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The Fallacy of “Full-Stack” Observability Tools
Discover why mobile teams cannot achieve full-stack observability with a single, all-in-one solution and what they actually need to achieve true observability over their mobile apps and reliably deliver optimal performance. Learn more in this blog post.
instabug.com
News
WWDC Notes 2024
There have been some changes to WWDC Notes for this year. I almost missed this, because the old site has no links to the new one, which is very strange! However, the project is alive and well, which is great news! This year’s notes are hosted with DocC, and I must say it makes a fantastic host. The notes look amazing, and this remains a valuable community-run resource.
github.io
Documentation and sample code from WWDC24
WWDC Notes aren’t the only people using DocC to organise the updates coming out of this year’s conference, Apple is, too! ☺️ As with the past few years, this summary page is a great place to start if you’re looking for documentation of the new APIs and features introduced this year. 👍
apple.com
New GitHub Organization for the Swift Project
Did you notice this year’s conference had more than a few mentions of using Swift with other tools and on alternative platforms? Swift has been more than “an Apple language” for a long time, and Ted Kremenek announced that the Swift project is moving to a brand new GitHub organisation. The evolution repository and some others have already migrated, and the language and remaining repositories will follow later.
swift.org
WWDC
From what I saw on social media, the various community events this week have been hugely successful. It’s hard to know how things were in Cupertino from 5,000 miles away, but watching from afar, the One More Thing (OMT) conference was a huge success and brought some focus to the community events throughout the week. I reached out to J’aime Ohm, organiser of OMT, and it looks like my hunch was correct. They welcomed hundreds of attendees and volunteers from all over the world, including a local dairy farmer who provided complimentary milk as refreshment for everyone! 🐮 In addition to being a great conference, providing a “base” for people during WWDC week is truly valuable. I’m so happy it was a success and hope to see it run for many years!
Also, if you’re still in the Cupertino area today, it’s not over. There’s a closing party from 1:30pm to 5pm (Pacific time, obviously! 😂) at the Residence Inn TODAY. Join the OMT conference team, all the OMT attendees, and James Dempsey for his famous “Recap of the Week” song, and finish your week in style! 🎸
Tools
Helm for App Store Connect
This may be the only non-WWDC link in today’s issue! I’ve followed along with this native App Store Connect interface app during its beta, and I’m very pleased to see that Pol Piella Abadia and Hidde van der Ploeg released it this week. I’m always surprised Apple doesn’t make an app like this themselves, but there’s no need for them to now! 🕺
helm-app.com
Installing macOS Sequoia in a Separate APFS Volume
Friends don’t let friends install brand new macOS betas on their main development machine. Adrian Schönig shows us the way.
schoenig.me
Code
What's new in Swift 6.0?
The best thing about Paul Hudson’s new Swift language version posts is the playground that he always includes, and this one covering Swift 6 makes no changes to that formula. Strict concurrency checking is not the only new feature in this release, so be sure to read all the way to the end.
hackingwithswift.com
A New Direction for Testing in Swift
As expected, Xcode 16 now supports the new Swift Testing framework, and it’s looking good. You may already have watched that session, but you’re more likely to have missed this recently accepted vision document from the team. This is how Apple thinks about testing, and I like what I read.
github.com
Using iOS 18’s new TabView with a sidebar
My favourite new enhancement to SwiftUI this year is sidebar adaptable tab views. I’m happy to see such a common UI issue fixed. Here’s Donny Wals with an overview of how they work, especially if you have sectioned content.
donnywals.com
Design
Dark Mode App Icons
If Widgetsmith taught Apple anything, it taught them how important home screen customisation is to quite a large set of people, and it surely led to the addition of dark mode and tintable icons for apps to this year’s iOS release. I absolutely adore this article from Louie Mantia on how to think about these new icon types. Don’t miss this one!
lmnt.me
Videos
The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2024
If I hadn’t been so slow preparing this week’s newsletter, I’d have missed that John Gruber just released the recording of his interview with Craig Federighi, Greg Joswiak, and John Giannandrea. I have no idea what’s in here as the video is brand new, but these are always great.
youtube.com
What a week! I hope you all enjoyed WWDC as much as I did. I made time to watch quite a few session videos this year, and of course, seeing our work on Ready for Swift 6 in the Platform State of the Union absolutely made my year.
As I always say, I won’t try and recap everything from the conference in today’s issue. We have the whole summer to explore this week’s announcements, so let’s take our time. 👍
I want to write about this article on Private Cloud Compute today. The article is published on a security research blog, and as you’d expect it’s a detailed piece, but it’s designed to be much more than just a technical overview, this is also a marketing document.
There are so many obvious examples of Apple being great at marketing, from the iconic, to the funny, to the clever. But that marketing has to be backed up with great products to be effective. The iPod was an amazing portable music player, they got away with being cheeky with the Mac vs PC adverts because the Mac is a great computer, and there really was no step three!
Apple centres a lot of current marketing around privacy, and claims around privacy are much harder to prove than how good an mp3 player is. It comes down to trust at some point, but that’s built on years of taking the subject very seriously. From differential privacy to the secure enclave¹, Apple talks about privacy at every opportunity and it was at the heart of Monday’s Apple Intelligence announcements.
For Private Cloud Compute and Apple Intelligence to be successful Apple needs everyone to believe that it’s meaningfully more private than the alternatives, and for everyone who uses it to believe that privacy still matters.
We are constantly challenged to give up aspects of privacy with each cookie permission click-through and every pundit saying that privacy is dead. Apple’s first job is to show that it doesn’t need to be that way. Once that’s done, it must prove that Apple Intelligence is meaningfully different from the competition and this document and others are a key part of that. Even if your average consumer will never read documents like these, they influence people who write about Apple. You could call it full-stack marketing, and it’s very effective.
It also helps Apple say “What we’re doing is unique so it can’t be compared to our competition”, but talking about that will have to wait for another day
¹ Note that these features both have names so good that I could recall them without looking them up. That’s also part of great marketing.
Dave Verwer