Issue 713

6^th June 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It’s almost WWDC time! 🚀🎉❤️

No matter what we get to see next week, whether it’s a new naming convention for the operating systems, a new lick of paint in the design department, or new Apple Intelligence features inside our developer tools, there’s always one constant. It’ll be a firehose of information.

If you have a ticket and are going to California, I hope you have a wonderful time at the event. If you’ll be there without a ticket, I hope you have a wonderful time at CommunityKit and One More Thing, and the countless other events during the week!

Of course, WWDC wouldn’t be complete without a James Dempsey and the Breakpoints benefit concert, and this year it’s supporting Techtonica. You’ll be happy to hear there are a few tickets remaining, or a livestream if you can’t be there in person.

Enjoy the conference, however you’re planning to attend it. I’ll be back next week with a round up.

– Dave Verwer

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News

The official Swift website has had plenty of content changes during the last couple of years, but none as significant as this! This week, the redesign project, which has been in the works for months, was unveiled. Even though I’m a member of the Swift Website Workgroup, I wasn’t heavily involved in the redesign, so I can say without (much) bias that I think it looks great. Not all pages are redesigned yet, but the homepage and install page show the design direction, and the other pages will ship in the coming weeks and months.

There’s a lot in John Siracusa’s latest post, but this paragraph stood out to me:

Start by changing App Review from a Kafkaesque nightmare to a sane, functioning, supportive process in which Apple and developers work together to successfully release software. That means timely, two-way communication with recognizably human entities at Apple. App reviewers should be able to convince developers that they have both read and understood their messages, and they should be empowered to help solve problems.

I haven’t submitted anything for App Review in years, but I receive plenty of email from people who have bad experiences. John gets to the heart of the problem: rejections often feel combative instead of collaborative. I know there are all sorts of people trying to get all sorts through review that should be blocked, but from what I hear the balance is wrong.

I also receive too many emails where bad app review experiences caused someone to give up on the App Store and move to another platform. That’s tragic, and the stories always focus on the lack of communication with the review team.

It’s also worth reading Sarah Reichelt’s latest post on App Review, which has a similar theme.

Tools

I missed the original post from Pedro Piñera, but I caught this follow-up post from Natan Rolnik about distributing and installing Swift command line tools with Mise. Specifically, an experimental feature in Mise which allows SPM executables to be built and installed directly from remote repositories. Interesting!

Code

We’ll likely see a beta of Swift 6.2 in the new versions of Xcode released next week. What’s new? As always, Paul Hudson is here to give us a well-written and clear breakdown of what we can expect. Thanks Paul!

This post from Natalia Panferova is a comprehensive look at SwiftUI mesh gradients. I love the effect of a mesh gradient, and when used sparingly and subtly they can make a huge difference to how polished your apps look. 🌈

What a lovely little View Modifier from Oleg Dreyman. You won’t want this for every timer in your app, but what a beautiful way to add a little timer to update something in your UI on a regular basis.

Design

It’s not yet WWDC, but as is now the normal schedule, we have the official design award winners already! Congratulations to all the winners and runners-up. Every year, I spend hours looking through these exceptional apps and games. 🎉

And finally...

The pregame quiz ’25. 🚀