So much new goodness due to WWDC

Jeroen Leenarts: Hi, and welcome to episode 83 of my podcast. My name is John Lennon's and I've been developing software for over 20 years developing iOS apps for 10 years, and I'm running the Dutch kolkhoz for over nine years. If you're an iOS app developer, you should listen to my podcast because it will keep you updated on interesting articles, conferences and events you might not have heard about. In this episode, I'm going to talk about a lot of things about WWDC, all new framework presents that WWDC 22 What's new in Swift, 5.7, Swift 5.7 new optional unwrap syntax. What's the difference between any and some in Swift 5.7 using the Psalm and any key words to reference generic protocols in Swift 5.7 Trying new Swift features on Linux via Visual Studio Code def containers. What's new is swift UI for iOS 16 overview of the new Swift UI navigation API's iOS 16 notable UI Kit additions, creating a detent with a custom height in iOS 16. What's new in Xcode 14, Xcode integration of Swift package plugins in Xcode 14. Use Xcode for server side development and setting up your first CarPlay app. So that's a whole bunch of articles I want to go through. So we'll just see where we end up. And yeah, it's just so much interesting and cool stuff that has been announced during the WWDC last week. And as an additional extra piece about CarPlay that I'm looking into right now, because I will be getting a new car in July that is CarPlay enabled. So all the more reason to start digging into that as well. And I must say that the entire WWDC cycle this year was very enjoyable. I did a lot of content related work with with my team at stream and also with myself with podcasting. And I think overall the the end result was very neat. And yeah, I spoke a lot of people online about the new WWDC announcements and what they thought. And we were also able to share what our thoughts are. And yeah, just the interaction online was really great. So things are going well in that regard. And now after the busy WWDC week, we're back into a more relaxed state, I will at least that's what I should be. But tomorrow evening, when I'm recording this, I will be presenting at Cocottes. And now in the Netherlands, in the stream office in Amsterdam, and then the week after, on June 24. I will be presenting at at DEF CON as well. And at DEF CON will be a very interesting talk because it's a non technical talk yet again, it's about the developer manual, how can you as a non technical person interacts with technical people that do software development and make sure that the two of you are in alignment with each other. And that the software developers in the end will build what you as a business person are actually looking for, to be credit, which is software conducted. See, I haven't even recovered from that. But headfirst into additional work after that, again, fortunately, last weekend, I was able to have a nice relaxing weekend with my family and my own parents that they were married 50 years, sometime last year. And we finally were able to go on a family weekend with the six of us to celebrate this event. It was basically our gift to my parents as a family so that they could have like a nice relaxing weekend with to have their grandchildren on site as well. So that was really good. Very relaxing, I was able to unplug. Most of the time. I just did a few minor things during the weekend. So that was very enjoyable, very relaxing. And we had good luck with the weather as well, because it was like 20 degrees Celsius all the time the entire weekend, no rain. So we were able to enjoy ourselves outside a lot because it was in a cabin in a forested area. And then having nice weather is very good to have. And because a wet forest is not a pleasant place to be if you asked me. So yeah, let's just get started with the first article. And then we'll just wrap up after that. And then we'll talk to you again next week. Right? So the first article, all new frameworks presented at WWDC 22. This is an article by Marco Heidinger. And basically it's a list of frameworks that were new and announced by Apple during the WWDC, it's part of his apple frameworks site. It's a website that allows you to inspect which frameworks were released with which versions of Apple's platforms. So for instance, if you look at the, let's say, app Eclipse framework that was released in iOS 14, Mac, catalyst 14 and iPad os 14, so that's pretty obvious what's happened there. But if you look at for instance, the authentication services framework that was released on iOS 12, Mac OS 10 point 15 Watch was six TV OS 13, the Mac catalyst 13, and iPad os 12. So you can quickly inspect which versions of a platform a framework was May 1 made available, and If you click on the links on this website, you jump to the documentation on this specific framework on the Apple website immediately. So very convenient if you want to have a good look at what Apple has announced as frameworks in this year, WWDC. So, you can quickly see What's New in iOS 16. Mac OS 13. And yeah, just a useful resource to have a look at the second article is by Paul Hudson, it says big what's new in Swift 5.7 article, it's a big overview of what has been on the language level been announced in the