Issue 531

29^th October 2021

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Two days ago, Apple reminded us that they’re not finished with developer-focused announcements for this year by releasing the first beta of Xcode 13.2. 🎉

There are two significant headlines in this release, alongside the usual “bug fixes and improvements”. 😂 First, and most significantly, the much-discussed backport of the Swift 5.5 concurrency features is not only going ahead, but it’s also shipping in Xcode 13.2! There are some caveats around using it with watchOS, Mac Catalyst, and TestFlight, which you should read about in the Known Issues. Still, considering the last post I saw on this subject made no promises of the backport happening, seeing this in the release notes was a happy surprise! Let all your threads prosper, regardless of the underlying operating system. 🎉

It’s worth reading this tweet from Doug Gregor before going all in, though. There may/will be bugs.

The second significant point in the release notes is this one:

Xcode 13.2 beta includes support for app projects created with Swift Playgrounds 4.

As we saw at WWDC, Swift Playgrounds on iPad is growing up into something that can even submit apps to TestFlight and the App Store. They also promised a better package-based project format for transferring projects between Playgrounds and Xcode, and this feature of Xcode 13.2 looks like one half of that! It seems likely that we’ll see a release of Playgrounds 4 around the same time as 13.2 coming out of beta. Exciting!

It’s easy to focus our attention on WWDC as the “Developer Event” each year, but as the recent Tech Talks also showed, I like that Apple doesn’t think that way anymore.

Dave Verwer

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News

So iOS 15.1 is out, and we can release SharePlay enabled apps to the store! I’ve not read anything about the experience of implementing SharePlay from someone who has done it, though. Have you implemented it? Would you like to write about it? I’d love to read what the experience was like, and I’m sure everyone else would, too.

Were you honest with your privacy nutrition label questions? This feature rolling out will be fascinating, and I’d encourage you to give those questions another look with your next update. Users will be very keen to pull developers up who are not being completely transparent.

Tools

I’ve heard from a few people that they got access to Xcode cloud over the last week, so it looks like Apple are finally rolling it out a little more widely. I enjoyed this post from Eneko Alonso on the experience of getting started with it.

Now, all I need is an invite so I can try it myself! 😅 I’d love to write about it.

Following up on last week’s link, Jesse Squires takes the concept of automating the deletion of your apps after your UI tests run a step further by making it a little more reliable and adds some advice about when you might want to use this technique.

Code

I’ve linked to SwiftWasm before but haven’t been keeping a close eye on it, so I was very interested to read this post from Carson Katri about porting his SharePlay app to the web with Tokamak. Does it work? Kinda!

Next, you’ll be telling me that Adobe built Photoshop for the web! 🙄

Did you think that Swift’s concurrency features were complete? Konrad Malawski explains what’s coming next in this post on the official Swift blog.

Design

I loved reading every word of this post from Carlos Melegrito about the Big Sur’ification of Reveal. There’s so much love for the Mac platform in this post, and it’s a beautiful look at how you can take the standards that Apple lay down and tweak them to fit your needs. Reveal has always been a beautiful app, and it looks like it will remain that way with this update.

I also need some disclosure here. I’m sure that I was previously sent over a license for Reveal when it first launched, but that was before they changed to subscription pricing. Anyway, you should know that there was some kind of free license given to me at some point, even if I can’t find it anymore! 😅

Here’s a nice reminder from Mike Stern that the design resources are all up to date for iOS 15 and watchOS 8. 👍

Videos

You probably don’t need as elaborate a brew setup as Josh Holtz does, being the lead maintainer of fastlane, but that doesn’t mean you won’t learn plenty from this half-hour video and associated blog post. I learned plenty about Rosetta from watching this, and with lots of new M1 PRO and MAX machines arriving this week, it seemed like a good week to include it, even if it’s not directly related to Swift development!

Jobs

Head of Mobile @ Chip – At Chip, we are on a mission to build the best savings account in the world. Automated, intelligent, wealth-building all with an amazing UI for the mobile generation. – Remote (within European timezones) with some on-site work (United Kingdom)

IOS Developer @ Reframe – An opportunity to join the core team at one of Y-Combinator’s fastest growing companies and help millions of people cut back on alcohol use. – Remote (within US timezones)

Founding iOS Developer @ Bloom – We’re building an app that will capture and save sounds (specifically, human voices) and allow us all to learn more about the people in our lives in a fun, game-like way. In a way, it saves people. And together, we can use it to save everyone. We’re looking for the first engineer to join our team. – Remote (within US timezones)

iOS Developer @ Bontouch – At Bontouch, we have a simple but ambitious idea: to make the world’s greatest apps for the best brands on the planet, and to have the greatest impact on users all over the world. Come join us working with fun and passionate coworkers, creating world-class digital experiences for million of users! – On-site (Sweden) with some remote work (within European timezones)

Staff iOS Engineer @ Turo – Help us build product features that delight guests who book vehicles on our platform & enable hosts with the tools they need to manage their fleet. We’re actively transitioning our codebase from Objective-C to Swift, and learning SwiftUI together as we migrate our internal, watchOS, and tvOS apps. – On-site (United States in CA)

Are you looking for a new challenge? There are more than 65 open positions listed over at iOS Dev Jobs. Or, download the apps for daily personalised notifications to keep you up-to-date!

And finally...

This is a very cool piece of history.

… and all it took to get from there to here was a few announcements introduced as one more thing! 😅