Articles, podcasts and news about Swift development, by John Sundell.

Sponsor: Raycast

Published on 01 Feb 2021

Thanks a lot to the indie team behind the fantastic new macOS app Raycast for sponsoring Swift by Sundell last week. Raycast gives you a Spotlight-like interface for controlling your tools, scripts and tasks. It ships with a large collection of built-in integrations, for services like GitHub, Jira, Zoom, and Google Docs, and it also lets you invoke your own custom scripts as well.

For example, to be able to deploy Swift by Sundell using Raycast, all that I had to do was to write a simple script file containing a few pieces of metadata, and a call to publish deploy — like this:

#!/bin/bash

# @raycast.schemaVersion 1
# @raycast.title Deploy Swift by Sundell
# @raycast.mode fullOutput
# @raycast.currentDirectoryPath ~/developer/swiftbysundell

publish deploy

After importing the above file, I can now simply invoke Raycast using its system-wide keyboard shortcut, type deploy into its search box, and hit return — and Swift by Sundell will be deployed within seconds. Really nice!

Raycast screenshot

Of course, the above just scratches the surface of what Raycast is capable of. You can use it to update GitHub issues and pull requests, search for files in your Google Drive, start or schedule Zoom calls, and much more. It even includes a clipboard manager and lots of other system integrations.

Try out the completely free Raycast beta, to see how it can help you improve your various workflows, and to support Swift by Sundell.