Issue 660

10^th May 2024

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Reading this post from Jim Luther wishing WWDC a happy 35th birthday set me thinking about what a remarkably long time that is for a conference to run without a name change.

My first in-person WWDC was in 2008 when the iPhone SDK launched and the App Store debuted. I also apparently saw Sam Altman demo his app, although I’ll admit I don’t remember that! Attending the event was fantastic, and it kept bringing me back to San Francisco and eventually San Jose year after year for well over a decade. Over the years I heard stories of earlier and earlier instances of the conference, including tales of the early days of Stump the Experts and busses from San Francisco to Cupertino when the bash was held inside the central grass-covered area inside Infinite Loop.

Wikipedia disagrees with Jim on when the conference was renamed to Worldwide Developers Conference, claiming 1990, but I’ll take Jim’s word for it given his involvement!

There aren’t many developer-focused conferences that have run for 35 years without a name change. SIGGRAPH and GDC spring to mind, but are there others? I couldn’t find any.

I wrote about naming things last week, and getting the name of a conference right for the long term is hard! You can’t use the name of any technology, language, or anything else that might go out of date. I think they did pretty well with the name they settled on.

Anyway, happy birthday WWDC. I’m sure that the finishing touches are being applied to the plans for this year’s event and Tuesday’s iPad event got me in the mood to find out what Apple has been up to for the last 12 months, and what we’ll be up to for the next 12! I can’t wait.

Dave Verwer

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News

Talking of WWDC history, Mathijs Kadijk and Tom Lokhorst have put together this great resource with metadata about every WWDC talk back to 2000. What really appeals to me is the very long list of everything because as Mathijs says “CMD+F’ing though the all page is so much faster then anything else”.

I hope the situation Jeff Johnson finds himself in is quickly resolved and caused by a one-off glitch, but it might be worth checking your figures from App Store Connect if you have two or more apps in a bundle. I’m sure Jeff would welcome more information if you also find discrepancies.

Code

This isn’t the first time Chase Lewis has compared different technologies across mobile platforms, but this time he adds Flutter to the existing pair of SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose. I always find a quick glance at competing technologies interesting.

I’ve tried to create a Settings screen for a macOS app with SwiftUI twice, and while my second attempt was better than my first, I could never wrangle Form to look “proper”. Paul Peelen manages it with style in his latest posts. The first post covers the layout of an individual page of settings and the second moves on to pages of settings.

Like with any advice, doing what Christian Tietze suggests here won’t fit every project, but I liked the idea behind this post and the example from sudo-rs. Move quickly at first, then tighten things up after you know it’s possible and working. It’s especially important when working on something related to sudo, too!

Videos

I think David Smith’s approach to creating this video contributed to how great the end result is. Thinking about it as if it were a conference talk but then recording it as a tight, 15-minute dose of his experience is brilliant. He talks about inclusivity in many forms and it’s absolutely worth the 15 minutes it’ll take you to watch it.

Books

What a gem of a book this is from Natalia Panferova! Yes, the pun is intended, 😂 but it’s also true. It’s got a nice mix of tips and techniques, and every “gem” is focused and concisely written. Thoroughly recommended. 👍

For full disclosure, Natalia sent me a review copy of the book.

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And finally...

Talking of the hard problems in computer science. It turns out it’s not naming things, cache invalidation, off-by-one errors, or any of the others you’ll have heard. It’s harder than all of those things!