Even though it's been more than a month since the last video of WWDC 20 was released, we’re still harvesting the fruits Apple grew for us throughout the last year. All around the world, developers for Apple platforms have been digesting the news and have come up with a bunch of great catches, notes and ideas of how we can leverage them. But of course, plenty of articles and posts not related to WWDC also caught our eye. Let's dive right in.
WWDC WRAP-UPS
Unless you’re a true enthusiast or video freak, you most likely haven't watched all WWDC videos. Here’s our list of several summaries that we find most interesting and are easy to consume.
WWDC20: Wrap up and recommended talks
For those of us who already know and trust the Apple taste of Paul Hudson, it’s definitely worth checking out this lightweight summary of the most important happenings from the conference. Besides his overall impression, Paul also shares his 10 favorite talks and a list of five must-see videos.
Do you know what TL;DW stands for? If not, feel free to Google it and if it seems like your case, just follow the link and read through the concise notes from plenty of talks you haven’t had time to watch.
What’s New in Xcode 12 and Swift 5.3
SVG support, improvements in code completion, multiple trailing closures... Here we have another aggregated list of news released by AppCoda. Provided that you want to know how your day-to-day coding will look like come September, we recommend going through it.
SWIFTUI
Let's be honest—SwiftUI rocks the Apple world and the best way to absorb changes is by consuming monthly doses of SwiftUI news.
Use the SwiftUI Kit app by Jordan Singer to see how SwiftUI views appear and interact when using the system defaults. The only prerequisite you have to meet is to have the Xcode 12 Beta installed on your Mac. But all of us already have it, right? 😉
@StateObject vs. @ObservedObject
Several new property wrappers were introduced this year and @StateObject was one of them. This blog post by Matt Moriarity describes the difference between the new @StateObject and @ObservedObject introduced last year and discusses best use cases for both.
A guide to SwiftUI’s state management system
In case the polemics about @StateObject vs. @ObservedObject are way too much for you—maybe you’re confused by all those property wrappers in SwiftUI—you can start with this straightforward overview of SwiftUI state management property wrappers by John Sundell.
And John Sundell once again. Xcode 12 introduces the option to write not just views, but entire apps using SwiftUI from top to bottom. If you are brave enough to get rid of AppDelegate, the last anchor that connects you with the known world of UIKit, check out this blog post.
BEYOND WWDC
Kinda tired of WWDC mentions everywhere? Welcome to the WWDC-free zone, consisting of articles and blog posts entirely unrelated to the [name retracted] conference.
Custom emojis are a fun way to bring more life and customizability to your apps. However, iOS SDK doesn't provide straightforward support for custom emojis out of the box. This neat library by Matheus Cardoso can help you with that.
Most of the time, we’re just fine with privacy policies natively provided on Apple operating systems. But these security features can be quite easily bypassed by jailbreaks or other tweaks and hooks. If you are interested in how they face these challenges at Snapchat, read all about that in this article by AeonLucid.
Five powerful, yet lesser-known ways to use Swift enums
We use Swift enums every day. From finite list definitions to associated values, they are undoubtedly very powerful Swift constructs. John Sundell has several tips on how you can use enums even more extensively.
These days, you can't avoid news about COVID-19 and (sorry) you won't be spared here, either. Apple and Google have recently jointly created the ExposureNotification framework to help governments and public health authorities reduce the spread of COVID-19 through contact tracing. This month, Apple released the source code. And it’s written in Objective-C!
And last but not least, if you need more proof that SwiftUI is the one and only UI framework that will rule them all, check this project by Jordan Singer—who recreated the legendary Windows XP operating system for iPads. If you sometimes feel that 2020 is way too much for you and sometimes catch yourself thinking of the good ol’ times, build a project from the Github repository and let it transport you to 20 years ago.
And that's it for July. See you next month!
