Issue 562

10^th June 2022

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So, I successfully predicted this wasn’t the big AR/VR/MR year at WWDC. 🥽 What I missed were any signs that this would be the year we’d have two dedicated sessions covering regular expressions instead! 😳🤯🥰

What I also didn’t expect was to see so many people attend the in-person portion of this year’s conference. I’m not sure what the exact capacity was, but it seemed to be a significant number from the photos!

I wonder if we’ve seen the future of a truly hybrid WWDC? I’m not the first to say that the pre-recorded session videos are superior to filmed in-person sessions, so it feels like that part is a clear win. It will always be tough to convince companies to send people to California for a one-day event, though, especially if it involves intercontinental travel. If Apple slightly expanded this type of event, is there a balance that might make those journeys worthwhile? I think there probably is.

I’ve seen several people this week suggest that Apple should run this kind of event in multiple locations worldwide. That’s a good idea, but there is something special about meeting developers and app builders from all around the globe that regional events struggle to compete with.

There’s no easy solution to a successful hybrid event. Still, I’m sure the developer relations teams within Apple were watching very closely and that it’ll be a hot topic inside Apple Park over the next weeks and months! We’ll have to wait and see what happens next year, but I must admit I felt some regret for not applying for a ticket. That feeling intensified when I saw this tweet from Paola Mata specifically. I want to feel that way, too!

As with all post-WWDC issues of this newsletter, I won’t try to summarise everything from the last week in today’s issue. We have the whole summer for that. Instead, my comments and the articles I link to are always inspired by whatever I found interesting during the week. So here we go!

Dave Verwer

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Apple recently announced a new powerhouse in its desktop lineup – the Mac Studio. As the leader in the macOS cloud computing space, MacStadium is thrilled to announce that we expect to have bare metal, cloud-hosted Mac Studios generally available by Summer’s end.

News

The open-source collaborative note-taking site launched by Federico Zanatello is back for another year and already has plenty of sessions covered. I was particularly keen to read about App Intents after seeing it mentioned in the SotU, so I was happy to see that Cihat Gündüz had already made extensive notes on that session! 🚀

One thing I hadn’t noticed about the new Xcode 14 beta until I read this recap from Toomas Vahter was that Bitcode is deprecated! That’s an unexpected announcement, although I know that Bitcode wasn’t without issues. Read more about that and some of the other new features in the latest version of everyone’s favourite developer tool. There are also the official release notes for the whole story.

Tools

While Xcode 14 runs perfectly well on macOS Monterey, if you want to play with all the features, you’ll need runtime support which is only¹ available if you’re running the new macOS Ventura beta. This Twitter thread from Craig Hockenberry talks about setting up Ventura in a VM, which might be helpful! You should be aware of one major limitation, though! This post from Bryan Heinz also has some good tips if you’re trying to get this working.

¹ While some Swift 5.7 features are only available on the latest Apple platforms, that doesn’t hamper the Linux builds of Swift. You can easily play with Swift on Linux via Docker and VS Code development containers.

Xcode Cloud is now open to everyone with a (paid) Apple developer account! Apple also detailed pricing, and while there’s a free tier of 25 hours/month available through the end of next year, there will be no free tier once that expires. Pricing is very reasonable, though, and it’s good to see this feature finally roll out to everyone!

Want to get up and running? Paul Peelen wrote up a quick guide this week, too!

Code

A table view or collection view might be the perfect place to experiment with adding a SwiftUI into a UIKit app, but it was never quite as easy as it should have been. Until now! John Sundell takes a look at the new UIHostingConfiguration API.

Navigation getting a major reworking in this year’s SwiftUI was predictable, but what exactly changed? Natalia Panferova does an excellent job of taking us through the new navigation APIs now that Apple has deprecated NavigationView.

From my perspective, I’m also delighted that the only place we needed to use Introspect in the iOS Dev Jobs apps should go away now, with this specific enhancement, also written up by Natalia.

Even with the very clear message from Apple, UIKit is going nowhere for a very long time. So what’s new for UIKit? Jordan Morgan does a great job of summarising the changes and improvements in this post.

If you’re already fully switched over to Swift 5.7 😬 then go ahead with this tip from Daniel Tavares and submit a PR. 🃏

Design

New operating system versions mean a new HIG, and one of my favourite parts of this week every year is giving it a browse. The major change this year, echoed by many of this week’s announcements, is consolidating all platforms into one guide. There are still platform-specific sections, of course, but there was plenty of duplication in the old separate guides.