latest Xcode release. Of course, Swift 5.7 has been released a little bit earlier, but now it is part of the Xcode IDE. A great article with a lot of links to the underlying specification requests. And all the information and code samples really get you up to speed on what you should be now what you should be aware of with the latest Swift language features. One of the cool features of Swift 5.7 that I really like is the new optional unwrapping syntax. And John Sandow has a nice article about that on his swift by Sunday blog. And it's it's a nice overview with a more elaborate code sample compared to Paul Hudson's article on what this new optional unwrapping syntax allows you to do. It basically makes your F flat and cartlett statements a little bit more compact. It's really nice in the sense that, yeah, it's, it's just a convenience, ergonomic feature that really helps you with making sure that you don't have to, like type too many of the same words. So while creating your source code, but there was one feature in Swift 5.7 that I had a bit of a struggle with, and that's the any and some keywords in nursery 5.7 And that's where the article by Daniel also comes in, what's the difference between any and some in Swift? 5.7. So, in Swift 5.1, Apple introduced the some keywords, this keyword was a key in making straight UI work, because the view protocol defines itself requirements. The thing is the some keyword fixes an issue that you might be having with concrete associated types. And there's some details involved with the end end some keywords in Swift, that that has to be fixed in Swift 5.7. And I really think that the some key words is, it's to me it sounds like the same like any rights, you have somewhere you have any I don't care. But there is a small difference between the two. And they each solve a very specific situation that you can run into with, with type inference in in Swift. So it's mostly something that you get to deal with when defining functions, and if you have some flexibility in there. So generally speaking, you should prefer using some or generics over any whenever you can. So you often don't want to use a box that conforms to a protocol, you want that object that conforms to the protocol. Sounds weird, right? Or sticking with a pizza analogy that Donnie Walz has put in his article. And he will hand the runtime a box that says pizza, and it will need to open a box to see which pizza is inside. And with some or generics, the runtime will know exactly which feature it just got. And it'll know immediately what to do with it. Toss it if it's a why or keep it if it's a pepperoni pizza, if that's at least your taste preference with pizza, right? A lots of use cases, you will find that you actually didn't mean to use any, but you can make some orange generic work and according to the Swift team, we should always prefer not using any if you can, because any is just too broadly scoped. To help me understand this summon any keywords stuff, I also looked at an article on the same topic by John Sundale. That's a more technical overview with a he talks about opaque parameter types and primary associated types. So there's a lot more explanation of the basics instead of diving into like code samples as Donnie was did. And yeah, if you'll come to grips what the summon any keywords do in Swift 5.7 through the article by Daniels, and you want to know some more detail, definitely check out the article by John sandal because it allows you to get to understand some of the internals and the naming of these summon any keywords so that you can in conversation with other engineers have a good conversation about what summon any actually means semantically to the compiler. So Swift 5.7 doesn't just make swift generic system more powerful. It arguably makes it much more accessible as well as it reduces the need to use generic type constraints and other more advanced generic programming techniques just to be able to refer to certain protocols. Generics is definitely not the right tool for every single problem. So John really argues that some is not always the best option in all cases, but If he does agree that when it is the right option to use, being able to use Swift generic system in a much more lightweight way is definitely a big win. A lot of new things have been announced in Swift 5.7, I'm still coming to grips with all the new features. But with the help of these articles by Paul Hudson, Daniels and Johnsonville, I think I definitely am on the right track. Challenge, though, is that I don't want to run the latest and greatest X code, better versions on my production machines. And sometimes you do want to play around with some of these new language features, regardless without having to mess up your entire development environments. And that's where there's this nice article comes in, it's an article by a spent a Smith. It's called trying news fit features on Linux through Visual Studio dev containers. So the reason that span rods article is that with every WWDC there are new and exciting swift features. And you're well trained to download the latest latest Xcode betzest to try them out. Sometimes, however, downloading Xcode isn't enough, because features might have dependencies on the Mac OS version as well. So