Issue 746

13^th March 2026

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It’s time to start thinking about WWDC!

Apple announced the conference on Monday, and registration is only open until Monday, so don’t delay if you want to attend the official event!

Of course, the official event won’t be the only reason to be in Cupertino that week. CommunityKit jumped on the announcement immediately, confirming what I am confident will be another fantastic iteration of the community-run conference. There’s been no word since the announcement from the OMT Conf organisers, but it was on their mind a month ago, so fingers crossed they announce something soon.

The big question is whether it’s worth being in Cupertino for a week without Apple running a week-long event.

It felt so much easier to justify being there when Apple ran a full in-person conference. But if I think back honestly, a huge part of what made that week great was organised by the community and companies looking to reach that community. The evening events, the breakfast meetups, the side conferences. Apple’s most significant contribution outside of the sessions and hallways inside the conference centre was the bash on Thursday night.

The community events are a huge part of what made WWDC week special, and while we don’t have a full list of them yet, I’m sure the next month or two will be full of announcements.

Whether or not you’ll get value from it depends partly on how far from Cupertino you are. It can be very expensive to travel there, even more expensive to get a hotel room, and entering the USA from other countries isn’t as easy a decision as it used to be.

I should really get myself organised and attend again. It likely won’t be this year, but I should try to make it happen soon.

– Dave Verwer

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News

This release brings better C-language interoperability, module name selectors, finer-grained control over compiler optimizations, a preview of Swift Build in SwiftPM, and Swift Testing and DocC updates. It also has improvements to embedded Swift, and the first official release of the Swift SDK for Android. 🤖 However, the feature that will likely be most impactful, especially if you use any macros, is that SwiftPM in 6.3 now includes a pre-built Swift Syntax for shared macro libraries. What a packed release!

Tools

I love this new tool (and its icon! 🫨) from Simon Støvring. It’s not directly related to app development, but I’d say it’s likely to appeal to app developers! 😂 The concept is dead simple, POST (or GET) to an HTTP endpoint with a few parameters and get a push notification to one, or all, of your devices. Use it with web hooks, agents, scripts, or anything else that can make an HTTP call.

Code

Adrian Ross isn’t the first person to use the iOS Dev Directory to build a rolling list of content published to all those RSS feeds, but as far as I’m aware, he is the first to back it with a search engine! To have your blog included, make sure it has a full text RSS feed and add it to the directory. I love to see this.

Pavel Zak sweats the details on an animation to expand/contract a SwiftUI List item, and while I’m not a huge fan of expanding/collapsing data in lists like this, it can be the best choice and I really appreciate when someone pays attention to how it looks and feels. He walks through several approaches that get closer and closer to polished along with code examples for each.

Danny Bolella:

Recently, I had the privilege of attending the “Let’s talk Liquid Glass: New design workshop” at Apple’s offices in NYC. For three days, from 9 AM to 5 PM, I sat in a highly intimate room with Apple’s Developer Relations and Design Evangelists team.

There’s some good information in here, especially in the “Stop Fighting the Framework” section. 👍

I had to look up what Raylib was as I started reading Antonin Carette’s latest post. He shows how easy it is to get a C library working with Swift, and then goes for a stretch goal and gets it working with Wasm, too!

Books

Following on from her previous book, SwiftUI Fundamentals, Natalia Panferova published The SwiftUI Way this week. Fundamentals gives you insights into how the framework works, and this book builds on that with information on how to handle larger and more complex projects. As always, it’s easy-to-read and contains valuable information from a former member of the SwiftUI team.

And finally...

Does this mean I need to buy an actual cheese grater now?