Let’s take a deep dive into the latest and greatest news on the Apple ecosystem.
What’s New
Let's start with our daily driver, XCode 14. While Xcode 13 added some major features such as Vim mode, version control, DocC and Xcode Cloud, Xcode 14 opted to return to the basics and polish some core features that make the whole experience faster and smarter to use. Paul Hudson goes into detail about the changes to come — even the ones Apple didn’t announce.
One of the most “quality of life” additions on XCode 14 is allowing us to get rid of App Icon generators. How great is that? Many of us have been asking, “Why can’t Xcode just generate the sizes for us based on a single file?” Well, the time has come! Check out the details.
Along with our favorite IDE comes an update to Swift, and this new version delivers a gigantic collection of changes and improvements to the language, including power features such as regular expressions, quality of life improvements like the if let shorthand syntax and a great deal of consistency cleanups around the ‘any’ and ‘some’ keywords. Check out all the features Swift 5.7 has for us with this comprehensive summary.
With Swift 5.7, combining Swift’s flexible generics system with protocol-oriented programming can often lead to some really powerful implementations, all while minimizing code duplication and enabling us to establish clearly-defined levels of abstraction across our code bases. Take a look at how to use the ‘some’ and ‘any’ keywords to reference generic protocols. Then dig deeper into the ‘some’ keyword and, with Swift 6 around the corner, continue the topic with this insightful podcast.
SwiftUI
Can’t forget about SwiftUI; it appears this framework continues to be one of the main focuses of the WWDC conference. As expected, Apple announced a new version of SwiftUI that comes along with iOS 16 and Xcode 14. The new changes and improvements are not to be missed. Check out this detailed wrap-up. Or, if you feel like being specific and sharing, take a look at one focused on the new ShareLink view.
SwiftUI has shown it is highly capable of staying ahead of the game, allowing developers to create complex views with simplified code. Have you ever built Line charts using SwiftUI? Check out some advanced examples.
WeatherKit
The forecast is in! Apple announced WeatherKit, a platform-specific Swift API that brings valuable weather information to your apps and services through a wide range of data. Easy to implement, powered by Apple Weather, with privacy in mind. Want to be one of the first to try it out? Go for it!
WWDC 2022 Wrap-up
What better way to end this coffee break-read than with a summary of our favorite conference full of recommended talks and tips. This year’s WWDC was unlike anything we’ve seen before, with 1,000 developers being invited into Apple’s home in Cupertino to share their excitement, meet engineers and even take tours around Apple Park.
Hope you enjoyed this month's Swiftly Highlights! See you soon!
