Tag: CloudKit

While we wait for next beta of visionOS SDK there are still a lot of interesting topics to get familiar with.

• Jordan Morgan covers WidgetKit and AppIntents – Create an Interactive Widget Using App Intents;
  
  
• How to create a custom reusable toolbar in SwiftUI by Natascha Fadeeva goes through some hints to build reusable views in SwiftUI;
  
  
• Marco Eidinger explains complicated uses of Xcode Cloud – Using Swift packages with authentication in Xcode Cloud;
  
  
• Sarah Reichelt goes through modern SwiftUI data flow – SwiftUI Data Flow 2023;
  
  
• And following with Migrating to Observable by Keith Harrison on migration to @Observable macro;
  
  
• Majid Jabrayilov covers formatting in Mastering Swift Foundation Formatter API. Custom Format Styles;
  
  
• Inspect Web Content on iOS 16.4+ by Marco Eidinger helps making web content inspectable;
  
  
• Leonardo Maia Pugliese explains animations in SwiftUI – Difference Between Implicit and Explicit Animations in SwiftUI;
  
  
• App Intents Spotlight integration using Shortcuts by Antoine van der Lee explains use of App Intents with Shortcuts;
  
  
• Embracing CloudKit by Stuart Wheelwrigh is a cycle of articles covering CloudKit integration.

And that a wrap for this week. Come back next Friday for another big pack of interesting reads.

WWDC23 week is over, all announcements are already made, Apple and developers are going through highlights of the conference.

Apple lists important sessions on spatial computing, developer tools, Swift, UI frameworks, design, graphics and games, ML, privacy and security, and other topics.

Apple also asks developers to take part in survey that could shape the future of conference.

macOS 14 Sonoma

Developers highlight FaceTime reactions, presenter mode for screen sharing and various of other features.

Widgets availability for macOS should help bringing more apps to Mac from iPhone and iPad.

Another area of interest is support for web apps.

tvOS 17

Apple TV is to support VPN apps with tvOS 17. This will put tvOS on par with other Apple platforms.

Also, tvOS will improve sound for dialogs to make voice more audible. This feature requires second generation HomePod (original HomePod and HomePod mini are not supported) and Apple TV 4K.

iOS/iPadOS 17

DockKit SDK and Standby mode bring interesting capabilities for apps and also could hint on more standalone home devices.

Autocorrect in standard keyboard is expected to become much better with iOS 17.

iCloud

iCloud Drive now could be switched off and third-party apps will still be able to sync via iCloud.

Vision Pro

Analysts expect that more affordable version of Vision Pro will be released in 2025.

M2 Ultra

Benchmarks for M2 Ultra show significant improvements over M1 Ultra chips. New chip is 20% faster than previous generation.

Apple Developer:

• WWDC23 highlights
• WWDC23 resources and survey

References:

• macOS Sonoma Tidbits: New FaceTime UI, Safari Profiles, Screen Sharing Improvements, and More
• macOS 14 feature roundup: Presenter Overlay, Reactions, widgets, more
• Apple TV to Support VPN Apps on tvOS 17
• WWDC 2023: Here’s everything Apple announced this week
• iOS 17 has new DockKit API to integrate camera apps with motorized iPhone stands
• Top Five iOS 17 Features
• tvOS 17 helps you hear what people are saying in shows, when using HomePods as speakers
• CloudKit and the iCloud Drive Switch
• Apple still aiming to release a more affordable version of Vision Pro by the end of 2025
• M2 Ultra Chip Benchmark Results Reveal Impressive Performance Gains

Just recently we announced Canopy, and now there is another library to sync data over CloudKit.

CloudSyncSession is a Swift library that builds on top of the CloudKit framework to make it easier to write sync-enabled, offline-capable apps.

CloudKitSession

In case of CloudSyncSession data is not persisted locally by the library. Overall, design principles are described in documentation:

1. Persistence-free. Data is not persisted to disk.
2. Testable. Code is structured in a way to maximize how much behavior can be tested.
3. Modular. To the extent that it makes sense, different behaviors are handled separately by different components.
4. Event-based. State is predictable, as it is updated based on the series of events that have previously occurred.
5. Resilient. Recoverable errors are gracefully handled using retries and backoffs. Non-recoverable errors halt further execution until the app signals that work should be resumed.
6. Inspectable. The current state of the session can be evaluated for troubleshooting and diagnostics.
7. Focused. This project aims to solve a particular use case and do it well.

GitHub: CloudSyncSession

Reference: CloudSyncSession

Tact developers released library to work with CloudKit as open source – Canopy.

Canopy helps you write better, more testable CloudKit apps. It isolates the CloudKit dependency so you can write fast and reliable tests for your CloudKit-related features, and implements standard CloudKit-related behaviors.

GitHub: Canopy (documentation)

Reference: CloudKit code from Tact is now available as Canopy open-source library

Weekend is coming with several great reads this time. Let's dive in!

• Point-Free Pointers finish their SwiftUI cycle – Modern SwiftUI: Parent-child communication, Modern SwiftUI: Identified arrays, Modern SwiftUI: State-driven navigation, Modern SwiftUI: Dependencies, Modern SwiftUI: Testing;
  
  
• Jaanus Kase covers aspects of iCloud encryption in CloudKit – What Advanced Data Protection for iCloud means for Tact and other apps that use CloudKit;
  
  
• David Smith is continuing his design series – DND 18: Creating Custom SF Symbols and DND 19: Designing for Smaller Dynamic Type Sizes;
  
  
• SwiftUI View's internals covered by Chris Eidhof – Variadic Views;
  
  
• Natalia Panferova covers ShareLink customizations in SwiftUI – Customize ShareLink appearance with view modifiers;
  
  
• Krzysztof Zabłocki continues his article on widget architecture – Widget Architecture - Part 2;
  
