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News
Introducing Pkl
I liked Daniel Jalkutās humourous take on Appleās announcement of Pkl, a new āprogramming language for configurationā. It looks larger than Iād expect for a language described like that to be, and even allows the definition and importing of other Pkl packages!
I guess I should finish by making a joke about it being developed in the kitchen? š«£
pkl-lang.org
Apply for the Swift Student Challenge
This yearās Swift Student Challenge is open for applications! Thereās no explicit mention of WWDC, but if I had to guess, the āextraordinary experienceā of the 50-person winnerās event will probably happen sometime around this yearās conference. So, check your eligibility, and get your application in. š
apple.com
Tools
Inside Code Signing
Code signing problems are much less common for Apple platform developers than they used to be, and you could go for years without needing to uncheck that magic "Automatic signing" box. If you ever find your mouse hovering over it, though, make sure to have this document on certificates and the associated ones covering requirements, provisioning profiles, and hashes to hand. š
apple.com
Code
New GitHub Copilot Research Finds a Downward Pressure on Code Quality
Iāve not been using CoPilot for Swift code much, but I use it regularly when I need a little script or utility, and itās very impressive. Both CoPilot and ChatGPT (because they use the same underlying model) are extremely good at āunderstandingā and creating code to solve coding problems. That said, I am not surprised to see the conclusion of David Ramelās report saying code quality overall is down after using these tools. They donāt have enough context to consider a larger codebase, so itās obvious they would fail at things like code reuse. Itās worth reading the whole article.
visualstudiomagazine.com
Disabling Core Data CloudKit Logging
Remember when the Xcode console used to be completely silent unless you added some logging of your own? Keith Harrison shows you how to get back there if you use CloudKit with Core Data or SwiftData. I especially liked the tip about streaming logs to the console. š
useyourloaf.com
Screen vs View in SwiftUI
So, hey, you've read an article about a naming convention.
Iām also a little surprised that Iām linking to a post about naming conventions š«£ but I found myself nodding along the whole way through this one. If youāre writing with SwiftUI, this is a sensible, pragmatic approach to organising your View types.
scottsmithdev.com
Design
Q&A with the Apple UX writing team
Thereās some excellent advice from the Apple UX writing team in this summary of their Q&A session from last yearās WWDC. Picking my favourite tip was easy, as itās something Iāve done for years:
... you can always read out loud to yourself -- it's an invaluable way to make your writing sound conversational, and a great way to find and cut unnecessary words.
Read the whole thing, and also watch the linked WWDC video. š
apple.com
Jobs
Senior Mobile Software Engineer, iOS (Swift) @ Doximity ā We are looking for a talented iOS Software Engineer to join our growing team of developers. We have built and maintain a suite of fully-native iOS and Android apps that healthcare professionals use on a daily basis to increase productivity and provide better patient care. ā Remote (within US timezones)
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From Stuart Varrall's recent article on Inspiring Apple Vision Pro Apps:
Every iOS-based platform so far has imposed a space limitation on apps. On iPhone, it's a challenge to design apps that need to present lots of information. On iPad it's sometimes hard to know what to do with all that space, and on watchOS and tvOS ā¦ well, the problem is even more extreme.
visionOS is the first iOS-based platform to remove that restriction, bringing it much closer in line with how macOS works, and people are very comfortable with windowing in macOS and Microsoft Windows.
But the parallels between the windowing systems on visionOS and macOS don't end there. There's another similarity: Windows stay where you left them. On macOS, this really helps people build mental models around what they are doing in a way that flipping through pages or "cards" of apps on other iOS-based platforms can't match. You could even argue that visionOS goes further here than macOS does by using transparency and spreading out windows in 3D space.
Iām sure youāve also heard pundits wondering out loud whether this platform is the "future of computing" in the last couple of weeks. š I don't think anyone should be going anywhere near that kind of statement yet, but I think visionOS gets some things about window management really right, and that's a solid basis to build on. š
Dave Verwer