Issue 41  9th June 2023

WWDC Notes

Apple released 175 new videos at WWDC this year. That is an insane amount of content, and watching all of those videos would take you much longer than a week (if you assume an average duration of 30 minutes for a video, that would amount to almost 90 hours of content, and even if you tried binging this away around the clock, it would take you more than 3 and a half days...)

It should be obvious that this isn't sustainable. So what can you do? Short of using Google's Bard or ChatGPT, you can head over to WWDC Notes, and check out the notes and summaries that the community has put together. It's an excellent resource for getting a quick overview - and if you notice the summary for your favourite session is missing, you can just contribute one yourself.

wwdcnotes.com  

ailtonvivaz/SwiftRequest

Here is one of the very first Swift packages that make extensive use of Swift's new macro system to make an existing API easier to use. Ailton Vieira uses a smart combination of attached macros and property wrappers to enable you to write REST clients.

Here is how you'd define a simple service for fetching quotes:

@Service
class QuoteService {
    @GET<[Quote]>("quotes/random")
    private func getRandomQuotes(@QueryParam("author") authorSlug: String? = nil) {}

    @GET<Quote>("quotes/{id}")
    private func getQuote(@PathParam by id: String) {}
}

@Service and the REST verbs (like @GET in this example are attached macros, whereas @QueryParam is a regular property wrapper.

This is really exciting stuff, and it's going to be interesting to see all the other use cases people will come up with.

github.com  

An App Group roller coaster ride

App Groups allow multiple apps developed by the same team to share data. They also are one way to set up sharing authentication between multiple apps (or an app and its extensions) in Firebase Authentication.

They are notoriously difficult to set up. In this article, Daniel shares how he ran into an issue when sharing data between a keyboard extension and its main app. There are some interesting lessons that might help you debug issues when using App Groups in your own apps and extensions.

danielsaidi.com  

What’s new in Swift 5.9?

Swift 5.9 has a bunch of quality-of-life improvements (such as if and switch expressions) that will make it easier to write cleat and concise code. But there are also larger changes, like the addition of Swift macros. Paul walks us through them, explaining everything with a copious amount of code snippets.

hackingwithswift.com