Issue 705

28^th March 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It’s that time of year again! Apple announced WWDC for the 9th-13th June. It’s the same setup as the last few years, with an in-person event in Cupertino on Monday followed by remote labs and session videos throughout the week.

If you want to attend the in-person event, you have until April 2nd to apply in a ticket lottery, and of course the online portion is available to anyone worldwide. 🎉

If you apply and get a ticket, don’t forget WWDC week has grown back to being much more than just Apple’s event. If you’re making the trip to Cupertino, then you’ll want to plan a slightly longer trip than one or two nights, as there are (at least) two more events going on for the remainder of the week.

First up, a new event, CommunityKit, which looks like it’s a successor to the highly popular WWDC Community events that have been running since the early days of WWDC going remote. The website is short on details, so I can’t say much more than that but there’s a mailing list if you want to stay updated.

I’ve also been reliably informed that One More Thing will return this year. Again, details are light and there’s no official announcement yet, but my advice would be to keep an eye on their website over the next few days.

In the past, the WWDC community website also covered worldwide events like keynote watch parties and community get-togethers. I hope that part of the old site also makes it to the CommunityKit website at some point. I’m sure the organising team would be happy to hear from volunteers if you’d like to help make that happen.

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

When it comes to server/backend, “observability” is both a huge business and a constant topic of conversation – even if that conversation is often “how do we spend less on this?”. Yet, we rarely hear about mobile observability, even though the importance of being mobile-first is clear. Why is this? Check out Matt Klein’s take on the value of mobile observability here.

News

Bryan Irace:

… but this shouldn’t distract us from continuing to criticize one of Apple’s most deserving targets: App Review.

He argues that as the time needed to create apps decreases, the process and time taken with everything after building the app looks more daunting.

Tools

Jesse Squires on automating capturing App Store screenshots for macOS apps:

However, on macOS there is much less support (and, sadly, demand) for automated tooling — so you are kind of on your own to figure it out.

There are some great tips in here, especially about processing the screenshots in Retrobatch, which I can confirm is a fantastic piece of software.

Code

I enjoyed reading Oleksii Oliinyk’s piece on integrating the egui graphics library with SwiftUI. It’s not just a theoretical exploration of using the library, either. He’s using it in his app, Data Scout, which looks great if you need a modern SQLite/SwiftData database viewing tool.

One question I hear time and time again when people ask me about Swift on the Server is “How hard is it to deploy?”, so I was so happy to see Natan Rolnik tackle the subject in his latest post. It’s easier than you think.

I know I say this every time I link to information about Instruments, but it’s an underused app because it can be seen as hard to get to grips with. So I was delighted to see Apple publish this new 90-minute tutorial. From the content of the two currently published chapters, I suspect this might be the start of a larger set. 👍

And finally...

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