Issue 678

13^th September 2024

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It’s go time for iOS 18, macOS 15, and all their friends! Your app updates that you slaved over throughout the summer are probably already pending release and it all kicks off on Monday!

I’ve been running the betas recently, and the iPhone Mirroring feature confuses me. It works well when my phone is close by, but I accidentally left it downstairs in the kitchen a few days ago and attempted to use mirroring for a real task for the first time. Unfortunately, it failed to connect because my phone was too far away. 🫤

Now, before you start thinking I live in a mansion and I was trying to connect between my office the east wing to my kitchen in the west wing, I wish I did! my kitchen is at the bottom of the stairs and my office is at the top. Maybe 6 metres away. I’ve not found anyone else complaining about range, but every demo I’ve seen, even Apple’s has the phone sitting right next to the Mac.

So, I’ve been thinking about why this feature exists.

It’s part of the Continuity set of features, which have (at least for me) been a tremendous success. It’s possible some of them were a little flaky at first, but they are rock solid now and I couldn’t live without seamless copy and paste between my phone and my Mac. ❤️

The second half of the iPhone Mirroring demo was all about using it for drag and drop between devices. A feature that feels much more a part of the Continuity set of features. I wonder if that’s the true purpose of what Apple built, and all the other parts of it are just what it took to make that work? Certainly if my phone is sitting directly next to me, I’d rather pick it up than use it with my mouse in a window on my Mac.

I do wish it would work from my kitchen for those occasional times I accidentally leave my phone downstairs. That said, a few more flights of stairs every day will do me more good than harm!

Dave Verwer

News

Hummingbird 2

I wrote about Vapor’s plans to take better advantage of Swift concurrency last week, and this week hummingbird announced a version 2.0 with a very similar goal. Here’s Adam Fowler with the details.

Apple’s App Store terms are still not compliant with the DMA

I have no idea if this is true or not, but it sounds like Apple’s hassles with the DMA are far from over. No surprise there, and I expect this to drag on for years.

Code

Morphology

I liked this little tip from Michael Liberatore about using Morphology in Foundation to format plural strings that don’t include the number. 👍

An Xcode Detective Story

Jacob Bartlett:

I couldn’t have predicted an underlying issue as dramatic as “half of our app’s features duplicated in memory”, whenever a user re-logged. Or a solution as simple as moving a [weak self] capture one line up.

I love a good debugging story.

The weirdest Core Data crash I have seen

I’m sure I have already heard about the situation that Filip Němeček recently found himself in. I may have even linked to another blog post about this, it certainly rings a bell! Regardless, you’ll want to be aware of this restriction if you use Core Data (and presumably SwiftData too!)

Jobs

Mobile Developer (iOS) @ Planning Center – Our Mobile Team works on both iOS and Android. While focuses are leveraged, there is a healthy bit of collaboration in the execution of how things are released. – Remote (within US timezones) with some on-site work (United States in CA)

And finally...