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News
2024 Apple Design Award winners
The first piece of WWDC is already over! It feels strange that the ADAs are now announced before the conference starts, but I guess it doesn’t matter much when it happens! Congratulations to all the winners, I love downloading all the apps and trying them every year. I hope Apple is also working on “Developer stories” for all the winners. I’m sure they are!
apple.com
WWDCScholars
When I congratulated the WWDC student scholarship winners a few weeks ago, I asked if anyone knew of a replacement for the sadly abandoned WWDC Students repositories. I had no responses to that request, but I found the successor project today, and it’s great! Organised by Michie Ang, Moritz Sternemann, and Sam Eckert, it contains information on scholarship winners since 2012 and is bang up to date with the 2024 winners, too. 🏆
wwdcscholars.com
Code
Concurrency in Swift 6
Matt Massicotte has been writing up posts on Swift 6 concurrency for several weeks now, and just in time for WWDC, the last post in the series has arrived. He tackles a different Swift Evolution proposal related to concurrency in each post, and if they don’t help you solve some of the concurrency warnings you see when you opt into Swift 6 language mode, you can have your money back! There’s an index to all the posts in each post, so be sure not to miss any.
massicotte.org
Designing a Declarative API
I enjoyed this post from Tjeerd in 't Veen. If you’ve ever wanted to design a SwiftUI-like API from scratch then there’s plenty to learn in here.
mobilesystemdesign.com
NotPrivateAPIs
What an interesting project from Morris Richman. Obviously, you shouldn’t use any of these APIs in shipping apps, but they are still fun to explore!
notprivateapis.com
One thing we’ll certainly hear more about on Monday is visionOS. We’ll likely hear about international hardware releases for Vision Pro, and I’ll guarantee that we’ll see the next version of visionOS with whatever new goodies it brings.
I won’t make any visionOS predictions here. We’ll find out what Apple has been working on soon enough. Instead, I’ll link to a wonderful article by Francesco Perchiazzi on game design which finishes with a whole section about game design in VR environments, specifically for the Vision Pro.
At almost 10,000 words, Francesco’s piece is more than an article. It’s even way past essay length and heading towards a dissertation, which also fits because it’s clear that Francesco has spent significant time researching the subject. It would be a perfect article to ensure you have saved for offline reading if you have a long flight this weekend!
Apple is pushing spacial computing as the future, or at least as a future of computing, but that future is still years of hardware and software iteration away from being mainstream. But apps are a tough sell for a platform that currently makes anyone wearing the device look a little silly and when there are still so many apps needed for it to be worth that trade-off.
VR games are already here, though, and have been for years. With a slightly more affordable version of Vision Pro surely arriving at some point, could this article and whatever software enhancements to visionOS Apple releases next week inspire you to write a VR/AR game?
It’s easy to forget with all of the focus that everyone has on AI for this year’s updates that there’s a huge new platform just waiting for big steps forward. I can’t wait to see what they show us on Monday and throughout the week!
Enjoy dub dub! I’ll be here, as always, with a quick recap next Friday. 📰
Dave Verwer