Issue 666

21^st June 2024

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Now we’re firmly settled into what a WWDC at Apple Park looks like, is that the format we’ll see for the next ten years?

It’s possible, but something caught my attention this week that indicates that Apple isn’t quite done with making changes to the conference yet. They are hosting a set of in-person session video watch events at their offices around the world.

The events start this Monday, and unfortunately, that means that registration is already closed for London, which is the first location on the schedule. Registration is still open for Paris on the 26th, Berlin on the 27th, and Istanbul, Mexico City, São Paolo, Seoul, Miami, Tokyo, Shanghai, Warsaw, Bengaluru, Madrid, Toronto, and Montreal after that, though! I expect these events to fill up fast so I’d recommend booking a place as soon as you can.

The full in-person conference in California that ran until 2019 was always amazing. But even before the pandemic forced a change, people had been asking Apple not to focus entirely on West Coast America for quite a while. That location excludes so many Apple-platform developers for all sorts of reasons. Yes, there have been various in-person Tech Talks over the years that were always well distributed around the world (including ones that happened after the format change). However, they were not held annually and didn’t feel a part of the conference. I hope those events continue independently of these WWDC events, too!

Anyway, I wanted to get the word out about these events as I hadn’t seen them widely publicised and if we want Apple to do more worldwide events, we had better all sign up to attend these!

Dave Verwer

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News

I didn’t make a big deal about this link last week as we hadn’t quite finished processing with Xcode 16 beta 1, but I’ll include a link this week as we worked hard on it! All the charts on the page are now up-to-date with the latest available Swift 6 version, and every package page now shows whether a package has any data race errors or not. We’ll update the charts with fresh data every few weeks, so be sure to check back to see how the Swift package ecosystem progresses towards data race safety.

I’m going to assume that Apple spends hours and hours on the points they highlight in their bento box summary images, and it feels like such a waste that they’re only on screen for a few seconds each. Ryan Klumph clearly feels the same way, as he grabbed them for us all to peruse at our leisure.

Code

Jordan Morgan continues his annual tradition of cataloguing the major UIKit changes, and here he is with the 2024 update!

What more can you say? SwiftUI, like the last few years I’ve written this, is the future. But hey, UIKit, no doubt, is better than it ever has been.

Jordan is correct that this is the best version of UIKit ever, but the pace of development is slowing. UIKit will be around for a very long time, so don’t worry about it becoming obsolete, but it’s clear where the engineering effort is being invested.

I’m really happy to see scrollPosition receive more attention in this year’s SwiftUI update. Majid Jabrayilov goes through some of what’s new.

I’ve loved using mesh gradients since they first appeared in Adobe Illustrator, and it’s amazing that we now have this functionality available to our apps with SwiftUI’s new MeshGradient. What I didn’t know about until this week was the blur hash technique, and what a clever technique that is! All we needed was for Dale Price to come along and put the two together, and he did!

I could spend 200 words to summarise this article from Peter Friese, or I could say that it’s now trivially easy to create the beautiful card animation first seen in the App Store app a few years back and that Peter shows us how.

Business and Marketing

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And finally...

WatchPad 941 ⌚