Not Only Swift Weekly - Issue #2

Hello!

It’s September, and this means it’s an exciting time for those of us who are in the Apple ecosystem. I run xcodes update every day to find out if there’s a new (final?) beta of Xcode 13, and Swift’s new concurrency system seems to gain backward compatibility with previous OS versions, which is very exciting!

Speaking of which, the roadmap for Swift concurrency has a number of features that will have long-lasting implications on how we write software for distributed systems. Definitely worth reading the pitches to learn what’s coming up!

Firebase released some pretty cool features as well in the past couple of weeks, and - let me tell you - we’ve got even more things brewing that we can’t wait to share with you … pretty soon!

I hope you enjoy this second edition of Not Only Swift Weekly - if you do, please share it with a friend. And as always, feel free to share your feedback with me by replying to this email.

Thanks for reading!

Peter

The second part of my new series about SwiftUI’s List View is out! It covers both basics (how to display items from a dynamically changing collection) and more advanced topics - such as how to make your list items editable (a feature Apple added to SwiftUI just recently!).

So I promised you some behind-the-scenes looks at how I produce content. Here is a snapshot of a recording session for my Building SwiftUI Component video series:

In the top left corner, you can see the teleprompter I use for all my videos (Glide Gear TMP 100). It’s large enough to hold an iPad 11”, and I run Teleprompter Premium on both the iPad and my MacBook to keep my script in sync on both devices.

This video is currently in editing, so expect it to land soon.

It’s no secret that learning your IDE’s key bindings will make you more productive. Here is Cyril with a hidden gem in Xcode: Jump between line changes (Control + \):

For more keybinding goodness, check out this article with my favourite Xcode key bindings:

On this note, I ran a Twitter poll last week to hear about your favourite IDE for developing iOS apps. It’s no surprise that most of you prefer Xcode, but there were some interesting replies as well. Check out the results!

If you are a JavaScript developer, you will be pleased to hear that the Firebase team has reduced the size of the JavaScript SDK. For example, the JavaScript SDK for Firebase Auth now weighs in at 17.8 kB (down from 63.4 kB in the previous version). When I first heard those numbers, I thought “it’s just a few kB, why all the excitement?” - but you have to keep in mind we’re talking about web applications here. Every single byte you can save makes your site load faster, and that is indeed a pretty big deal.

My colleague David East has all the details about it:

I am super stoked to be speaking at SwiftLeeds (October 7th, in Leeds, UK), along some amazing folks such as Tim Condon, Josh Holtz, Antoine van der Lee, Donny Wals, Jordi Bruin, and Danijela Vrzan.

My talk will be about Firebase and SwiftUI, and I will cover setting up an architecture for data-driven (serverless) applications, syncing data across multiple devices with Cloud Firestore, using Combine and async/await with Firebase, and some other cool things we have been cooking up for iOS developers on the Firebase team, such as view modifiers for in-app messaging and analytics, as well as some property wrappers for Firestore.

Which topics would you like to hear about in my talk? Reply to this email, or reach out to me on Twitter!

We all have heard about the chip shortage, but what are the implications, and how did we get there in the first place?

This episode of Decoder goes behind the scenes and explains all of this. Super exciting insights into how foundries and fabs work, and the level of accuracy you need for the machines that are required to build the chips in our phones. Check it out, you won’t regret it.

Have you ever wondered about the lyrics in some songs? They didn’t make sense to you? You’re not alone! Check out Bec Hill’s hilarious flip chart videos to learn what those lyrics actually mean!