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Helm 2.0 is here!
Hey everyone! I hope you’ve all had a fantastic couple of weeks — welcome to another issue of the newsletter!
Yesterday Hidde and I released the iOS and macOS 26 versions of our app Helm. We didn’t manage to make day one as we did with our other app NowPlaying, but we are certainly very proud of what we have achieved and taking the extra time to make sure we could make the** update as good as possible** really paid off!
Not only have we embraced the new Liquid Glass design system, but we have also focused on addressing feedback for some of our most important features, making them better than ever before!
We have made significant enough changes to make this release our second ever major update: 2.0!
You can read more about the release in this update post we have written and we would love it if you could check out the new version, which is now live on the store and give us a nice review if you enjoy using it ⭐️.
Now, let’s dive into today’s issue 👀…
⚖️ Is your project ready to scale?
Scaling a Swift project isn’t just about adding more code — it often means slower builds, tangled dependencies, and frustratingly long build and test runs. Many teams hit this wall sooner than they expect, and some even consider drastic moves like switching frameworks or replacing their build system entirely.
If these problems sound familiar, make sure you read this article by Pedro Piñera on the Tuist blog, there are plenty of tips there!
💪 ReleaseTools: A lightweight alternative to Fastlane written entirely in Swift
I’ve been a fastlane user for a long time and love its community support, rich features, and how quickly you can go from zero to a working CI/CD pipeline.
That being said, I’ve never been a fan of Ruby, which fastlane relies on, and I usually end up using just one or two of fastlane’s vast amount of features. Sam Deane felt the same way, so he built his own solution: ReleaseTools, a lightweight and highly focused alternative written entirely in Swift.
💪 How to install Xcode 26’s Metal Toolchain on CI/CD
We migrated our Xcode Cloud workflows this week to use Xcode 26 and, as we did, we were greeted with an unexpected failure: The Metal Toolchain was not installed and could not compile the Metal source files.
As you probably know, the solution locally is to just download the toolchain and build again, but how do we do that when we don’t have access to the build runner? I tell you all about it in this article!
🧠 Profile your Foundation Models calls in Xcode 26
Are you curious to see how your Foundation Models are performing under the hood but struggling to get the right information using logs and print statements?
You definitely need to read this article by Artem Novichkov, who explains one of the new instruments in Xcode 26 in great detail.