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Many years ago, back when I used to be a .net developer, I remember feeling frustrated by Microsoft developer marketing. They needed to sell Visual Studio upgrade licenses every year, so their messaging was always around what was coming in next year’s release. As soon as every major version released, it felt like it was already out of date because Microsoft immediately started hyping up next year’s enhancements.
Apple doesn’t have a sales model as Visual Studio did back in the late 90s/early 00s. In fact, in stark contrast, they never talk about what’s coming next! Instead, we, the community, have taken over that task, and from the minute the annual set of new operating systems ship, our minds turn to what’s coming next year. 😅 Will this bug be fixed? Will SwiftUI get that new API next year? Will Core Data be replaced with something that feels more at home with SwiftUI? How many times have you read an article titled “Is SwiftUI ready for production?” in the last year? It reminds me of the old feelings I had about the Microsoft sales cycle, except we’re doing it to ourselves.
Maybe I’ve changed as I got older, but over the last few years I’ve found myself wanting to think less about what’s coming next, and more about the present. I don’t pay too much attention to the latest rumours, and while I’m not immune from talking about or linking to articles on what might be coming in next year’s releases, I try not to dwell on it.
There’s always something new coming, and it can be tempting to say, “This will be so much easier when X gets released”. Unfortunately, I have bad news. When X is released, Y will be just around the corner, tempting you to wait for it, too.
There’s no better time to start building something than right now. It doesn’t need to be “pure” anything, and it doesn’t need to be using the latest trends in app architecture. It’s much more important to build the things you want to make than to ensure that they are perfect.
Note: Please ignore that last sentence if you’re building aircraft flight control systems or nuclear reactor security software. 😂
I'd like to start this week's newsletter with a little apology. I promised that I'd publish the results of the iOS Developer Community Survey at the end of January, and here we are two weeks into February. 😱 Sorry. I've been working hard on the results site, but it has taken longer to create than I thought it would. Yes, I'm bad at estimating, aren't we all? 😂
The good news is that the site is really, really close to being finished and will launch officially next week. However, before I send it out to everyone, I'd love to get a few eyes on it to make sure I've not made any terrible mistakes. If you have a bit of free time on Tuesday or Wednesday next week and would be willing to do some checking, please leave your name here.
What I can say is that the results are fascinating, and I can't wait for you all to see them.
The least surprising announcement at this year's WWDC will be¹ that Xcode 12 will include Swift 5.3. 🤯 So to warm-up for next month's flood of news, why not read Tibor Bödecs' guide to what’s new in Swift 5.3? It's an excellent summary.
In my opinion, the most exciting part of 5.3 is that the Swift Package Manager will finally gain support for bundled resources. I was quite surprised to see the community survey show people using it in ~35% of personal projects, and ~18% of commercial apps. Much higher figures than I was expecting!
That said, it feels like binary resource support might be the last major feature needed for most libraries to support the SPM. I'm guessing, though! So, would you like to tell me what is holding you back from adopting SPM as your dependency manager? (Yes, that’s a quick survey, but it’s only one question long!) I’ll publish a write up of the results next week.
In the least surprising move of the week, Apple just announced that WWDC 2020 would be an online-only event. The web site is predictably vague on the subjects of why, and what that means in practice. But that's understandable given how quickly this must have come together.
Naturally, AltConf is going virtual too, and I'm sure every other event that was pencilled in for early June in San Jose will follow suit in the next few days.
I wrote a bit about what an online-only WWDC could look like last week, but it'll be fascinating to see how Apple see it, and whether we see it come back in person next year. 🤞
I know I wrote about virtual community events three weeks ago, but things are moving fast, and more are launching every day, so here’s a quick follow-up.
First up, try! Swift World which kicked off on Monday. Next, RW Talks had their first talk on Wednesday. Both of these have full schedules of workshops/talks coming up, so check them out even if you missed their opening sessions.
Then, the virtual conferences start. Next week is App Builders, followed by UIKonf the week after. Both have their schedules and events announced. Then, looking into June, there’s still mDevCamp and Hacking with Swift Live in July. Are there any other virtual conferences I’m missing? I’ll do another round-up as we approach WWDC.
This week’s announcement of WWDC snuck up on me a bit. Is it that time of year already?
Yes, it is, and as I am sure you’re well aware by now, you can drop your name in a hat any time before next Tuesday for the chance for a ticket to a single-day, in-person event at Apple Park. If that’s not for you, the plan for the week sounds similar to the last few years. I can’t see any significant changes, but I’m not sure anyone was looking for a shake-up of the format that has been so well received over the last couple of years. 👍
The only other announced event is the annual Swift Student Challenge, so check whether you qualify and open up a Playground if you do! Submissions close on April 19th.
I’ve not yet decided whether to put my name in the hat. I’ll let you know next week if I applied!
Even though it was announced at WWDC, I'd completely missed the fact that supporting IPv6 will be a requirement come the beginning of next year. Luckily, it's probably not going to be a huge deal for most apps. The short version is to make sure you're using NSURLSession and friends instead of the older APIs, and don't hardcode any IPv4 addresses. There's more information, including details on how to easily test with an IPv6 network, in the first half of this WWDC video.
Final iOS 9 Checklist For Your App
With all the excitement of new platforms and iOS features, it's easy to forget that there's apps to ship this week. The release date has been set for the 16th, but it's not possible to submit apps yet and let's not even talk about TestFlight anymore! It must happen over the next couple of days though so be ready. In the mean time, why not go through this checklist by Denys Zhadanov and make sure you've got everything covered.
Microsoft and Xamarin Expand Global Partnership
You might ask what this article is doing in iOS Dev Weekly but I think this is big news. There are an enormous amount of .NET developers out there and the next version of Visual Studio will have built in support for downloading Xamarin to enable "native" iOS development out of the box. Also, as part of the same announcement it was interesting to see Microsoft open source the .NET framework, including taking contributions. Truly, times have changed.