you want to use specific features, but you also have to upgrade the host operating system, right. But this is, of course, a problem because nobody ever installs better software on their devices, right? Right. Especially if it's your like daily drive device, you don't want to get better on there. But what if there's like a safer and faster way to get to all these new language features, and that operates and function completely as intended in the language specifications. So spend actually argues that you can use Linux through Visual Studio Code def containers, and you need three bits of software to be able to do this on your machine. And that's actually Docker for Mac, Visual Studio code, and Visual Studio Code, Swift language extensions. And then in his article, he goes into detail what you need to do with these three pieces to make sure that you have a working def container that you can access with Visual Studio code that's running in Docker, so you have a full runtime environment available isolated in the Docker container. So it doesn't mess with your with your system or any stability on edit on other areas of your system. And it's it's a great way to just try to try out a few of these language features without having to fully invest in running better operating systems on your hardware. So I really like the the idea there. And of course, some of these new language features that were introduced in Swift 5.7 Are there to enable new things in Swift UI for iOS 16. Right. Paul Hudson also wrote an article titled what's new in Swift UI for iOS 16. So basically, it's an overview of all the new, more visual components that are available in Swift UI. So the big stuff, as he calls it, is like displaying a bottom sheets. Positioning fusing the fixed grid layout detects location of tap inside a few. That's something you can do now with Swift UI. And let us share content using the system share sheet. So you sharing content from your app should be a lot easier compared to how it was on iOS 15. How to ask users to review your app, Apple tweaked that a little bit as well. And there's a new date component available in Swift UI that allows you to do some really cool stuff in allowing users to select multiple dates. So you're not using these rollers anymore, but more like a calendar date based components. There are awesome smaller improvements as well. So that's dynamically changing between V sec and H tech, how to dismiss the keyboard when the user scrolls and how to hide scroll indicators in the scroll view lists are more how to hide the home indicator and other system UI and how to let us paste data into your app system gestures to stop them interfering with your own gestures and how to dynamically adjust the color of SF symbol. And this will enable some really cool things as well. Because as if symbols are a lot of them now have also numb a number of states. So if you have the Wi Fi can in SF symbols, you can now actually animate that in several steps. So there's a lot of stuff to unpack in Swift UI. And just getting started with of course, the WWDC videos about Swift UI. But also the article by Paul Hudson to get you on your way is a really good one, especially because the Paul Hudson article has a lot of source code that you can copy paste and try in playgrounds. Because we're not running the latest Mac OS yet and you cannot copy code from from from a video frame as you can do now with the latest Mapquest Ventura. So I think that's a really cool thing to have look at on the article the second article that I mentioned by Paul Hudson to get you on your way with Swift UI One big new feature in Swift UI is actually swift UI navigation API's. And Natalia Ponferrada. Has a nice article on what's new with this navigation stack. It's available on iOS 16 and Mac OS 13. And it allows you to define stack based navigation and multi column navigation. So it's a, it's a, it's a good improvement over the Navigation Controller of UI kit, with some great additions. And, yeah, I think it's good to have a look and be familiar with this navigation stack. We can't use jet on iOS 15, of course, because it's not backported. But I think this is the new way of doing stack based navigation in in iOS applications in the foreseeable future. So the article by Natalia has a nice overview of what is navigation stack is how you can use it, how you can actually programmatically navigate in the navigation stack. And that is actually also has a split view support with navigation split view. So if you use a navigation stack based application, you can quite easily convert it to also work really well on bigger screen device like an iPad or on macOS, really with an efficacious split view. So and you can even take that for that you can do tree columns in the navigation split view. So that's like a the main view with detail with a sub detail, which is really nice. And yeah, some good code samples there and a nice GitHub repository at the bottom of the article that you can click through to get access to all these code samples in one go. Talking about cool additions for the frameworks released by iOS, Jordan Morgan actually wrote an arc wrote an article called iOS 16, notable UI Kit additions. And he goes over some of the cool new additions that were announced