators and individual developers alike, Actioneer makes monitoring and simple management of GitHub Actions fast and convenient.

Follow updates on X: https://x.com/ActioneerCI

A new version of CompareShots has been released. It's a simple app I wrote years ago to compare two images.

The new version 1.6 has been rewritten in SwiftUI. And I've implemented a couple of ideas from app reviews that a user suggested.

What's new:

• Choose your view: Easily switch between aspect fill and aspect fit with a new button.
• Move your images: In aspect fill mode, use two fingers to reposition images for the perfect comparison.
• Faster setup: Select up to two images at once for side-by-side comparison.
• Expanded language support and improved accessibility.
• Various bug fixes and performance enhancements for a faster, more reliable app.
• Various bug fixes and performance improvements.

Spent some more time on HTMLEditor for SwiftUI. There are significant performance improvements in the new version 1.0.3 (thanks to Claude Code).

Try it on GitHub: https://github.com/makoni/HTMLEditor-SwiftUI

Recently, I've implemented a feature that I wanted to add to the CouchDB Swift client for a long time. It's Mango Queries support. Finally, it is done in 2.3.0. Feels like the last remaining big feature.

Changelog:

• Introduced a robust and type-safe MangoQuery API for building complex selectors, projections, sorting, and pagination in CouchDB.
• Added support for specifying indexes via useIndex in queries to optimize performance.
• Added first-class support for uploading, downloading, and deleting document attachments (files/images).
• Comprehensive Attachments API test suite ensures reliability for file operations.
• Added models and API for creating, listing, and managing Mango indexes (MangoIndex, IndexDefinition).
• Tutorial and code samples for creating indexes are now included in documentation.
• Added support for CouchDB Mango _explain endpoint via MangoExplainResponse to inspect how queries are executed and which indexes are used.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

This website is working on Vapor - a server-side Swift framework. It's pretty old, popular, and well known.

I’ve used it for a few years already and always liked that it's fast and doesn't require a lot of memory on the server.

I'm keeping all dependencies up to date. But recently I've noticed that the website started to eat a lot of memory. It starts with about 20 mb of memory usage, but after a few weeks, I found that it ate about 750 mb on the server.

That's a lot for such a simple website, so I started digging. After reviewing the site code (which I didn't change for a long time), I couldn't find any issues (and AI agents too).

I use Leaf - a template engine from the Vapor team to render HTML. And there was an open issue on their GitHub repo describing exactly the same problem.

So I've asked Copilot to help me debug what's wrong. Pretty quickly, it added some new tests to my fork that did a lot of renders in a cycle. And leak util found retain cycles. So I fixed that with some weak annotation, but during the review of my PR, a maintainer suggested to just use unowned.

And that's it. 2 lines of code fixed memory growth. It's hard to believe, but after a few hours since the deploy, the website still takes only 2 mb of memory. So I'm very proud of myself today.

Morale: contribute to the open-source project that you use.

For my own purposes, I wanted to add a spell checker to one of my apps. It should check the text and automatically correct it. Built-in macOS writing tools work fine for English, but don’t work for Russian.

So after it's done, why not share it?

https://github.com/makoni/YaSpellChecker

A few months ago, I wanted to add a text editor to one of my apps with HTML syntax highlighting. I tried a couple of libs that I found on GitHub, but none of them really worked for me. Mostly, they are too heavy and try to do everything. And in the end, they are glitchy and buggy.

So inspired by vibe coding, I made my own. It works fine for me and doesn't try to be an IDE or a real code editor. Just a simple SwiftUI view with a text editor with syntax highlighting. Colors are customizable with a simple struct.

Try it on GitHub: https://github.com/makoni/HTMLEditor-SwiftUI

Couchdb Swift client lib

There are 2 new releases of couchdb-swift library. Copilot kindly added more unit tests to the library to cover more use cases. Mostly failures. I still had to tweak a lot manually, but it gave me some ideas. So I've added more error handling in these 2 recent releases. Also, it found a couple of minor bugs and fixed them, reviewed my PR, and suggested some improvements. Far from being perfect yet, but still pretty impressive.

