Issue 694

10^th January 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

The tools and setup I have for writing and distributing this newsletter have changed very infrequently over the 13 years and almost 700 issues since I started publishing it. I started in 2011 with some Markdown files, a Mailchimp account, and Jekyll. Then, in 2013/2014, I decided I needed something more sophisticated. With a small team, I built a publishing tool that enabled me to construct issues via the web, host the site, and send the emails. That project went so well that it even ended up turning into a product: Curated.

I ended up selling Curated to another company, and it’s been sold a couple more times over the years. I was still a happy customer until recently, but that all changed at the end of last year. Even though they did eventually get the system working again, my confidence in their ability to run the site has gone and I needed to leave Curated behind.

So while I was originally planning a restful break over the holidays, instead I spent most of it at my desk trying to get this complete re-build of the site and publishing platform finished. It has been an enormous amount of work, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I also took the opportunity to tweak the design and to make some other small changes. You can still see the old design for a little while if you’d like to compare the two. One change that some of you will be pleased to see is that there are no more cur.at shortened links. Every link in the newsletter is now a plain and simple hypertext link that you can hover to see the URL, and I know that has been something some of you have wanted for years.

Most importantly, this rebuild puts me back in control of this website. If I’d like to try some new things, that’s much easier now that I control the entire rendering of the site and email.

That said, there are still some rough edges and things I didn’t get to before shipping the site. The most important, and I know I’ll get plenty of email if I don’t mention it, is that there’s no full-text RSS feed yet. This is not intentional, but I hit an issue with creating it that I couldn’t easily fix. I’m also aware there’s no plain text version of the email right now, but I’m not sure that’s something anyone cares about? Let me know if you do.

My todo list also includes better mobile device support, dark mode support for both the website and email, and tidying up some other loose ends. I’ll make those changes over the next few weeks, but if you see anything wrong with today’s email or the website, please let me know so I can get it fixed!

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News

There are many reasons you might want to participate in the Swift Student Challenge. Yes, 50 winners will get to attend WWDC 2025, but participation is also its own reward, too. Whether you want to build a project to flesh out your portfolio, or just want to learn something new, now’s the time to get started. Submissions open on the 3rd of February and close three weeks later. That means you’ve got about 6 weeks to make something amazing. Check the eligibility requirements and get cracking.

This won’t affect a large number of you since it’s limited to Apple Pay on the Web. That said, I’d bet there are a few of you reading that’ll need to make a change, or at least check that your code isn’t affected. The deadline for making this change is soon, too, on February 4th.

Tools

Thanks so much to Florian Seida for this tip for quickly making new files in Xcode. I had absolutely no idea this existed!

Code

Strict concurrency has tended to overshadow everything else that Swift 6 brought with it, so it’s great to see Vera Dias write up this very readable guide to typed throws. You’ll learn what they are and why you should use them. Great stuff.

I doesn’t matter if you read Matt Gallagher’s latest post because you want to hear his experience developing code with CoPilot or because you’re interested in Core Audio. Either way, you’re in for an interesting article. It’s also really nice to see Matt back blogging again after a little break!

I’ve not used generative AI to translate UI text in an app yet, but I believe it’s a a step ahead of using something like Google or Apple Translate. Obviously, it’s no substitute for a human translator, but depending on your app’s budget you might want to check out Adam Wulf’s latest article on using AI as a starting point before moving to POEditor to translate an app.

Business and Marketing

If you’re struggling to get back into the swing of things this year, these wise words from David Smith might help you:

The goal here is not to make massive progress; it isn’t about getting back up to full speed again, going from 0 to 100 miles/hour in one swift step. It is about building up my working inertia again. Speed is useful, but inertia is powerful.

And finally...

Are you a Fira Code or an Inconsolata?

I’m a very happy MonoLisa user after purchasing it a few years ago. It’s not in this quiz, and I’m kinda glad! Imagine if it turns out I prefer one of the free fonts over the one I paid for. I’ll live in blissful ignorance, thank you very much. 😂