Issue 620

28^th July 2023

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I won’t go into detail about what Apple announced regarding testing visionOS apps on Vision Pro hardware this week, as I’m sure you’ve already read about it in their announcement article. You’ve also almost certainly already applied for a lab, a developer kit, a compatibility evaluation, or all three!

Labs and developer kits are great but not particularly surprising as we’ve seen programmes like this from Apple alongside other platform launches. Compatibility evaluations are interesting, though. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s the first time we’ve seen these publicly available for a new platform. Actually, I think this is the first time we’ve ever seen any kind of pre-actual-review app review!

There are comprehensive details on what the review will check in the announcement. visionOS is so drastically different to every other iOS-based platform it’s almost unfair to expect people to develop an app without being able to test it, and I expect these reviews to save many hundreds of hours in back and forth with app review as we get close to “day one”. It also potentially benefits Apple in training reviewers on what developers plan to do with the device.

It doesn’t sound like you’ll get opinion-based comments from the reviewers like you would at a WWDC design lab. It’s more of a “Does the app work?”, “Does it violate the guidelines?” and “Does it behave well in AR”? You might get more opinion-based feedback in the in-person labs.

If you’re developing something for visionOS, I wish you great luck getting a spot in whatever you applied for, and if you’re not, well, Happy Friday anyway! 😂

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News

Announced at WWDC, here’s a specific list of APIs you’ll need to justify using when included in an app you submit to the App Store. Whether you agree with the new rule or not, the good news is that both the list of APIs and the approved reasons are clear. Some of you will disagree, but I think this is a good idea. What depresses me is the reasons we need these rules. 🕵️

I love that these online sessions are continuing, and here is a whole new batch covering every time zone. Each session covers a topic, but there’s live Q&A available, too. Take an hour or so from your day and learn something new about subscriptions, optimising your App Store page, or in-app events. You have very little to lose!

Code

Here comes TipKit! Ben Dodson takes us through a look at this brand-new framework included in this week’s beta. I hope never to see a poorly designed tip view ever again now we have this!

It’s taken a while to get here, but Junda Ong takes us through the latest developments in on-device logging and shows us why we should all be using it.

Design

I can only reiterate Chris Wu’s experience with the design labs at WWDC. At every opportunity, the feedback is constructive and meaningful. I’m also happy to see him write an account of his lab session from this year’s WWDC because I’m sure you can learn some lessons by reading about his experience, too.

Videos

If you have 20 minutes free, you could do worse things with it than to join Daniel Steinberg as he brings his signature simplicity to the subject of macros in Swift 5.9.

And finally...

Someone had to do it! 🥽