Issue 409

21^st June 2019

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

We’ve all had a couple of weeks now to get used to the fact that the future of Apple platform development is much more declarative and reactive than it was before the WWDC announcements.

I think most people who were already aboard the reactive programming train are generally in favour of Apple moving in that direction. I have seen a few tongue-in-cheek comments joking about how reactive Swift (note the lower case “r” there 😀) is suddenly seen as great now that Apple have blessed it. It’s certainly true that there’s nothing revolutionary here, we’ve had similar technologies available for years, but in my opinion this stuff being first party really matters.

Third party dependencies are costly, especially so if they affect the fundamental architecture of your app. It’s one thing to use a small UI component for a specific view. It’s something else entirely to base your entire architecture on a third party library. So when Apple do it, yes it’s different to when an open source framework does it. SwiftUI and Combine have been in development for years and they won’t ever be abandoned without real care and time to let them deprecate gracefully. I’m not saying they will be deprecated of course, but that if they are, it’ll be done very carefully.

That’s why it’s OK for people to jump on board much more quickly when it’s Apple doing this stuff, even if it’s been possible for years.

Dave Verwer

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News

I touched on this last week but it’s worth re-iterating with this post from Pedro Piñera. You don’t need to keep up with the tons and tons of material that this community is producing about SwiftUI, Combine, and all of Apple’s other announcements. In fact, if you wait a bit (maybe even until the final release) then you’ll gain the benefit of not having to rewrite your code three times before September, and that can only be a good thing.

You’re doing fine, don’t worry… 👍

This is a great idea. Are you making notes on WWDC sessions as you watch them? Contribute them here and let’s build something more than the transcripts give us. I do love a bit of crowdsourcing. ❤️

Tools

I had no idea that Xcode could restore a snapshot of your app’s data when it runs, or even better when running tests. It’s not even new in Xcode 11, It’s been around for a while too. This is an extremely useful tip from Mohsen Alijanpour.

Did you think Xcode Previews were only usable with SwiftUI? I know I did, until I read this article from Antoine van der Lee that explains how to get it up and running for your standard view controllers too. The implementation makes perfect sense too, so I don’t think this is something that’ll be “fixed” in the future. 👍

Note: You still need Xcode 11 and the Catalina beta to see Xcode Previews, you just don’t need to be using SwiftUI.

Andrei Hogea with a guide on creating your own Swift Package using Xcode 11. It strikes me that Apple bringing this functionality first party, and so nicely integrated with Xcode might lead to more people splitting their code bases into packages. Private/internal CocoaPods were always a thing, but I didn’t see them used much outside of very large companies.

Code

Beta 2 is here, and it brings new SwiftUI goodies! Majid Jabrayilov takes us through how to build a Form. If you thought static table view controllers were good, you’ll really like this.

iOS 13 finally gives better access to the NFC chip in modern devices, which means it can be used with all sorts of interesting tags that you might have lying around… like passports. What better way to get up to speed with what’s possible. Thanks to Andy Qua for putting this example together.

Did anyone else notice that Apple snuck a version of Core Data cloud sync into this year’s releases? As someone who knows Core Data syncing better than most, it’s really interesting to hear what Drew McCormack thinks about it.

Of course it isn’t, and John Sundell is here with a coupe of links to articles he wrote last year to prove the point. That said, I do think it’ll be interesting to see how SwiftUI will affect the architectural choices we’ll end up making in our apps going forward.

Business and Marketing

New in beta 2, Federico Viticci noticed this great step forward for subscriptions on iOS. I wonder if we’ll see more changes like this before the September releases?

Videos

A full set of videos from the recent UIKonf conference. There’s a YouTube playlist too, if you prefer to watch that way. As if we didn’t have enough videos to watch at the moment. 😬

I only recently realised that the San Francisco Swift Language User Group were still publishing videos after the hosting and publishing situation changed a bit. Here’s a great reminder from J.P. Simard that they exist.

Jobs

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Swift Engineer @ WillowTree – At WillowTree, Senior Swift Engineers have the freedom to create products people love. You’ll collaborate with a cross-disciplinary team to build large-scale products for well-known brands. We look for team members who advocate for software engineering best practices and inspire their team to continuously learn and improve. – Charlottesville, VA

Whether you’re looking for a job, or looking to hire, head over to iOS Dev Jobs right now.

And finally...

This is a trick that I expect only to work once… 🕵️‍♂️ Your move, Apple.