Release Informer Bot for Telegram

At some moment, I found that Copilot Agent is available for my account, and I can simply start with an issue on GitHub, assign it to the agent, and see what it will do. I've started with a request to update the README for Release Informer Bot with some nice details about how it works and how to set it up.

After the agent finished the updated README, it gave me another idea. Setting up might be automated. So I've opened Visual Studio Code and asked the Copilot agent to add automatic creation of the required database and set it up with the required CouchDB indexes.

It also did a good job, but it still required some manual tweaks and changes. And during that, it led to one more release of the CouchDB client lib because I wanted to rely on a proper "not found" error.

It's hard to tell how much time Copilot saved me. But definitely a lot. Including my favorite automatic string translations. Hopefully, that will inspire me to ship more.

Вышло обновление AppMetric версии 1.13.0. Теперь на Swift 6, слегка подправил UI и убрал открытие поповера при запуске (кроме первого запуска) — пришёл к выводу, что это скорее раздражает, особенно если приложение запускается автоматически после перезагрузки. Ну и добавил локализацию на несколько новых языков.

Recently, I’ve released a few new versions of the CouchDB client for Swift. The latest version is version 2, and it includes several key changes:

• Updated the minimum required Swift tools version to 6.0.
• Adopted Swift Concurrency. CouchDBClient has been updated to be an actor.
• Renamed the library from couchdb-vapor to couchdb-swift to better reflect its purpose as a general CouchDB client for Swift, beyond Vapor-specific use cases.
• Made some changes to the initializer. Instead of passing a lot of parameters, it now accepts a Config structure.
• You can pass your own HTTPClient instance to be used in the client.
• Added translations for error messages.
• Introduced a dedicated tutorial for integrating CouchDBClient with the Hummingbird server-side framework.
• Added a shutdown() method to properly release resources associated with the HTTPClient.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

In the previous article, I've explained how to add a Strings Catalog to a Swift package to support localizations. Now, we'll try to translate it into more languages.

Recently, I've been working on a Swift Package with some strings that I wanted to localize. Apple's documentation on this topic seems to be a bit outdated. The documentation still suggests using language-specific directories for localizing resources and strings.

But, at WWDC 2023, Apple introduced String Catalogs. It's much more handy - just a JSON file that Xcode can fill with all the strings that need to be localized. Most of the examples you can find are about apps, not packages. So, I've spent some time trying to figure out how to use String Catalogs in a Swift package.

My Mac is using 2 folders to store apps: one is in the user folder ~/Applications, the second is the system applications folder at /Applications.

One day I created a search filter in Finder and saved it to have all the available apps in one place, also did put it to the sidebar in the Favourites section.

But also I love to have a shortcut in the Dock. So I've added a grid here too. It worked as I expected until I updated to macOS Sequoia and tried the iPhone Mirroring app once. Now the grid shows some apps from my iPhone too:

An interesting thing is that only Dock's grid shortcut shows the apps from my iPhone, but not the search in Finder.

And here comes the funny part - that's what you'll see if you will try to launch an app from your iPhone:

macOS 18.0 or later? Really? I wonder if that's some feature planned for a future macOS update. Will see :)

Вышло обновление для AppMetric, версия 1.12.0. Допиливал его в свободное время. Из нового в последних версиях:

• Ревьюверам Apple почему-то не нравится теперь OAuth-авторизация через Safari, пришлось переделать через встроенное окно с WKWebView. Надеюсь, в следующем SwiftUI наконец-то появится свой WebView, и больше не придется использовать обертку.
• Добавил кнопку для быстрого перехода на статистику приложения на сайте Appmetrica.
• Добавил просмотр статистики в виде графиков - как каждого показателя, так и всех показателей вместе. Всего спустя 7 лет после того, как один из пользователей попросил добавить графики :)
• Добавил перевод интерфейса на несколько языков. Благо, с помощью ИИ это сделать теперь совсем просто.

