Issue 662

24^th May 2024

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Did you see the developer forums refresh that launched yesterday?

This isn’t the first time Apple shipped updates to the developer forums shortly before WWDC. It also happened a few days before WWDC 2020 when we were all wondering what a virtual WWDC would look like! The forum refresh got lots of criticism then, but looking back they fared better than many thought they would.

My only request at the time was:

What I’m hoping for is that these forums receive the attention they need inside Apple. I hope the employees and engineers are being encouraged and given time to help out, not just in this coming week but permanently. 🤞

So, what’s new with this pre-WWDC 2024 refresh? Well, first of all, they look great. I have no notes on the design refresh. 👍

The categories and sub-categories are also great, and I like how they focus people’s attention on a broad selection of top-level topics rather than just coding. There are categories for Distribution and Marketing, Design, Graphics and Games, and even a Community category in addition to all the coding categories you’d expect. They all have RSS feeds, too. ❤️

But what about my only request? Four years seems like a good amount of time to see if Apple employees are being encouraged and given time to participate. The good news is that plenty of Apple folks are active, made obvious by the little Apple badge added to any thread where they are talking. Taking a couple of popular categories, I found that ~30% of recent threads had Apple involvement. That’s much better than I expected, and those categories all had threads spanning more than two weeks, so it’s not just a flurry of activity related to the launch of this refresh.

Looking at reply and view counts on threads in those same categories, it appears they are not particularly well visited, and most threads only had two-digit view counts. I’m sure that will change during WWDC, but let’s see if that influx of traffic plus the refresh turns them into the destination that the Swift forums have become, which are between one and two orders of magnitude more visited for a much more niche topic.

I’m happy to see Apple put more effort into these forums, and I hope they continue to grow and become a permanent venue for this community.

Dave Verwer

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Tools

I’ve not yet had a chance to check this out, but I like the idea of mise-en-place. Think about it like rbenv or nvm for your whole development environment. Paul Samuels wrote up his experience with using it with Xcode and in CI, and it’s worth a look if you work with external tools and work in a team.

Code

I was tempted to call Wade Tregaskis’ latest post a “summary” of a recent blog post and forum thread about benchmarking some Swift on Server code, but at 6,000 words, I don’t think I can! 😂 Benchmarking is hard! It’s an interesting investigation, though.

Did the Swift team make the Swift Package Index its own attribute in @_spi? 🫨 They did not. 😂 Instead, it stands for System Programming Interface, and it helps API designers gate code for different groups of developers. I’d guess this could be useful in large teams where you might want to roll our changes to internal frameworks gradually. It’s a private/beta attribute so it could be changed, but as Marcos Varani says, it hasn’t changed in several years.

I’m not sure I’d agree with Jared Sinclair’s description of this as “deeply disappointing”, and the answer to the question posed in the post title seems to be “No”, but it is worth knowing that SwiftUI preview code is not currently being stripped from unoptimised builds. I don’t see this being a huge issue, but it’s probably not what you’d expect to happen so it’s worth knowing about. Luckily, the workaround is trivial.

Design

Yes, this post from Emanuele Agosta is targeted at visionOS, but it’s also full of great tips for creating better designs using built-in typography across all platforms. 👍

Business and Marketing

This conversation, started by Matt Corey about when to present your users with a prompt to review your app was interesting. Plenty of developers jumped in to share their experiences and results, and I was a little surprised by some of them!

And finally...

The Gherkin, The Walkie Talkie, The Cheesegrater, The Flatiron Building, and … The SIM Eject Tool?