iOS and Mac Dev Delight #1

By Julius — December 5, 2021

Dear Readers,

the year is almost over and what a year it was. While the world is still struggling with the global pandemic we decided to focus on the good things in this last issue for the year.

A lot of exciting things happened in the iOS and macOS world. Apple released new MacBooks featuring M1 processors with unmatched performance and iOS devices got nice upgrades too.

Besides hardware, the software side got many great additions: Testflight is now available on macOS, Playground 4 allows you to upload your apps to AppStore Connect, StoreKit 2 makes InApp-Purchases and subscriptions so much easier. Then there is TextKit 2, lazy loading layouts in SwiftUI, and Xcode Cloud. Additionally Swift 5.5 gained concurrency based on the actor model.

This year was treats all around for us iOS and macOS developers. So many new possibilities and so much fun to discover them and play around!

Weekly Highlights

xcinfo – install and safely remove multiple versions of Xcode, all at once!

Swift concurrency explained by John Sundell, a good read for the upcoming quiet days

Playgrounds 4 allows uploading apps to the AppStore

Ambiguous PNG Packer by David Buchanan creates PNG that look different on Apple systems

Swift Game Engine with Metal code-along by Rick Twohy, watch if you want to learn something new over the holidays!

That's it already for this week. We hope we gave you some material to enjoy, stay healthy and see you next year.

Happy holidays!

Your Coding Friends,
Anna, Gabriel, and Julius