My highlights of WWDC 2024 as an iOS developer 🍎
Hi 👋
What a week it’s been!
Thanks to Photoroom I had the privileged to attend WWDC and watch the Keynote and Platform State of the Union on-site at Apple Park!
And as you can imagine, all the announcements have given me a ton of ideas for new content that I plan to create over the coming weeks 🍿
However, before we get into that, how about I share a recap of the developer-related announcements that particularly caught my eye?
But first, I have a big thank you for the sponsor of this email: Runway
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Let’s start with the big announcements: everything that’s related to Apple Intelligence 🧠
I’m really a big fan of how Apple has decided to integrate all the features around text re-rewriting:
The feature seems to have been implemented in such a way that any native text input control will benefit from it.
I personally think it’s great for two reasons:
it makes it widely available, many apps will benefit from it for free
it standardizes the interaction, which will make it feel less daunting
We’ve all noticed that many apps, like Notion for example, have already rolled out their own AI text-rewriting capabilities.
But as a user, I feel that when each app rolls out its own UX and model, it will be impossible to keep track of the subtleties of each of them.
And that’s quite a problem for something as personal as your writing style!
So I’m really happy to see this feature becoming available across the whole app ecosystem.
Talking of text-related features, there’s another one that might have gotten your users quite excited: Genmojis!
If you plan to support this feature, make sure to note that it does seem to require an explicit opt-in on the developer’s end:
The reason behind this is that, whereas regular emojis are just text characters under-the-hood, genmojis are custom images that are stored in an AttributedString.
So if you want to support them in your app, you will need to make sure that you can indeed properly handle them in all your data flows.
Now let’s move on to another big feature: Predictive Code Completion.
From the looks of it, this feature is basically Xcode’s version of GitHub’s CoPilot:
I particularly like the example above: here predictive code completion is able to suggest a basic implementation of the body of a View.
And once this basic implementation has been generated, the developer is then free to enrich it with any additional logic or styling 👌
(as a content creator, I’m quite looking forward to this feature, because I hope that it will allow me to skip many tedious tasks during livestreams!)
By the way, if you want to try to this feature, you will of course need Xcode 16 beta, but also macOS Sequoia beta, along with an Apple Silicon Mac with at least 16GB of RAM.
But Predictive Code Completion is not the only AI feature coming to Xcode: we’ve also been introduced to Swift Assist, Xcode’s very own ChatGPT 🤖
As you can see, it works in quite a similar way to ChatGPT: you describe what you want in a prompt (visible at the bottom left of the screenshot)…
…and Swift Assist automatically updates your code with the changes.
The workflow feels very similar to ChatGPT, except that you don’t need to constantly copy code back-and-forth 😌
Once again, I’m really looking forward to installing the beta of macOS Sequoia so that I can experiment more with this feature!
And to finish, I wanted to say a few words about the new Swift Testing framework.
One feature particularly caught my attention: the ability to provide several set of arguments, each of them resulting in a distinct execution of the test:
When you take into account that the new AI code generation features might help us automate writing these set of test arguments, I see a lot of potential for dramatically increasing the quality and coverage of our tests!
And that’s it: these were my top highlights of what’s been announced at WWDC 2024!
But if you have a bit more time and you want to discover even more newly announced feature, you can check out the video I released last week:
That’s all for this email, thanks for reading it!
If you’ve enjoyed it, feel free to forward it
to your friends and colleagues 🙌
I wish you an amazing week!
❤️
