…the 2022 edition is sticking to the Covid-years format, and the whole conference is online and free for all devs! And to kick off the conference, Apple is hosting an all-day, in-person experience at Apple Park.
From Apple Press
Let's focus on the latest press news. At the beginning of May, Apple officially confirmed that the era of iPods is over. It feels unbelievable that the original iPod was introduced more than 20 years ago. As usual, the iPod surpassed competitors in the MP3 players market.
A renewable subscription is a very popular approach for providing users with exclusive content or features in your app. Unfortunately, the subscription management in iOS is not very intuitive. Apple has been very protective of users when the subscription price increased since the required opt-in confirmation of price often led to customers losing their content. Now, as a result, Apple has put out very detailed rules about the subscription price change process.
The App Store changes every year to improve the user experience and product pages. There are small details that can help you to market your app better; the iOS 15 product page will now show an in-app events overview and there are more customization options as well.
Accessibility Is a Must
We're thrilled that the accessibility topic resonates so strongly. As engineers, we usually try to fit some A11Y goals in our apps but our options are often limited. Apple's taken a step up forward by bringing the latest tech together in its A11Y initiatives. Looking forward to seeing accessibility features combining the power of hardware, software and machine learning in action.
SwiftUI Evolution
SwiftUI is still not perfect, but the community is pushing many extensions and learning materials.
If we continue down our accessibility bridge over into SwiftUI, we need to mention a great tutorial from raywenderlich.com. Charts are a data set that is hard to imagine being accessible. Fortunately, we have SwiftUI and audio graphs to do that!
Some problems are repetitive and engineers tend to Google them again and again. One of them is confetti animation. It was quite a pain to create confetti in UIKit, but what about SwiftUI? This tutorial is pretty straightforward, no comments needed.
Another frequent issue is the progress bar, especially the circular one. The logical approach to creating a progress bar in SwiftUI is similar to UIKit, but the readability of the code and easy implementation make the SwiftUI a winner.
SwiftUI comes with built-in markdown support for text, making it easy to transform the text into bold, italic and other formats. iOS 15 and SwiftUI 3 introduced proper support, taking away the need to combine text weight for similar results. No more stressing about formatting or working with markdown.
What kind of a SwiftUI progress overview would it be without Mr. Sundell? Recently, he invited the co-founder of objc.io, Chris Eidhof, to his podcast to debate the SwiftUI evolution.
Geeky World
Although SwiftUI is the main topic here, we can't forget about programmer basics.
For a long time, CocoaPods were the main library to integrate third parties into your codebase. SPM should be the game changer — but it’ll take some time. The biggest concern about using SPM has been a missing option for build-time scripts. The SPM plugin system was introduced with with Swift 5.6, and this great article can help you to set up Swiftlint in your project with Swift Package Manager.
Hope you enjoyed this month's Swiftly Highlights. We're all looking for news from WWDC 2022, excited to chat about it soon!
