On September 14th, we had the latest Apple event where they introduced the new iPhone lineup with iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Mini, as well as a new iPad Mini along with the ninth-generation iPad and Apple Watch Series 7.
In case you're curious if your app will require any changes for the iPad Mini, you can check how to get ready for the new iPad mini display.
The announcement of these new devices also comes with a new major update for iOS with iOS 15, which means a new Xcode and, not at all the least important, a new Swift Release (5.5) — and this was a huge one, as it introduced new language capabilities for concurrency, such as async/await, structured concurrency and Actors.
Besides all of the goodies above, we of course saved some room in these Highlights for cool articles and guides written by people from our community. Let's dive into it!
SwiftUI
The SwiftUI world is growing fast, new architectures appear from time to time... but what about having our beloved coordinators pattern in SwiftUI? Definitely worth checking out.
Have you ever heard of the disclosure group in SwiftUI? Many people have yet to hear about it, and it seems like a game changer when compared to how we used to approach such features in UIKit or AppKit. Easy and smooth as SwiftUI wants to be.
Guides & Tutorials
Async/Await is not a reality just yet for most of us in our daily work, but it definitely is the future of asynchronous programming in iOS development; loading images asynchronously is a really good, simple use case showing how to use it as a day-to-day task.
We also have Actors following the same path as the previously mentioned Async/Await. One interesting article we found mentions how actors can guarantee thread safety but not prevent reentrancy problems, by Lee Kah Seng.
What's your first feeling when you have a crash and see EXC_BAD_ACCESS? Fear? Danger? Wanting to just run away? All of that? Well, worry no more. This month, we have SwiftLee with a nice article that will help us to understand and solve it.
It has already been quite a long ride for the Swift language, and there are now lots of changes compared to previous versions. But the question is: Until now, have all decisions been accurate? Jordan Rose has put together a thread about Swift Regrets.
Core image, metal shading, warp kernel. Fancy terms, right? But that fanciness doesn’t necessarily mean they are out of our reach. Check out this Custom Filters With Core Image Tutorial, where you'll learn how to create your own Core Image filters using the Metal Shading Language.
One More Thing
Though we’ve already got iOS 15 running on our devices, it's good to know what's new when the subject at hand is privacy. The Ray Wenderlich group brings us a good overview about the news with Privacy Features Introduced in iOS 14.5, which affects any upcoming version.
That's all for our September edition. Stay tuned, and see you next month!