  
• A Less Evil NotificationCenter? by Jordan Morgan proposes an approach on better usage of NotificationCenter in SwiftUI;
  
  
• Natascha Fadeeva provides good guide on keychain – Developer guide on keychain for iOS;
  
  
• How To Speed Up Swift By Ordering Conformances by Noah Martin explains how Swift protocol conformances impact app launch time;
  
  
• Majid Jabrayilov continues his series on charts – Mastering charts in SwiftUI. Custom Marks.;
  
  
• Swift Package String Localization by Keith Harrison guides through details of providing localized resources in Swift packages;
  
  
• Leonardo Maia Pugliese explains how to deal with nested ObservableObject's in SwiftUI – The Nested Observables Problem in SwiftUI;
  
  
• Iterating over web socket messages with async / await in Swift by Donny Wals guides through structured concurrency usage with sockets;
  
  
• Two great articles by Marco Eidinger: minimizing device backup size – Prevent your app's files from being included in iCloud Backup and money-saving advice for GitHub Actions – Save money when using GitHub Actions for iOS CI/CD;
  
  
• New Scanning and Text Capabilities with VisionKit by Warren Burton covers on-device image recognition tools in VisionKit framework;
  
  
• Antoine van der Lee advices on how to simplify testing of push notifications – Testing push notifications on the iOS simulator;
  
  
• And finishing with two articles by Douglas Hill – NSPredicate: an old API with new surprises and Using JavaScript in a Swift app.

This is a lot for a weekend, so choose wisely. :)

iCloud was introduced many years ago, however, developers still see issues with syncing data in their apps using Core Data.

NetNewsWire, Overcast developers (as well as others) share their thoughts in couple of blog posts.

Most developers report long syncing time and overall unreliability of the service. Moreover, according to internal app statistics, it sees that about 10% of users do not have iCloud meaning that they did not entered their Apple ID in system settings.

Overall recommendation to developers who plan to use iCloud is to have an alternative by either having their own sync solutions (self-hosted or using some public cloud offering), or rely on third-party as data storage (NetNewsWire allows to use multiple RSS aggregators in addition to iCloud).

References:

• iCloud Syncing Limitations & Solutions
• Overcast Keeping Its Servers

Jordan Morgan has negotiated open-sourcing of his Spend Stack app. Source code of this app might be used for multiple features – CloudKit integration, animations and transitions.

There are several restrictions on reusing Spend Stack source code and naming, check the blog post for possible usages.

Code is mostly Objective-C, however, could be still relevant.

GitHub: Spend-Stack-Public

Reference: Spend Stack is Now Open Source

It is officially winter and here is new great pack of good articles for all Apple developers.

• Interesting observation by Christian Tietze on mutating functions that do not actually mutate the structure – Mutating Struct and State Observers: How the Latter Will Be Notified Even for 'No-Ops';
  
  
• Good deep dive into SwiftUI performance – SwiftUI is convenient, but slow by Alin Panaitiu;
  
  
• Series of articles on app design by David Smith – Design Notes Diary #1, Design Notes Diary #2, Design Notes Diary #3 and Design Notes Diary #4;
  
  
• Animated Background in SwiftUI by Leonardo Maia Pugliese is a great example of how to use animations to make apps more appealing;
  
  
• Majid Jabrayilov continues his series of articles on SwiftUI layout system – Building custom layout in SwiftUI. Caching.;
  
  
• Provide custom size for UIViews wrapped in UIViewRepresentable by Natalia Panferova helps improving usage of UIKit views in SwiftUI environment;
  
  
• Ole Begemann shares one caveat on view clipping in SwiftUI – clipped() doesn’t affect hit testing;
  
  
• Great tutorial on Shortcuts in iOS by Jordan Morgan – Create a Basic Shortcut using App Intents;
  
  
• Sheets in SwiftUI explained with code examples by Antoine van der Lee gives examples of sheet view presentations in SwiftUI;
  
  
• If you want to build your own build automation scripts, Developer guide on the App Store Connect API by Natascha Fadeeva will be a good start;
  
  
• CloudKit Console Act As iCloud Account by Keith Harrison provides hints on how to work with CloudKit data using specific account in CloudKit Console;
  
  
• Couple of interesting reads by Sarun W. – How to fix "The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time" error and What is Swift If Case.

Have a great first winter weekend and see you soon!

Apple prevented transfer of the applications between developers if the application used iCloud containers or key-value storage. Well, not anymore.

Now Apple allows this kind of application transfer. This provides an opportunities to indie developers to sell their apps to other developers even if they were using iCloud.

Apple Developer: App Store Connect Update

App Store Connect Help: App transfer overview

Here are some good reads for upcoming weekend.

• SwiftUI Testing With ViewInspector for iOS by Warren Burton dives into SwiftUI testing topics;
  
  
• And view debugging is continued by Leonardo Maia Pugliese in Introduction to Xcode Frame Debug - A Sherlock Holmes Adventure;
  
  
• Aspect Ratios in SwiftUI by Chris Eidhof explains how aspect ratio works in SwiftUI views;
  
  
• Jesse Squires covers build automation techniques in Using fastlane to increment version numbers in xcconfig files;
  
  
• Majid Jabrayilov continues his CloudKit series with Zone sharing in CloudKit;
  
  
• Antoine van der Lee covers error display in Error alert presenting in SwiftUI simplified;
  
  
• Creating a Custom App Launch Experience in SwiftUI with Deep Linking by Gianluca Orpello goes beyond standard launch screen;
  
  
• Sarun W. deals with text in How to force two lines of Text in SwiftUI;
  
  
• And good long read on how iMessage blastdoor was hacked – FORCEDENTRY: Sandbox Escape.

And that's it for today. Have a nice weekend!