in iOS 16. First of all, that's he mentioned the UI calendar view, this is somewhat of a similar control that you have available in Swift UI now as well. Doing a date selection on a more like a calendar type thing, multiple date selections, even if you want to, you can customize and tweak this thing and do do cool things with it. And in his article, Jordan Morgan actually also details some information about the variable symbols. So that's, that's the the the thing I mentioned earlier, if you have a Wi Fi Connect, you can actually animate these, because they have an animatable property that allows you to change the state of the of the SF symbol and how it looks on screen. And you can actually use that to animate these SF symbols. So some, there's also something in relates to our collective fuse and your table fused with resizing cells. So it's always been kind of hard to do that dynamically. But there is now a new bit of API available self sizing, invalidation enabled, that allows you to make sure that resizing cells just works. So in quite often, this should just work. But if it causes issues, you can always turn this off. Again. Another great addition for UI kit is actually that there's been some substantial improvements in support of Swift UI views in TableView cells and UI CollectionView cells. And this is really something that allows you to gradually incrementally transition your codebase from UI kit to Swift UI, so that you can take yourself from the UI Kit world into the Swift UI, few worlds, gradually installed, instead of having to do this in one big swoop. For each screen incomplete and completion, you can you really do this on the cell level, which allows you to do this more gradual, which is a good addition as well. Some other small nuggets that are the improved heuristics for detecting money, a physical values with date detectors. This is of course, something that is also available for swift UI. And there's a whole bunch more stuff to discover. So John Morgan thinks that we will see an inevitable rise of Swift UI, but he can't help but smile as he writes an article in his series for each year since iOS 13. Right after WWDC, he made the CS he has new what's new in Swift UI articles hit why not switch wise, excited, I exciting and he loves it. But for now, UI kit is still here and doing its things and wow. It's been adding a lot of great stuff this year, according to Jordan Morgan. And while Apple keeps improving UI kit in such substantial ways. You can rest assured that Jordan Markel will keep talking about that as well. Speaking about new additions to iOS 16 Is that creating a detent in with a custom height in iOS 16. So, a custom detent height is a concept that is something that you have to be aware of, because if you present a modal sheet From the bottom enter your screen, you had to depends on it medium and large. So that determines how much area you had to put controls. In view on this your sheet presentation, what you can now do is make custom defense. So you not only have medium and large, you can also use a detent that is suitable for you need for your knees so you can make it smaller or bigger. It's good one to be aware of. And Stuart Breckinridge has an article about it, which is just two code samples with some text around it called Create a detent with custom heights in iOS 16. My colleague Stefan blas also wrote a nice piece and that's the What's New in Xcode 14 article. And so there's four big areas of improvement that Stefan has seen. And that's source editing and swift UI, improved previews, multi platform development, testflight, feedback analytics and significant performance improvements in Xcode overall, he will go through each of these four items and explain why he thinks these are big improvements to Xcode. It's a nice article with a lot of graphical assets in there to help make the points and the case for what Stefan is arguing about, Stefan things that have been there have been huge improvements in Xcode in this new version. So while many of them are under the hood, and there's also many things that make the life of you as a developer easier every day. Personally, Stefan thinks that these four things are the most important improvements to x codes for you as a software developer, and he's really looking forward to a stable release. And while some people might argue that it's about time that certain features land, he's very happy that Xcode has improved every year and that we are getting these nice additions. Speaking of Xcode improvements, Swift package manager now supports plugins. And with Xcode 14, Xcode actually integrates with the Swift package manager plugins. And Marco Edinger has an article on this very specific topic. So let's flip back to Plugins can be divided into two types command plugins and build two plugins. And both were introduced in Swift 5.6 and work in Xcode 13.3 when using Swift packages, so what changed in Xcode 14 with Swift 5.7 rights. So what you get now is that command plugins can be triggered within Xcode. So if you add a command plug in to your Swift package definition, it will show up in your Xcode menus, which is like really nice because it allows convenient and easy access to specific command plugins that you have embedded in your codebase. And