Issue 527

1^st October 2021

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I loved this tweet from Rebecca (Slatkin) Sloane this week. Yes, she wrote it to be amusing, but it’s also true.

Apple’s documentation gets a lot of criticism. Some deserved, but the “Apple’s documentation is bad” meme is harmful, especially for people starting with Swift.

Most community blog posts come from experience or experimentation. Apple documentation is from the source and verified before being published. There’s no question of what should be your primary resource! Yes, it’s not perfect or as complete as you might want/expect it to be. But, if you only gathered opinions on it from Twitter (which is a terrible idea), you could easily come away thinking it was worthless.

So, why is this newsletter filled with links to community blog posts rather than Apple documentation, then? Partly because this is a community newsletter and partly because it focuses mainly on new content. I have ways and means to keep up with what the community is publishing, but nothing like that exists for the official documentation. I wish it did!

It’s also because this newsletter isn’t about teaching anything specific. It’s just what catches my eye each week. Some of that will be educational, of course, but it mainly exists to tempt you into reading about something you might find interesting rather than solving your problems.

Also, let’s not even get started with this reply from Kathy Tafel to Rebecca’s tweet. There’s so much wisdom in these two tweets! 🚀

Dave Verwer

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News

Here’s one to be aware of before you upgrade to Monterey when it becomes available, presumably next month. Downgrading a macOS version or restoring from backup is not a pleasant way to spend a day if you still need Xcode 12. Thanks to Ethan Huang for the heads up.

It’s hard to say how widespread or severe the issues (1, 2, and 3) in this thread are, but if you’re using the new concurrency features in Swift 5.5 and see stack corruption, you’ll want to read this.

Tools

Like Chris Wu, I remember being taught how to use sed, awk, grep, and friends back in University, and still put them to use reasonably regularly today. Unix tools excel at string processing, mainly because the output of Unix tools is all text! If you’ve been avoiding them because they feel old, this post might inspire you to give them a try.

Code

It’s been a long time since we made pixel perfect designs on iOS, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention when new screen sizes appear. But don’t worry, Geoff Hackworth is here with his usual excellent summary of what’s what.

A couple of things jumped out at me when reading this post from Adam Overholtzer on SwiftUI animations. First, don’t forget to respect the user’s “reduce motion” setting when throwing your views around the screen, and second, the animation performance issues he encountered on macOS 11. The whole post is worth a read, though!

It used to be a safe bet to stick to the rule of “Never call sleep” in your code, but is that still the case with the new Swift concurrency APIs? Marin Todorov investigates.

Design

I love little details like this. This one from Ayden Panhuyzen reminded me of the demise of my favourite blog on this subject.

Business and Marketing

How do your apps fare against Apple’s pre-installed apps? Apple enabled ratings for built-in apps with iOS 15, and Ariel Michaeli checked out the results. I was shocked that some of the apps I’d consider being great, like Mail and Calendar, both rate towards the bottom of the list, while Tips is riding high with a 4.0 average! Don’t read too much into this, but it entertained me for a few minutes!

Jobs

Senior iOS Software Developer @ TouchBistro – Our developers are a tight-knit group even as we continue to grow. Fix it, Ship it, Own it is our department mantra and we try to live it daily. We value shipping quality code that delivers e2e functionality and then iterating using feedback loops from our customers and observability stacks. – Remote (Anywhere)

Senior iOS Engineer @ Ground News – Tim Cook personally reviewed and praised this award-winning app (for real!). Featured by the App Store multiple times. – Remote (within US timezones)

iOS Experienced Engineer @ Bloomberg LP – Join our group of mobile engineers at Bloomberg who build the definitive financial market mobile experience. With new projects on the horizon and opportunities for both technical specialists and those looking to progress into team leadership, this is your chance to make an impact. – On-site (United Kingdom) with some remote work (within European timezones)

Senior Software Engineer @ Frontier Design Group – We make the iOS app Video Star. We emphasize flexibility, personal responsibility, and good team communications, and try to minimize meetings and overhead. Our team has 10 full-time members plus part-timers, most based in Northern New England, USA, with others in Texas, Spain, China, and Brazil. – Remote (Anywhere)

Is your company hiring? You can post your open positions for free over at iOS Dev Jobs.

And finally...

Be thankful for code completion when working with the Contacts framework! 😂