Issue 618

14^th July 2023

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It’s been a few weeks since they were published, but I’ve had two videos on my mind recently, both covering the Vision Pro headset demos from WWDC. First, just a couple of days after the conference ended, Paul Hudson posted a video covering his demo experience. Then a week or so later, Malin Sundberg and Jordi Bruin documented their experiences.

Like you, I’ve seen several first impression videos from YouTubers and members of the mainstream press, but these two videos are different. Paul, Malin, and Jordi¹ had the same 30-minute demo but also attended another session the day after the keynote, staffed with engineers.

There are common points between these videos and those targeting consumers, but I love how these videos reveal details about the operating systems that most people wouldn’t find interesting. If you’ve not watched them already, I recommend watching both. Many of the details are also covered in visionOS session videos, but it’s important to hear unofficial perspectives.

It’s impossible for every developer to have the chance to try on a headset before next year’s release, and only a small subset of Apple platform developers will be able to buy one at release, whether that be due to the cost or the fact it won’t be available outside the US! 🇺🇸 I’m happy to see Apple give some developers this chance, though, where hardware previews would usually only be for the press. I don’t think this is a policy change or anything we’ll see for new iPhones, iPads, or Macs, but because this is an entirely new platform. Whatever the reason, I’m glad it happened and that they were allowed to document their experiences.

It’s also worth a quick reminder here that there are upcoming visionOS labs that become “Available in July”, so you might want to set yourself a daily reminder to visit that page if you want to join the group of lucky developers who get to try an app out on real hardware before 2024. 🤞

– Dave Verwer

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News

I agree with Quentin Carnicelli and Craig Hockenberry, who also posted on the same subject. I’ve linked Quentin’s post here because what he says sums up the situation perfectly:

Apple already has a powerful method for dealing with deprecated APIs. First, they announce the pending removal of the API to developers. Then, some time later, they remove the APIs. That’s more than enough.

Also, this is a great point. I really can’t see any upside to how this works in the betas.

Tools

I enjoy a bookmarking feature in my code editor. The first editor I enjoyed them in was the Turbo Pascal IDE back in the late 1980s, and just 40 short years later, we have the technology to bring them to Xcode! 😂

Seriously though, the feature is great, but Jesse Squires wondered if they could be shared with team members, and here’s what he found.

Code

What an excellent idea this is. I hope this becomes the last ever Swift implementation of these core networking types!

Also, this could have easily been part of the new, open-source Foundation library, but Apple chose to make it an independent package. I won’t be surprised to see more small packages containing important functionality. If you’re holding off adopting SwiftPM, the time is now.

Apple made several big improvements to scroll views in this year’s SwiftUI release, and I was pleased to see Majid Jabrayilov cover them in a three-part blog post series. He starts with transitions before moving on to target behaviour and scroll position.

Thanks to David Smith for this quick tip to help with what could be a common issue!

Design

Here’s David Smith again! This time, showing that visionOS will be a beautiful operating system as he takes the weather screen from Widgetsmith from iOS to visionOS. 🥽

Business and Marketing

It’s a generalisation, but I’d say the top two things the independent developer community doesn’t spend enough time on are marketing and optimising for growth. In this wonderful article, Ryan Ashcraft tackles one aspect of driving growth in his FoodNoms app. It’s worth reading every word he writes.

And finally...

It really is a treat. 📱