Issue 711

9^th May 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

In exactly one month, Apple will unveil what they’ve been working on for the past year. Where did half the year go? 😱

I won’t be making the trip across to Cupertino this year, but if you’re making the trip then the best place to find out what’s going on all week is the WWDC community events repository, which is still accepting updates if you spot anything missing.

The main community attractions, CommunityKit and One More Thing, have both recently posted their schedules, which is great to see. There are also opportunities to meet people at various in-person social events throughout the week.

If you’re not travelling to the area, don’t worry! The primary WWDC experience these days is still online, with daily video releases and online labs. Oh, and if you want community involvement remotely during the week join the CommunityKit Discord server where you can find other like-minded people around the world to enjoy the event with.

Dave Verwer

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News

David Smith (with emphasis added by me):

I’d love to see Apple adopt a new posture towards these things where they win on merit, not by fiat. Apple does have something of value which developers would be happy to pay for: a platform with highly engaged and monetizable users and a large collection of payment accounts attached to those users, which streamlines conversion. This is valuable and Apple has every right to be compensated for this value, but it would be wise to do so in a manner in which both they and their developers win.

I’m happy to see David agrees with what I said last week, that we should not wish for Apple to give up on their direct revenue from the App Store entirely. Please read his whole post, though, as this is not his only point.

It’s likely that Apple is experimenting with this (as I hoped), but I’d always urge against getting your hopes too high. Despite the ludicrously overstated headline, which I have edited to be more reasonable above, the article even hedges pretty strongly:

There’s no word yet on whether Apple will eventually launch the software publicly

I wouldn’t expect to see this in June, but if it does come to fruition one day, I’d be happy to see Apple partner with Anthropic because Claude is a great model for coding.

Tools

What a great trio of articles from Natascha Fadeeva covering Xcode build configurations. She starts with the concepts, then describes a great, multi-environment setup before moving on to cover xcconfig files. 👍

Code

I knew that the Z in USDZ stood for zipped, but honestly I didn’t know about anything else that was inside these files. With their rapid adoption across the industry, and their inclusion inside most visionOS apps, you might find Arman Dzhrahatspanian’s recent article on them as interesting as I did.

Even with the new (ish) regular expression DSL, regular expressions are a complex topic. If you’ve ever wondered about anything related to them, I’m pretty sure Guy Lapalme’s comprehensive guide to them that he published last year will answer your question!

It’s a simple question with a relatively simple answer. Regardless, I enjoyed Manu’s latest article that tries to keep your sheet presentation code nice and clean. 👍

And finally...

As an alternative to this, you could just put your phone in your pocket for a bit… 😮‍💨