Issue 40

Comment

I am writing this intro on my way back from Swift Heroes 2023 in Turin. This is the second time I've been at this conference, and I really enjoyed the experience.

The conference is organised very professionally, and Lucy, Stefano, and Mario did a fantastic job at MCing this two-day, two-track conference. The speaker lineup was really great, too - for a glimpse of the talks, check out this thread. A big shoutout to the program committee who selected the talks from all the submissions!

All of the talks I attended had great content, and were brilliantly delivered by speakers who clearly knew their stuff. Two talks really stood out to me:

A Newbie's Guide to The Composable Architecture (please excuse the typo on the tweet) by Shai Mishali (who live-coded an entire Pomodoro app!)
Elevated Swift, by Soroush Khanlou, who implemented an elevator simulator in Swift

I've been told that the recordings of the videos will be on YouTube in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, you can check out last year's videos on the Swift Heroes 2022 playlist

On top of all this, Turin is a wonderful, very beautiful city, worth visiting in its on right, and I thoroughly enjoyed the nice weather after the long and gray winter in Hamburg.

Now, on to the next conference(s): Appdevcon in Amsterdam, plSwift in Warsaw, and I/O Connect in Amsterdam. If you spot me, say hi!

Firebase

Supercharge your mobile apps with Cloud Functions for Firebase

Zamzam and I will run a workshop to show you how to Supercharge Your Mobile Apps With Cloud Functions For Firebase at Appdevcon 2023 in Amsterdam - literally next week!

If you're attending the conference and aren't sure which workshop to take part in, here are some things that might convince you to come to our workshop:

You will learn how to call Cloud Functions from your mobile apps, via HTTP, time-based, and using triggers (e.g. when a new user signs up or a Firestore document was added / changed)
This will be a hands-on workshop: you will actually build a working application.
We've created DocC interactive tutorials for each of the concepts we're going to teach you. This means you will be able to walk through the tutorials at your own pace at the workshop, and later when you're back home.
We've built sample apps for iOS and Android, so no matter if you're an iOS or Android developer, we've got you covered
The sample app is a Read It Later app, and we will show you how to implement a couple of interesting use cases using Cloud Functions
We will introduce each of the concepts we teach you with a few slides.
In addition to Zamzam and me, we will have Emad and Lahiru (who works on the Firebase Admin SDKs) join us as TAs, so you should get all your questions answered
You will some really cool new features that we will be launching next week at Google I/O - the workshop literally is on the day after the Google I/O keynote.

I am super excited about this workshop, and I hope to see you there!

Computer History

I Spent $40,000 to Unbox a Sealed Original iPhone!

Would you spend $40.000 for a sealed original iPhone? Well - MKBHD did, so you don't have to! It's a fascinating video, really worth watching.

Xerox Parc - Office Alto Commercial

This short commercial from the early 1970s introduces Xerox' vision for the office of the future. It's amazing to see how much further we've come since then: nowadays, everyone carries a supercomputer in their pockets, and we can directly connect with people around the globe with a tap on the screen.

From a 2023 perspective, the most hilarious moment of the video is when the main character says "I'm going to need a couple of copies [of this email]", and seconds later someone hands them a stack of printed copies. Obviously, for Xerox as a manufacturer of photocopiers, it was pretty important to reassure themselves "the office of the future might have email, but we're still going to sell photocopiers and printers"...

Thanks to Amir for digging this out!

SwiftUI

Using Swift Reflection

In Using Swift Reflection, Keith Harrison goes over a couple of use cases for Swift Reflection using Mirror.

ViewInspector is another great example for using Mirror - it provides runtime introspection and unit testing of SwiftUI views.

On Apple’s Guidance for StateObject Initialization

Apple recently updated their documentation to discuss how to initialise StateObjects inside our SwiftUI views (Luca Bernardi wrote about this here).

Jordan dives into this topic to discuss how it works and the sharp edges you need to be aware of.

Tools

Undocumented Features in Keynote

If you're happy to use undocumented features, check out this tweet - it shows how you can use the following command to enable custom timing functions for animations:

defaults write http://com.apple.iWork.Keynote EnableCustomAccelerationCurves -bool TRUE

This Mastodon thread has a lot more Keynote preference keys you can play around with.

Security

The beginning of the end of the password

You can now use passkeys on your Google Accounts, enabling you to eliminate passwords. The Google Security Blog has more details about how they work, and if you really want to dig deeper, I highly recommend the WWDC22 Meet passkeys session.

Podcasts

Hard Fork Presents: The Most Amazing – And Dangerous – Technology In the World

Chips are everywhere - they power the phone or computer you're reading this newsletter on, but they also enable everyday household devices, cars, military equipment, and artificial intelligence.

The semiconductor supply chain is highly concentrated, and just a few companies control the production of the most advanced chips. This concentration of power could have serious implications for the global economy and security.

In this "Hard Fork presents" episode, Ezra Klein and Chris Miller talk about all of this in detail. Highly recommended!