Issue 672

2^nd August 2024

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Sometimes I have so much to write here I can’t decide which topic to comment on. Other times, like this week, I draw a blank all week.

Couple that with my email software having major unplanned downtime for most of the day today, and it’s some kind of miracle that I’ve managed to get an issue published at all!

There are plenty of links, though, so enjoy those and I’m sure I’ll feel inspired to write something more significant than this next week. 🤞

Dave Verwer

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News

What a smart idea by Matt Spear. I’m guessing here, but I’d say this is ChatGPT or a similar LLM primed with the transcripts from all the WWDC session videos and a well-written prompt. The good news is that doing that works really well. Give it a try.

Code

I only read about halfway through Matt Massicotte’s latest post before knowing I would link to it. It’s now on my reading list for when I have a spare half an hour next week. If the second half is anywhere near as good as the first then it should be required reading for Swift developers.

It makes a nice change to read about a Swift 6 feature that isn’t related to concurrency! 😂 I was happy to see Natalia Panferova’s latest post on a little bit of Swift 6 syntactic sugar. As she says, this isn’t something that was especially difficult to do before, but it’s a nice convenience!

Yet more writing about Swift 6 concurrency. Have you noticed a theme to the summer yet? 😬 This time, it’s Jacob Bartlett posing a potential interview question: “Tell me about the tools available in Swift Concurrency, and when you might use them”. What follows is a well-written look at everything from starting a basic Task right through actors, Sendable, continuations, and more. He even wraps things up with a look at swift-async-algorithms. I think he’d ace the interview!

If used well, mesh gradients can be an incredibly effective tool for creating beautiful smooth backgrounds. So you can imagine how excited I was to hear about MeshGradient in this year’s SwiftUI release. Thanks to Ashish Kakkad, I now know they can be animated, too! ✨

Design

Luke Wroblewski is right. It’s time for us to stop using Lorem Ipsum. But what do we use instead? 🤖

Books

I love linking to people who review other people’s books, and this post is just that from Vera Dias. It’s not specifically an iOS or Swift coding book, it’s also not a new book, being first published in 2011, but it is well worth reading, as recommended by Vera!

Jobs

Software Engineer for AI Training Data (Swift) @ G2i, Inc. – We are currently seeking Swift Developers for project-specific roles focused on RLHF. This role will play a key part in our reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) initiatives, contributing to cutting-edge projects. – Remote (within US, European, or Asia-Pacific timezones)

Do you have any open positions at your company? You can post them for free at iOS Dev Jobs. You have nothing to lose!

And finally...

“Convert to Even More Modern Objective-C Syntax…”