Week 411

Happy Thursday! They say all things come to an end. And while this may or may not be the end, this will be the last edition of the iOS Goodies newsletter, at least until the end of this year. I’m sure you’re wondering why that is, and I’ll try to explain in the following lines.

To do a good job curating the content for this newsletter, I need to spend around 5-7 hours per week. And that doesn’t cover for any (long overdue) website appearance updates, small improvements, tweaks in format, or anything like that. I care a lot about my free time, and with a full-time job and a strong reluctance to give up my personal and family time for side projects, I don’t have enough time to do a good job curating the content for this newsletter. And instead of doing a poor job, I’d rather not be doing it at all. I don’t want to make something I can’t be proud of.

Another reason is that lately, making this newsletter every Thursday turned slowly more into a chore than into something fun that I was looking forward to. I also found it more difficult to find new content. We have a lot of great authors in our community, and many of them publish new articles every week, so from a point of view, it was very easy to find some content for the newsletter. But I wanted to have more diversity in the authors that I featured in iOS Goodies, instead of featuring the same ones every week. I was very happy whenever I found new authors I didn’t know before, but lately that hasn’t been happening that much. And this could very well be tied to the previous point where I mentioned my lack of time. But again, I don’t want to make something I’m not proud of.

So, what happens next? I need some time off this project currently, and I will take until the end of the year to think about the future of iOS Goodies. It could be that it turns into something less regular (after all, as a friend pointed out, it’s iOS Goodies, not iOS Goodies Weekly), or it could become a blog with iOS development articles instead of curated content, or a book, or video courses (just brainstorming here), but it could very well be that this is the last issue of iOS Goodies.

It’s been a pleasure doing this for more than 4 years, and I want to thank everyone who contributed to iOS Goodies by submitting articles, subscribing to the newsletter or spreading the word. It’s been a fun and rewarding experience for me. I’ll be around on Twitter.

Now, on to the links 😄

Marius Constantinescu

Articles

Tools/Controls

  • XCRemoteCache - Remote cache tool for Xcode projects that speeds up local iOS builds, by @polac24
  • ARHeadsetKit - Using $5 Google Cardboard to replicate Hololens, by Philip Turner

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Week 410

Happy Thursday! Around this time, every year, Apple announces that the App Store Connect goes on holiday around Christmas. Not this year, though. For the first time, as far as I know, App Store Connect submissions will be accepted through the holidays. Be aware thought, that they anticipate a high volume of submissions and reviews may take longer to complete during the holidays.

Marius Constantinescu

Tips from Twitter

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Week 409

Happy Thursday! Apple’s Tech Talks have been going on for a while now, they’ve already updated the schedule. I really like the way they are listening to feedback, adding more sessions and increasing their capacity. The most attended sessions will be run again, and the sign up has been split in two, with half the spots released once and half in a second time slot, to give an equal chance to people from different timezones to sign up. I think Apple is doing a very good job with those sessions and it’s a rare opportunity to talk to Apple developers outside of WWDC. A recap of what’s been going on so far and what’s coming next can be found in Tech Talks Digest: November 1.

Marius Constantinescu

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Week 408

Happy Thursday! Xcode 13.2 just got its first beta yesterday, and in it, the new concurrency model in Swift has been ported all the way back to iOS 13. iOS 13 is the first version that supports SwiftUI and Combine, so just imagine how much more fun writing iOS apps just became. This is still in its first beta, and as Doug Gregor mentions, it’s an enormously complicated feature to back deploy so there may be issues that the Swift team hasn’t found yet. If you try it, make sure to submit a feedback if anything doesn’t work as expected.

Marius Constantinescu

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Week 407

Happy Thursday! Apple announced Tech Talks 2021, with live sessions and office hours for developers, between 25 October - 17 December. And every two weeks, a Tech Talks Digest will be published with the details of the latest developer events.

macOS Monterey now has a release date: 25 October. That’s next week. I mentioned this in issue 404 as well but in case that’s not found 😅, I’ll write it here again: don’t update to Monterey unless you’re ready to go all-in with Xcode 13, because Xcode 12 won’t work.

Marius Constantinescu

Tips from Twitter

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Week 406

Happy Thursday! This week my attention was caught by this Twitter thread from Jeff Verkoeyen, the staff engineering lead at Google Design for Apple platforms. Jeff announces that they’re slowly moving away from the material design for Google products on iOS to use the native iOS components that UIKit and SwiftUI provide. The whole thread is very interesting, and, as I understand it, the main reason for this change is that because of the evolution of UIKit and the introduction of SwiftUI, it’s simply not worth it anymore to maintain a huge library of custom components. As a user I am very excited by this because to me, Google’s apps didn’t really feel at home on iOS. I’m looking forward to a better user experience, something that feels more familiar to iOS users. And as a developer, this again is very good news. I’ve always been a fan of experiences as close to native as possible and my ideal app to work on is “something that looks like it’s made by Apple”. If Google decided to go with native components, I hope more developers and companies will follow. And on the same note, Microsoft chose to move Visual Studio for Mac to native macOS UI.

Marius Constantinescu

Tips from Twitter

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Week 405

Happy Thursday! Back in the WWDC week it was very easy to miss it, but Apple updated then the App Store Review Guidelines, making it mandatory for apps offering account creation to also offer account deletion? I drew attention to this tiny update back then, because I think it’s a pretty important change and it can impact a lot of apps. Now Apple added more details on it, announcing that they will start to enforce the rule form 31 January. So get ready to implement account deletion in your apps 😄.

Marius Constantinescu

Tips from Twitter

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Week 404

Happy Thursday! Let’s start this week’s edition with a quick word of advice: if you’re not able to switch to Xcode 13 any time soon, then don’t update your macOS to Monterey when that’s out, because only Xcode 13 will work on macOS Monterey.

In other news, it’s been around 10 days since iOS 15 was released and the adoption rate is around 20%, which is actually better than I expected

Marius Constantinescu

Tips from Twitter

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Week 403

Happy Thursday! iOS 15 has been officially launched, and I guess the adoption rate will be slower than we’re used to. However, iOS 15 has been a great update on my iPhone 11, everything runs smoothly and I think it’s one of the most polished iOS updates I’ve seen so far. Great job everyone who worked on it 👏. Go update your devices so we can use async/await sooner 😅.

Together with iOS 15, Xcode 13 and Swift 5.5 have been released. For Xcode 13, it seems it’s the same build as the Release Candidate from last week. And if you’re curious to hear what’s new in Swift 5.5, check out Paul’s playground which I linked to in the Tools section below.

Marius Constantinescu

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Indie

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Week 402

Happy Thursday! Apple had its September event this week, where they announced new iPhones, a new Apple Watch and 2 new iPads. I was fearing a scenario like last year, but luckily we got the Xcode 13 RC and developers still have until Monday to get their apps on the App Store if they want to be live on day 1. Yes, iOS 15 will be available on 20 September, and submissions are now open for iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. And just as always, from April 2022, new apps and updates must be built with Xcode 13 and the iOS 15 SDK.

For some Swift-related news, Doug Gregor made things clear after we got our hopes up for seeing this Pull Request: the new Swift concurrency model is, at least for now and possibly forever iOS 15+. More details in his Swift Forums post

Marius Constantinescu

Tips from Twitter

  • Nick Lockwood explains DRY: very good thread from Nick explaining one of the main problem the Don’t Repeat Yourself principle bring when it’s poorly implemented.

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