Recently, I’ve been updating docs for the CouchdbClient library. After struggling with some phrases, I decided to try AI to do that for me. Microsoft has Copilot as part of Bing search in the Edge browser.

Обновил AppMetric для macOS - клиент для сервиса AppMetrica от Яндекса.

• Исправлена ошибка, когда при выборе сегодняшней даты она не обновлялась при смене дня.
• Добавлено форматирование цифр показателей (в зависимости от языка и региона в системе).
• Небольшие исправления.

Have you ever needed to package your application for distribution on macOS? The solution is simpler than you might think, and it's right at your fingertips in the Terminal. I recently stumbled upon a handy bash function that streamlines the creation of a DMG (Disk Image) file. Here's how to set it up:

Step 1: Edit Your Profile

nano ~/.zprofile

Step 2: Add the Bash Function

Next, insert the following function into your .zprofile. This script utilizes the hdiutil command, which is built into macOS, to create an HFS+ filesystem within a DMG file.

dmg(){
    hdiutil create -fs HFS+ -srcfolder "$1" -volname "$2" "$2.dmg"
}

Step 3: Save and Source Your Profile

After adding the code, save the changes and exit `nano`. To make the function available immediately without restarting your terminal, source your profile:

source ~/.zprofile

Step 4: Use the Function

Now, you can easily create a DMG file for any folder or application. For example, to create a DMG for the 'ModulbankInformer.app', simply run:

dmg ModulbankInformer.app ModulbankInformer

This command will generate a ModulbankInformer.dmg file with the contents of the ModulbankInformer.app directory.

And there you have it - a quick and efficient way to create DMG files directly from your Terminal!

And here we go, one more new version of the CouchDB client library. After the recent post about 1.4.0, Swift on Server released a new version of async-http-client that includes a new implementation of the client singleton. Now it's HTTPClient.shared, so I've updated the CouchDB library to adopt that change. This also means that you no longer need to call httpClient.syncShutdown() if the singleton is used. Additionally, they've bumped the minimum Swift version to 5.8 (which I aslo did in version 1.4.0 of the CouchDB client library). So, I'm keeping the library up to date.

Changelog:

• Bumped the minimum version of async-http-client to the new 1.21.0. If you can't use it in your project, you can still stay on 1.4.0.
• The library will now use HTTPClient.shared (new in async-http-client 1.21.0) internally for requests if no EventLoopGroup is provided.
• No more internal calls for httpClient.syncShutdown() in case of HTTPClient.shared usage.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

A new version of CouchDB Client has been released:

• The library migrated from HTTPClient.Response to HTTPClientResponse, which is similar to HTTPClient.Response but used for the Swift Concurrency API. It also migrated from HTTPClient.Body to HTTPClientRequest.Body. These changes impact the get and find methods. Old methods are marked as deprecated, please refer to the documentation for the updated methods.
• The minimum Swift version is now 5.8.
• The CouchDBRepresentable protocol is now marked as Codable.
• Additionally, a new data model called RowsResponse has been added. It accepts a generic CouchDBRepresentable type, making it easier to retrieve rows from a database. For example:

  let decodeResponse = try JSONDecoder().decode(RowsResponse<MyApp>.self, from: data)

• Lastly, there have been small improvements in the documentation and tutorials.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

Here’s an example code for such a middleware class for Vapor 4:

final class TrimSlashInPathMiddleware: Middleware {
    func respond(to request: Request, chainingTo next: Responder) -> EventLoopFuture<Response> {
        if request.url.path.count > 1, request.url.path.hasSuffix("/") {
            let newPath = String(request.url.path.trimmingSuffix(while: { $0 == "/" }))
            let response = request.redirect(to: newPath, redirectType: .permanent)
            return request.eventLoop.makeSucceededFuture(response)
        }
        return next.respond(to: request)
    }
}

Just add it to configure.swift file:

import Vapor

public func configure(_ app: Application) throws {
    app.middleware.use(TrimSlashInPathMiddleware())

    app.http.server.configuration.port = 8081

    try routes(app)
}

Works with Vapor 4.92.5.