Here we are at the end of another year, and as tradition now dictates, that means it’s time for the “Best Of And Finally…” issue!
There’s no double-anonymized voting system going on with how I picked this “best of“. I just opened up every issue of the newsletter I published during 2023, read the “And Finally…” links, and judged each by the metric of “Which links still make me smile?” Science! 🔬
I hope your 2023 has been full of happiness and prosperity, and I wish you all the best for 2024. 🎊 Enjoy the links, and I hope a few make you smile, too! I’ll be back next week with a regular issue.
Mac App Store Receipts and Mavericks
The next instalment of "Craig Hockenberry fights with the App Store on Mavericks" is in. Spoiler: Not good news.
Experienced iOS Engineers @ EyeEm, Berlin
Did someone say featured at WWDC? Yup, that was us. We are what’s next in photography - come join!
Lead OS Engineer @ Target in Minneapolis, MN
Come help the Target apps team build the next generation app platform for shopping, e-commerce, and loyalty!
Have you seen the leaked slide from WWDC '23 that shows off the next Apple silicon chip? 😂
iOS Engineer @ Farfetch - Porto in sunny Portugal
We're looking for iOS engineers who are passionate about mobile and want to take e-commerce to the next level.
2023 has been a fantastic year for me in many ways. This newsletter continues to do well, which is constantly surprising, and the Swift Package Index received support from Apple and continues to grow beyond all expectations. Yet, I feel melancholy as we approach the end of 2023.
I hope you’re not feeling the same way I am, but just in case you are, it’s worth a reminder, and I say this primarily to myself: Breaks from work are essential.
I’m terrible at taking breaks. When I worked for someone else, I always ended the year with spare vacation days as December ended, and that problem only got worse when I started working for myself. It’s not that I never take a day off, but needing to send this newsletter every Friday means I can never switch off for a whole week, which maintains a relatively consistent level of background stress throughout the year. I don’t mean to complain. I know I’m lucky to be in this situation, and there are many jobs with far higher stress, but it doesn’t change the fact that I feel exhausted.
So, I’m going to try to switch off as much as possible for the next two weeks and focus on the positive things that happened this year. I’ll put together the “Best of And Finally…” edition that you’ll receive next Friday as soon as I’ve sent out this issue, and that’s the newsletter done until the new year! I’ll also take as much time as possible off from the package index, and even though I have an idea for a little experiment in the documentation hosting system I’d love to prototype in a few spare days, I think it needs to wait.
Thank you all so much for continuing to read my words here during 2023, for writing all of the blog posts and articles I link to, and for the feedback and kind words you send in replies. I also hope that, wherever possible, you can also take a break over the holidays.
I’ll be back at full capacity, refreshed and ready to go on the 5th of January, and I can’t wait to see what 2024 brings!
I've been enjoying all the memories of the Mac that have been everywhere this week as we reach the 40th birthday of Macintosh. My favourite story was sent out only via email from the Steve Jobs Archive, but there have been stories and videos everywhere.
I've written about the first Mac I ever purchased before, but never about the first one I ever used. I can't remember the year exactly, but if I had to guess, it was either 1990 or 1991, and I would have been 16 or 17. I grew up in Poynton, and getting access to a Mac there in 1990 was probably a little harder than in California. However, my school did have one.
It was kept on a wheely trolley locked in a storage cupboard in one of the teacher's offices, and I'm not sure I ever knew its official purpose. I'm quite sure I never saw it used in any lessons. It did get occasional outings to the school "Computer Club", held once a week after lessons finished. Through that club and persuading the teacher that I wouldn't break it, I was granted occasional time after school alone with that Mac, and I remember being amazed by it. I don't have strong memories of exactly what I did with it, but I remember one app vividly. Aldus PageMaker. Microsoft had released Windows 3.0 by 1990, so I might have already seen a windowing operating system, but I had certainly never seen anything like PageMaker! Fonts! Drawing shapes! Flowing text from one text area to another! Dragging and dropping objects on a page! What would they think of next? 😍
I had one other close encounter with Macs a couple of years later when looking for a summer job when I was back home after my first year at university. I applied for a job with a small company in my home town. I walked over and found a few people working away writing software for Macs. I think I blew the interview, but I remember not being too worried about it as I walked home, as I wanted to work with Windows at the time. 🫣
My university had no Mac computers or at least none available to students, so my next proper experience with the platform was buying my first Mac in 2006. I sometimes wonder how different my career would have been if I had worked in that summer job and learned how to code Mac apps in the early 90s, though. 🤔
Update on apps distributed in the European Union
We knew this legislation was coming, but until yesterday, we didn't know what Apple would do about it. Now we know.
I don't quite know what to think about it yet, as I only saw the announcement quite late yesterday, but at the moment, I still believe that this will be a step backwards for consumer trust in the App Store. My views on alternate App Stores or sideloading haven't fundamentally changed from what I wrote here. Plus, when I wrote those words, it was without the additional restrictions and revenue requirements Apple announced yesterday. I think alternative stores are bad for developers without the rules Apple added yesterday¹, and it's undoubtedly worse for developers with them.
I feel like a broken record as both this week and last as I have ended up linking to old pieces of writing as I still have the views I had then. None of us has had time to properly process this news yet as it's only a day old, though, so I'll spend some time thinking about it properly this week. If I don't write more about it next week, you can assume my views haven't changed. 😬
¹ I know I'll get emails about this, so I'll briefly explain. It goes back to consumer trust in the App Store. Worthy of it or not, the iOS App Store has an amazing amount of consumer trust right now, and that's a kind of magic that's hard (if not impossible) to put back in the bottle after it's spilt.