Issue 482

Comment

As I write this, the first Apple Silicon Macs are making their way across oceans labelled with the names and addresses of lucky, or impatient, people all over the world.

We got a glimpse at the future of Mac hardware this week, and I’m excited about it. The only thing I was hoping for a hint towards, that they didn’t deliver, is details on the higher end of things. Is the GPU in the Mac Pro and iMac also going to be integrated? How are they planning to scale up to machines that currently support 1.5TB of memory? This event turned out to be firmly focused on the low end of the lineup, but that makes perfect sense as a first step, and as we all know, Apple only like talking about what’s being announced right now.

There was no bold new design, even though this image makes me confident that it’s in the works. Just look at all that unused space! Their performance claims during the event were also a little vague, and charts were conspicuously devoid of hard numbers.

So if it was an event focused on low-end machines with no fancy new hardware designs to coo over, why am I excited? Partly because this is an impressive start to a major transition, but partly because we might have to reconfigure our brains a bit on what low-end means, both in terms of performance and power consumption. 🏎

I think it’s safe to say that future is bright for Mac hardware!

News

TestFlight 3

Yep, the Big Sur release was the notable event this week, but don't let this new version of TestFlight pass you by. It only has one new feature, but as that feature is automatic updates for TestFlight, it's still worthy of a major version bump. 😍

Tools

What's new in Periphery 2.0

How much unused code is there in your app? I've linked to Periphery before, but it's worth another mention with this v2.0 release. This release includes a major change to remove the tool's dependency on SourceKit, and that brings with it support for analysing Swift packages, compatibility with Linux, and per-line rule configuration via comments. 👍

Debugging JSON Data in LLDB

I liked this LLDB extension from Sam Soffes, and I think you'll like it too if you ever work with JSON data in your apps.

Code

The Missing Guide for Mac Catalyst Apps

This is a valuable resource from Balint Orosz and Daniel Korpai. I especially love the way that they mix their own experience with links to Catalyst blog posts from around the community. I also liked this sentence at the end of the page:

Building great macOS apps will take time, patience, and commitment from you and your team.

Catalyst is like AppKit, UIKit, React Native, Flutter, and every other framework. Good apps require care and attention, and while the right framework can help, it's the care and attention that ultimately matter.

By the way, this document is also a beautiful way to show off the output of their app, Craft. What a fantastic resource, a lovely app (which is a demonstration that Catalyst itself is not the problem), and a great bit of marketing, all in one!

Attributed Strings with SwiftUI

Here's Javier Nigro on attributed strings and SwiftUI:

Before we begin, let’s put it right there: SwiftUI is not prepared to handle attributed strings easily.

This is true, but it's also not the whole story, so read this post! I'm confident, given Apple's history in text processing APIs, that this is an area that'll improve significantly in the coming years.

Formatting numbers in Swift

I remember first starting with Cocoa development and being amazed at the attention of detail that some of the APIs had, and NumberFormatter is a great example of such an API. Here's John Sundell explaining why displaying a number might need more than string interpolation, and how Apple's frameworks can help.

Combine and Swift Concurrency

When Joe Heck talks about Combine, it's always worth reading, and this article is no exception. In this post, he talks about how the plans for concurrency in Swift might affect, or be affected by Combine.

Building a concurrency-proof token refresh flow in Combine

When talking about frameworks like Combine, It's tempting for people to fall back on the theory of what's happening rather than talk about using it in real-world situations. That criticism certainly can't be made about Donny Wals' latest post, a practical look at a common task!

Design

Small Copy, Big Impact

I love it when people give me a chance to mention my love for well-crafted copy inside apps, and so my thanks this week go to Allen Pike for writing this fascinating story of how adjusting a single piece of copy reduced support load in an app.

Jobs

macOS Software Engineer @ PreEmptive – We make cutting-edge products that protect apps via obfuscation and injected runtime checks. We're small, we're agile, and we're serious about forming and supporting great development teams. We're looking for someone with iOS / LLVM / C++ expertise help develop our next great product. Remote-friendly, proximity to Cleveland Ohio preferred. Come join us! – Remote, or Cleveland OH

Senior iOS Engineer @ IRL – IRL is an all-remote company building a social calendar that will be a ‘one stop shop’ for all the things you want to do with friends. Our iOS team is looking to add a Senior Engineer to our small, nimble squad. Our size-to-product ratio is low, so you’ll be a high impact contributor, making tangible changes daily. Come write great iOS code for a beautiful app and help the world do more together! – Remote within ±3 of Pacific Time

iOS Developer @ Doximity – Doximity, the medical network used by over 70% of US clinicians, is hiring passionate iOS engineers (remote-friendly!). You'll get to be part of an amazing product team and work on an app that is constantly evolving. Use your skills (Swift, MVVM, FRP) to be an integral part of our newly launched telemedicine feature. Apply today! – San Francisco CA, or Remote within the US

Senior iOS Engineer @ DuckDuckGo and Senior macOS Engineer @ DuckDuckGo – Rather than rely on interviews, we base our hiring decisions on demonstrable work performance. We achieve that by asking our candidates to complete paid projects, which largely resemble the type of challenges they would be solving at DuckDuckGo every day. – Remote

And finally...

The look of love. 😍

Issue 482 November 13th 2020