When WWDC went virtual in 2020 and Apple replaced the in-person labs with virtual ones run over WebEx, the sound of everyone wishing that virtual labs and one-to-one sessions could become a year-round feature of the Apple developer programme was deafening.

It looks like Apple may be taking a step towards making that wish come true with their announcement of a new service this week, Ask Apple.

The service sounds very much like the virtual WWDC labs we’ve had for the few years, but … year-round? Isn’t that exactly what we wished for? 🎉

It seems like it! The only question is how often and for how long these will run. Apple has said that this service will run “for the first time” between the 17th and 21st of October (yes, that’s this Monday), which certainly implies that this isn’t a one-off, but they haven’t given any idea how regularly they might repeat. We should celebrate every time developers can get better access to help and guidance, though, even if this event only runs a few times a year.

Like at WWDC, there will be Slack Q&A labs covering specific technologies such as Augmented Reality, Accessibility, and Design. There are also Office Hours, a much more open-ended and real-time conversation about anything you’d like to cover, from code-level problems to App Review issues.

One improvement to the labs run via Slack during WWDC that I’d love to see is for Apple to capture and summarise the content from the Q&A sessions. The amount of information from these sessions during WWDC was fantastic, but it was left to the community to summarise and archive that valuable knowledge. If Apple does tackle this improvement, I’m sure everyone would be happy to have it labelled with wording similar to “this is an archive of a Q&A rather than word perfect and peer-reviewed documentation”.

Registration is already open, and I’d expect demand to be high, so don’t delay.

Dave Verwer

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instabug.com

Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile Is in Beta

I didn’t know that the timing of a KMM beta release was imminent, but it’s timed well, given the recent mini-survey results. Ekaterina Petrova is here to announce the release and fill us with some good resources to get started.

I’ve received more emails over the last couple of weeks from people who have tried it. By far, the biggest sticking point is that the interface between Kotlin and Swift goes via Objective-C, meaning you lose many of Swift’s language features when interfacing between languages. There’s always a balance, though! For some apps and teams, having some cross-platform code will be more than worth that trade-off. For others, it won’t be.

jetbrains.com

Codeface on the Mac App Store

Here’s a fun, free code visualisation tool from Sebastian Fichtner that shows promise, even if the edges might be slightly rough right now. Once the LSP Server is up and running (downloaded separately), it shows you a fun code dependency visualisation inside either an Xcode project or a Swift package. I’ll be keeping an eye on where this goes.

apple.com

Introducing ReMafoX

This new localisation tool from Cihat Gündüz looks great. As with any tool that tries to integrate with Xcode, setup is a little long-winded and awkward, but once configured, it’s a breeze to add or edit localisations from directly inside your source. The workflow focuses on Xcode, making it an excellent fit for solo developers or small, developer-heavy teams. If that’s you, there’s a free tier/trial, so check it out!

fline.dev

Bidirectional collection view with orthogonalScrollingBehavior

I’ll let Artur Gruchała introduce his latest post:

Before iOS 13, if you wanted to have a vertical collection view with horizontally scrolling sections it required embedding a scroll view inside the collection view cell, passing the model around, handling touch events, a lot of delegation, and complicated logic.

No matter what you think about the usability of this type of screen layout, there’s no question that it’s popular and that it used to be a bit of a pain to create! Artur takes us through using orthogonalScrollingBehavior. It has been around for a few years, but I don’t hear people talk about it much.

arturgruchala.com

Developer guide on the iOS file system

How hard do you think about where a file should go before you start writing to disk in your apps? What’s the difference between saving something to Application Support, Caches, or tmp? Natascha Fadeeva has all the answers!

tanaschita.com

Where View.task gets its main-actor isolation from

Here’s Ole Begemann with an interesting bit of background about the context for using task.

oleb.net

Women Who Code Mobile Summit 2022

I missed this when Women who Code first published these videos from their Mobile Summit at the end of July. There are some great talks here covering Android, and cross-platform tech, in addition to the Swift and iOS-specific talks you'll be expecting. There are some great presentations here.

youtube.com

iOS SDK Developer @ Stream – Do you want to work on an open-source chat SDK used by hundreds of high-profile companies and startups that impact billions of users? If you are a product-minded engineer and care about software quality, apply on the link below. – Remote (within European timezones) or on-site (Netherlands)

Freelance Interview Engineer @ Karat – We're dedicated to improving access in tech. If you are too, join us as a Karat Interview Engineer. As such, you'll conduct technical interviews of developers like you on behalf of our hiring clients (including Duolingo, Indeed, and more) using the Karat Platform and its data-tested questions. – Remote (within US timezones)

Senior iOS Engineer @ DuckDuckGo – Our app is now downloaded more than 50M times a year, and our private search engine packaged with it has become the #2 search engine on mobile in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. Oh, and we've been profitable since 2014 with revenue currently exceeding $100 million a year! – Remote (Anywhere)

Mac & iOS Software Engineer @ Flexibits Inc. – We make Fantastical and Cardhop, award-winning calendar and contacts apps for Mac and iOS. We were honored to win Apple's Mac App of the Year in 2020 and we're looking to make our apps even better! Our team is a 18 person, fully-remote company spread across the US and Europe. – Remote (within US or European timezones)

Senior iOS Engineer @ Sendwave – We currently have a 4.6-star rating on Trustpilot — people put their faith in us to deliver their money quickly, securely, and affordably. And we’re pretty darn proud of that. – Remote (within US or European timezones)

I usually write a few words here asking if you could let your hiring manager know they can post their job for free over at iOS Dev Jobs. Well, I’m doing something different this week.

I’d really appreciate it if you could let whoever handles hiring for your company know that due to the sad news from Sketch this week, there are a whole load of very talented people who just became available for work. Wouldn’t it be great if you could pass on a spreadsheet with names, job titles, contact details, and more to them? It’ll only take you a minute. What an easy way to get an amazing new co-worker 👍

No one ever asks Photos.app if it wants to detect faces or outline portraits.