I Learned Swift to Build 3 Mac Apps — Here's What No Tutorial Taught Me

Six months ago I didn't know Swift. Today I have three Mac apps live on my website, real users, and actual revenue. Here's everything the tutorials left out. Why Swift (and Why From Scratch) I'd been building web stuff for years. React, Node, the usual. But I wanted to build native Mac tools — things that lived in the menu bar, felt snappy, and didn't eat 400MB of RAM like every Electron app I'd ever used. So I picked Swift. Not SwiftUI-only (that was a mistake I'll get to), but AppKit + SwiftUI hybrid. The learning curve was real. Lesson 1: SwiftUI Is Not Ready for Everything Every tutorial sells SwiftUI as the future. And it is — for simple layouts. But the moment you need a menu bar app, a custom NSWindow, or fine-grained control over focus behavior, you're back in AppKit land. My first app, TokenBar , is a menu bar token counter for LLM APIs. SwiftUI's MenuBarExtra looks great in demos. In practice, I needed AppKit's NSPopover for the level of control I wanted. No tutorial mentione