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revenuecat.com
Tools
mise en place Xcode
Iāve 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 itās worth a look if you work with external tools and work in a team.
Code
Swift sucks at web servingā¦ or does it?
I was tempted to call Wade Tregaskisā latest post a āsummaryā of a recent blog post and forum thread about benchmarking some Swift on Server code, but at 6,000 words, I donāt think I can! š Benchmarking is hard! Itās an interesting investigation, though.
wadetregaskis.com
@_spi or How to develop better APIs in Swift
Did the Swift team make the Swift Package Index its own attribute in @_spi? š«Ø They did not. š Instead, it stands for System Programming Interface, and it helps API designers gate code for different groups of developers. Iād guess this could be useful in large teams where you might want to roll our changes to internal frameworks gradually. Itās a private/beta attribute so it could be changed, but as Marcos Varani says, it hasnāt changed in several years.
Do your builds include SwiftUI Previews and Preview Content?
Iām not sure Iād agree with Jared Sinclairās description of this as ādeeply disappointingā, and the answer to the question posed in the post title seems to be āNoā, but it is worth knowing that SwiftUI preview code is not currently being stripped from unoptimised builds. I donāt see this being a huge issue, but itās probably not what youād expect to happen so itās worth knowing about. Luckily, the workaround is trivial.
jaredsinclair.com
Design
Understanding typography in visionOS
Yes, this post from Emanuele Agosta is targeted at visionOS, but itās also full of great tips for creating better designs using built-in typography across all platforms. š
createwithswift.com
Business and Marketing
When should you prompt users to review your app?
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!
iosdev.space
And finally...
The Gherkin, The Walkie Talkie, The Cheesegrater, The Flatiron Building, and ā¦ The SIM Eject Tool?
Did you see the developer forums refresh that launched yesterday?
This isnāt 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:
So, whatās new with this pre-WWDC 2024 refresh? Well, first of all, they look great. I have no notes on the design refresh. š
The categories and sub-categories are also great, and I like how they focus peopleās 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 youād expect. They all have RSS feeds, too. ā¤ļø
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. Thatās much better than I expected, and those categories all had threads spanning more than two weeks, so itās 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. Iām sure that will change during WWDC, but letās 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.
Iām 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