Comment One great thing about WWDC being in San Francisco was that everything was close. It didn’t matter much which event you chose to go to after the conference finished every day, it was all within walking distance. AltConf, which grew to be a critical part of WWDC week was usually hosted across the road in the Children’s Museum ?, and the Layers conference joined a couple of years later. All combined, they supported many more people than the official event could accommodate. If anything San Jose might’ve been even more convenient than San Francisco! AlfConf was hosted no more than 20 paces ..read more

Comment Did you see the new Swift tutorials Apple released this week? It’s great to see more official tutorials appear, especially ones like these that target people brand new to programming, but as I was browsing the first tutorial it struck me what an amazing first introduction to programming this would be. The code in the tutorial was so clear and readable, and unlike Swift Playgrounds (which is great in its own way) these tutorials have you building an iOS app within minutes of opening the first tutorial. That's incredible. Before Swift arrived, I used to teach in-person training courses c ..read more

Comment I received two types of emails in response to last week’s introductory comment. The first type had phrases like “No warnings at all? Wow!” and “I’m surprised you didn’t get anything at all!” and the things said in the other type of email were much more along the lines of “You didn’t switch on the checks properly.” ? Yes, it’s true. I made a huge mistake with last week’s intro, where I used enableUpcomingFeature instead of enableExperimentalFeature. It’s crystal clear in the documentation that the former is for Swift 6, and the latter is for Swift 5.9/5.10. I was running with Xcode 15.3 ..read more

Comment Note: Please read the update at the end of this comment! Swift 5.10 is here! Holly Borla introduced the release on the Swift.org blog, and if you haven’t dug into what this release is all about yet, I’ll let Holly explain by quoting the bolded sentence in her post: Swift 5.10 accomplishes full data isolation in the concurrency language model. As she explains, this is the culmination of years of work that will make our apps safer. In Swift 5.10, the feature to strictly check concurrency code is off by default and if switched on, introduces warnings, not errors. The Swift Package Index ..read more

Comment People often ask me about a new app idea they want to build, and one thing I always try to think about is, “Is this app boring enough?” Obviously, “boring” is subjective, but the number of success stories I have heard over the years where the problem isn’t glamorous and the solution doesn’t leverage the latest trends is striking. Marketing your app becomes easier as there’s less competition on keywords, and users love your app because it solves a problem they don’t enjoy dealing with. If you want to make an app for fun or as a hobby or side project, that’s a whole different thing, and ..read more

Comment I know it's possibly a less popular opinion recently, but I still love and appreciate developers who put their time and attention to platform fit on Apple platforms. I also love it when Apple makes it easier for developers to pay attention to platform fit through their APIs. The big win in this area from the last few years has been SwiftUI. When you abstract the details of how apps work away from the underlying platforms and specific controls, you lose some control but gain masses of platform fit. What you lose in customizability, you get back multiple times over in knowing your app wi ..read more

Comment Did you see Chris Eidhof's announcement of The SwiftUI Field Guide this week? At first glance, you might take a quick look and think it's a well-illustrated guide to SwiftUI, but it's so much more than that. It's a fully dynamic and interactive guide to many aspects of the SwiftUI layout system. You'll even find step-by-step animated illustrations of various layout calculations as you progress through the guide. If you have been paying attention, you'll have noticed that Chris has a bit of a thing for the SwiftUI layout system. As if to prove that point, the underlying system behind th ..read more

Comment From Stuart Varrall's recent article on Inspiring Apple Vision Pro Apps: Apps such as Mercury Weather and Longplay change the information displayed in a window depending on the size. Every iOS-based platform so far has imposed a space limitation on apps. On iPhone, it's a challenge to design apps that need to present lots of information. On iPad it's sometimes hard to know what to do with all that space, and on watchOS and tvOS … well, the problem is even more extreme. visionOS is the first iOS-based platform to remove that restriction, bringing it much closer in line with how macOS ..read more

Comment From John Gruber’s excellent summary of last week’s DMA proposal: The Core Technology Fee (CTF) disrupts the free/freemium model used by Apple’s biggest rivals and competitors. Meta’s apps are all free: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and now Threads. Meta has paid Apple effectively nothing for those apps, ever. The YouTube app offers IAP subscriptions but most of Google’s popular iOS apps are just completely free, so Google pays Apple nothing. Spotify has 500 million worldwide users, split 40-60 between paid and free (ad-supported). That means Spotify likely has roughly 100 million fr ..read more

Comment 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. Howeve ..read more