Business and Marketing

Without a doubt, the most painful part of shipping an app release to the App Store is updating the screenshots, especially if you add frames, text, and callouts. You can automate the screenshots with fastlane, but how do you automate everything that comes after that? This tool and the developer API aim to solve that problem. Define a template in the web-based editor, then ping the API for generated screenshots. 👍

Videos

I’ve not watched this as it was only published an hour ago, but it’ll be great, as always! Unless things have changed significantly, it’ll be John Gruber, Craig Federighi, and Greg Joswiak with 90 minutes of additional context about this week.

Do you want to watch Paul Hudson race through as many new SwiftUI features for iOS 16 as he can in just over an hour? That’s exactly what he did in this video!

Jobs

Senior iOS Developer @ Chariot Solutions – Chariot Solutions is a Philly based consulting company that strives to create a product company culture. Celebrating our 20th year in business, we work hard to win exciting projects with some of the top companies in the world, while helping our employees maintain a great work life balance. – Remote (within US timezones)

Senior iOS Developer @ Covenant Eyes – The combination of competitive compensation, family atmosphere, low turnover, and a people-first culture make this an excellent place to work. We are proud to have been named #2 in Mid-Sized company category of Michigan Top Workplaces 2021 (Detroit Free Press). We are a 100% Employee Owned company! – Remote (within US timezones) with some on-site work (United States in MI)

Mobile Full Stack Engineer @ Expensify – Join our passionate team of top-notch engineers to solve a real-world problem, and help people spend less time managing expenses and more time pursuing their real goals. – Remote (Anywhere) with some on-site work (Australia, United Kingdom, or United States in CA, MI, NY, or OR)

iOS Engineer @ Intent – Intent helps people figure out what to eat and simplify their lives. We’re a small team with a fast-growing product, we’re backed by top investors, and people love our app - 4.85 rating in the App Store. We care deeply about product and eng quality, and you’ll have significant ownership and impact. – On-site (United States in CA)

Senior iOS Engineer @ DuckDuckGo – You will work on the team responsible for an all-in-one privacy solution. You’ll collaborate with Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers across Native Apps to craft a world-class browser with embedded privacy features that will revolutionise the way people search, surf, and exist online. – Remote (Anywhere)

iOS Developer @ Impending, Inc. – Join a team of 4 responsible for designing and building Heads Up! – the App Store’s most popular and beloved party game. We’re remote friendly (US timezone overlap is critical), pay $150k/year+ and also tinker on some cool indie projects like Clear, which popularized swipe left to delete. – Remote (within US timezones)

Senior iOS Engineer @ Sendwave – We currently have a 4.6-star rating on Trustpilot — people put their faith in us to deliver their money quickly, securely, and affordably. And we’re pretty darn proud of that. – Remote (within US or European timezones)

iOS Software Engineer @ NelNet Community Engagement – Our mobile-led strategy includes customized mobile apps, communication, online giving, and online learning. We help schools, churches, & nonprofits engage and grow their communities through text, web, & branded apps. – Remote (within US timezones)

Senior iOS Developer @ Flightradar24 – Join the team at Flightradar24, working on the world’s most popular flight tracking service. This is your chance to be part of our small but mighty mobile team, work on every part of our iOS app and have a big impact on over 3 million daily users. – Remote (within European timezones)

Staff iOS Engineer @ brightwheel – At brightwheel, our vision is high quality early education for every child. Early education is a $100 billion market in the United States. There are more preschools than restaurants in the US, so the opportunity for impact is immense! – Remote (within US timezones) or on-site (United States in CO or TX)

iOS Developer @ Konrad – Konrad is an amazing community of the brightest minds in tech. We build bleeding edge mobile applications for some of the largest, most exciting companies in the world. We have a team of 250+ developers that work with the latest technologies. – Remote (within US timezones) with some on-site work (Canada)

iOS Developer @ MFB Technologies, Inc. – Be one of two primary developers responsible for our #legaltech iOS application. The app (written entirely in SwiftUI using functional programming) is currently in beta at a major law firm. You will be given flexibility, resources, and time to add features and improve its architecture. – Remote (within US timezones)

There are many more open positions over at iOS Dev Jobs. Set up some filters, so you only get the jobs in locations where you’re looking for work, and get yourself into your perfect job!

And finally...

Stage Manager, or shrinkydink? 🙃