command plugins can be executed on Xcode projects now. So that's really cool. So that also means that Swift package manager is used more and more under the hood of Xcode projects, which is good. And build plugins can be executed on Xcode projects as well. So what this means and a build plugin is something that runs at build time in your codebase. And it allows you to now execute those on Xcode projects again, which also adds to the argument that it seems Swift package manager is used more and more under the hood in Xcode projects. So all in all, I think those are some really cool additions to Xcode build system as well. So definitely check it out. And there's also some information in the article by Marco on how you can actually get started with your own Swift package plugins. A specific article that I really enjoyed was the use Xcode for server side development. It's on WWDC notes, and it's written by its yard goodness, and Federico Santa Telo. And it's basically some notes on this same title session from the WWDC side of things. So Apple released a video called use Xcode for server side development. And it's basically a really cool video done by Apple during WWDC, in which Apple clearly indicates that server side Swift is here. And server side Swift is something you should look into. And they are using vapor swift as the prime example of how you can use Swift on the server side. So this is a really good indication that if you want to do some server side development with Swift, Apple thinks that you should use vapor for that. So really cool to see that and I really liked the vapor project, because I'd already did some really cool things with that. And just so you know, this fifth package in that index is actually built with vapor. So if you want to get your hands on some vapor codes, just have a look at this fifth package, index codebase. And you have a substantial size vapor project right at your fingertips to just play around with and I know Dave, we're really likes it if people look at the Swift package index codebase and suggest some improvements with by by submitting a pull request or giving some feedback through a GitHub issue on our on the discord server that Dave hadn't as made available for the Swift package index. And then I'm already up to the final article of my long podcast episode. And that's the one titled Setting up your first car play app, it's a article by Paul Palin. And getting started with CarPlay is easier than you think, according to Paul, and in his post, he will walk you through how to set up CarPlay. And get started using CarPlay in your simulator, so you don't need to have a car or a headset unit available on your desk. But it's, it's a good overview of how you can actually get started with CarPlay development. And Paul goes into some details of what CarPlay actually is for you, as a developer and how you should interact with it. And it's a good overview of what steps you need to take to be able to do CarPlay development. And, yeah, it's really cool, because you'd need to do some things a little bit differently in your application. But once you do, you can really launch a CarPlay simulator on your computer, and have a play around with with CarPlay on your development environment. And, yeah, it's something I'm looking into a little bit myself because so we'll be getting access to a CarPlay enabled car in in July, but all hopes because it's all dependent on delivery of the actual car and production and all these kinds of things. And I really noticed that car manufacturer manufacturers have a big impact of this silicone shortage that's happening worldwide as well, because the car was actually delayed by a couple months, because they just did not have the right chips available available to put in the car. So that's kind of wild. So that's the, the this big thing a car gets delayed, because the small things that are embedded deep inside the bodywork of the car are just not available. And they just need that to be able to create a car nowadays to that actually works. It's an electric car. So there's more electronics in there as well. But anyways, I really enjoyed propellants article on setting up your first CarPlay app, because I'm planning on getting into CarPlay development a little bit myself as well, just for the kicks of it. So that concludes my WWDC wrap up episode of my podcast. This is just some of the articles that I've been reading, to get up to speed with everything that's new, and announced during Apple's WWDC. And I just know that over the coming weeks that will be more great in depth articles and all the things and topics that that talk about everything Apple have has released. And I really look forward to those articles and to share those with you. So thank you for your time, it's a bit of a longer episode than usual. If you have any feedback, please reach out on Twitter, send me a DM or whatever is convenient for you. And I look forward to your feedback. Also rating me on Apple podcasts or any other platform that you use. That really helps me and if you submit a review anywhere, let me know send me a message and if I have the chance to confine to review, I will make sure to read it out on my next episode. Thank you for your time and I'll talk to you again next week.