Issue 591

6^th January 2023

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy new year! 🎊🎉 I hope you all managed to take some time off over the last couple of weeks and are back with vigour for the year ahead.

I know many of you are sad about the recent drastic acceleration in the decline of Twitter that has seen our community scattered across the internet. Some people are trying other sites and services, returning to blogging, or taking a break from social media altogether. It’s sad to see.

This situation may have been inevitable at some point for a community so focused on a free service owned by a giant tech company. I don’t remember the event in 2018 that made me create a Mastodon account, but I remember it was a reaction to something Twitter announced. Yes, a narcissistic troll accelerated this recent decline, but the problem has been there for years.

While many people from this community have moved from Twitter to Mastodon, it’s clear that it’s not a complete exodus. That’s OK, though, and there may be a more positive way to look at what’s happening. We just added a new platform.

Our community already spanned several types of services outside Twitter. Personal or company blogs, YouTube, Slack, Discord, Twitch, and now Mastodon. Twitter may have been the focal point, but it is far from the only place this community gathers.

It reminds me of why I created the iOS Dev Directory. Initially, it was a way for me to crowdsource the RSS feeds that I monitor for this newsletter, but over time it expanded. I added support for multiple languages and other types of content like Podcasts, Newsletters, YouTube and Twitch. I also supported linking to additional social networks such as Weibo and Micro.blog. Then, last week, I added support for Mastodon.

So, whether you’ve fully migrated to Mastodon or now split your time between multiple platforms, let people know where they can find you by opening a pull request that updates your entry in the blogs.json. Of course, if you haven’t yet added an entry for your blog, please join the 950+ other people who have! If enough people add Mastodon URLs, I’ll implement this suggestion to make it easy to follow everyone.

Finally, it would make me so happy if this disruption causes more people to return to personal blogging rather than social media. I’ve noticed a few recent posts that would probably have been tweet threads in previous years but are so much better as blog posts. Check out this post from Ryan Ashcraft and this one from David Smith as examples.

Long live writing things on the internet. ❤️

Also, if you’re passionate about the problem the iOS Dev Directory is solving and have some free time, I have some ideas I don’t have time to implement. Want to help make it an even better resource for the community? Reply to this email and let’s chat.

This comment isn’t about me, but I know I’ll get messages if I don’t mention my plans regarding Twitter. Social media has been bad for me for a long time. I stopped using Instagram and Facebook many years ago and significantly cut back on tweeting over 18 months ago. It’s also been about six months since I unfollowed everyone there in an attempt to break my addiction to reading it. I’m happier after making those changes and don’t feel like I want to start using Mastodon much more than I want to use Twitter.

I will start posting the iOS Dev Weekly recap updates you’d usually find here to Mastodon. I haven’t yet set it up, as I couldn’t find any good Mastodon scheduling software. I have a plan for that, but it’s not yet in place. You can, however, already follow the iOS Dev Weekly account to get a head start. Regular posts will begin in a couple of weeks.

As always, the best way to get me to read something you wrote is to blog it and make sure your RSS feed is in the iOS Dev Directory. I read everything in every English language feed there. If you can’t blog it for some reason, there’s a form here for other links.

Dave Verwer

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News

What does January mean? New year resolutions? Snow? It may bring those, but it also brings the need to check you’re up to date with export compliance obligations. I think I said it best last year:

Some questions you may have: Do you need to do it if you only use HTTPS connections to a web server? Yes! Do you need to do it if you’re outside the US? Yes. Do you have to do it every year for every app? Actually, no! You should read this guide from David Olesch for the full details. It only takes 15 minutes, so you might as well do it right now. I did mine yesterday. ⏰

Here’s a reminder from Apple that the WWDR intermediate certificate that you may not even know you use expires in around a month. You probably don’t need to take action, but there are some situations where you might, so it’s worth double-checking. Rik Haandrikman also wrote up a guide with more details.

For full disclosure, RevenueCat (where Rik’s article is published) previously sponsored this newsletter.

Tools

It’s hard to notice features like code completion getting better over time. The more they do what’s appropriate, or you want them to do, the less you notice how good they are, so I enjoyed this post from Sebastian Wojciechowski highlighting all the new goodies that slipped into the editor with

If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about linkers anymore, but that doesn’t mean there’s no innovation happening in this essential part of every build! I enjoyed reading Michael Eisel’s words about lld as a nice change of pace.

Yes! A thousand times, yes.

Code

I agree with James Sherlock that adding a secret set of complex gestures to your app to open up a debugging menu isn’t ideal. In this post, he looks through all possible methods he’s seen implemented and then comes up with something new. Is James’ method overkill? Probably. Is it interesting? Yes!

I love this post from Arnaud Joubay. I felt like I was with him every step of the way as he tried to find the best solution for adding a search field to a bottom sheet.

Is there a way to make isolated SwiftUI previews interactive? Xcode may initially dissuade you from going down this path, but there are several techniques you might want to look at to give that beautiful stateful preview you want. Peter Friese explains.

Design

I linked to one of the posts in David Smith in this week’s comment above, but you should also check out the full series he has been writing on design. Every post is worth reading. 🚀

Videos

This was a fun video from Balaji Venkatesh, who uses SwiftUI to build an almost pixel-perfect re-creation of Control Centre. It includes all the basic controls, including interactivity and animations on elements like the volume control. 👍

Jobs

Hello again! 👋 Before I list this week’s featured jobs from iOS Dev Jobs, I’d like to ask for your help. December is always a slow month for hiring, and the various hiring freezes and recession planning that’s going on is making things even slower right now. 🐢

That said, more companies are hiring for Swift-language developer positions than are listed on the board. Is your company hiring right now? I’d love to get the board filled up with jobs again now the new year has begun. It’d only take you a minute or two to either post it directly or to stop a message recommending it to whoever handles hiring at your company. It’s free, so you have nothing to lose apart from a couple of minutes.

Thanks so much! Now read about the open positions from the companies who already did it.

Senior iOS Engineer @ Doximity – Doximity, the medical network used by over 80% of US clinicians, is hiring passionate iOS engineers (fully remote!). Come be part of an amazing product team + work on an app that is constantly evolving. Use your skills (Swift, TCA, Combine) to be an integral part of our growing telemed feature. – Remote (within US timezones)

Freelance Interview Engineer (US Only) @ Karat – We’re dedicated to improving access in tech. If you are too, join us as a Karat Interview Engineer. As such, you’ll conduct technical interviews of developers like you on behalf of our hiring clients (including Duolingo, Indeed, and more) using the Karat Platform and its data-tested questions. – Remote (within US timezones)

Senior iOS Developer @ komoot – You’ll work with a genuinely inspiring product that brings real-life value to our users and empowers them to explore more of the great outdoors. We offer challenging tasks like turn-by-turn navigation, maps, on-/offline hybrids, data synchronization, and nearly everything the iOS platform provides. – Remote (within European timezones)

And finally...

What do you mean by “we just moved the problem”?