iOS Newsletter
Hi folks,
This week we’re really pleased to announce our very first open-source project. You can read more about it in the Utils section below, but one can say that we’re really excited about it!
Enjoy this week’s mixture!
Apple
New features for APNs token authentication are now available
In case you missed the developer notifications - Apple has updated their Push Notification service certificates. As a result, you can now maintain team-scoped and topic-specific keys, and leverage the upgraded security. Apple claims that
Your existing keys will continue to work for all push topics and environments. At this time, you don’t have to update your keys unless you want to take advantage of the new capabilities.
Great news!
New requirement for apps on the App Store in the European Union
Another thing that may have gone under your radar is the requirement to provide a trader status for your account as part of the Digital Services Act compliance. Starting from February 18, all the companies that did not have that trader status populated will have their apps removed from the App Store. The somewhat good piece of news is that this action is revertible - as soon as you populate your trader status in the App Store, you can re-enable the apps. More info on the DSA status can be found here
Swift
Introducing gRPC Swift 2
In a week of announcements the gRPC implementation for Swift got updated to version 2. gRPC is a modern, high-performance framework for building service APIs, enabling efficient communication between systems over a network. Version 2 is a major overhaul of the codebase, utilizing the modern-day Swift capabilities like structured concurrency and has full support for building services and clients on Linux and Apple platforms.
UI/UX
Creating CarPlay apps within a SwiftUI app lifecycle
As we are waiting for Apple to release CarPlay 2 we have to use the previous version of the framework. And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, integrating it with our apps can be a little on the tricky side. This article guides us through the process of adopting CarPlay in a SwiftUI app.
Enabling Interaction with Table View in SwiftUI
We know that SwiftUI ships with a view to render information as a table. What we didn’t know was how powerful it can become once you wire some interactions. This article was an eye-opener to us.
What to Test (and What Not to Test) in SwiftUI
Here’s an interesting point of view on UI testing. As UI is something that changes a lot, testing it can be tricky. However, testing that the interactions are working as expected is what really matters, as this article points out.
RealityKit Basics: update closure
The update closure of SwiftUI’s RealityView is one of the slightly confusing things in RealityKit. It’s a way to “wire” the view with the outside world. Instead of updating when the view changes, it’s meant to feed SwiftUI @State updates into the RealityView’s content. This article explains it with a simple example.
Utils
SnappTheming
SnappTheming is a library that originated from one of our projects. We saw a potential and we dedicated some time to move it to a separate Swift package and add more features. We also thought that it would be nice to expand its application to other platforms. So, we built an example app that showcases its use on all of Apple’s platforms. We documented it and made an interactive tutorial to help you get started. We’re really excited about it and we hope you’ll find it useful.