Tag: Open source

Riley Testut shares a story behind AltStore PAL launching in EU. Alternative iOS marketplace offers free and paid apps. Third-party submissions are about to open.

Notably, AltStore PAL is an open-source project, so developers could look into implementation details, including iOS app and server components.

AltStore PAL

GitHub: AltStore

Riley Testut: Introducing AltStore PAL

References:

• AltStore PAL Alternative App Marketplace Launches on iPhone in EU
• First third party App Store in the EU is live
• AltStore PAL Launches in the EU
• AltStore Is Now Available in the EU

Apple publishes MLX – an array framework for machine learning on Apple silicon, brought to you by Apple machine learning research.

Some key features of MLX include:

• Familiar APIs: MLX has a Python API that closely follows NumPy. MLX also has a fully featured C++ API, which closely mirrors the Python API. MLX has higher-level packages like mlx.nn and mlx.optimizers with APIs that closely follow PyTorch to simplify building more complex models.
• Composable function transformations: MLX has composable function transformations for automatic differentiation, automatic vectorization, and computation graph optimization.
• Lazy computation: Computations in MLX are lazy. Arrays are only materialized when needed.
• Dynamic graph construction: Computation graphs in MLX are built dynamically. Changing the shapes of function arguments does not trigger slow compilations, and debugging is simple and intuitive.
• Multi-device: Operations can run on any of the supported devices (currently, the CPU and GPU).
• Unified memory: A notable difference from MLX and other frameworks is the unified memory model. Arrays in MLX live in shared memory. Operations on MLX arrays can be performed on any of the supported device types without moving data.

MLX

Framework is available under MIT license and comes with examples on various machine learning tasks.

GitHub: mlx

Paul Hudson announced Inferno – open-source Metal shader library. Library provides shader source code, as well as sample apps for iOS and macOS.

Together with the open-source project, several videos are published:

• Introducing Inferno: Metal shaders for SwiftUI
• SwiftUI + Metal – Create special effects by building your own shaders

Reference: Introducing Inferno: Metal shaders for SwiftUI

GitHub: Inferno

It's rainy here in California (which is unusual...) and our weekend is perfect to spend some time reading technical articles. Let's go.

• Paul Hudson makes great review of Swift 5.8 new features – What's new in Swift 5.8;
  
  
• Pimp My DocC Documentation by Marco Eidinger is a nice review of DocC customizations available in Swift 5.8;
  
  
• Quick tip by Natascha Fadeeva on simplifying test for nil in tests – Quick tip on how to unit test Swift optionals with XCTUnwrap;
  
  
• SwiftUI Tables Quick Guide by Keith Harrison covers work with tables in SwiftUI by macOS;
  
  
• Equatable in Swift could be implemented manually or synthesized automatically, go into details with article by Antoine van der Lee – Equatable conformance in Swift explained with code examples;
  
  
• Slightly less technical article, but still very important for engineers – How to avoid burnout as a software engineer? by Krzysztof Zabłocki;
  
  
• SwiftUI app lifecycle does not come with launch storyboard, how to deal with that – How to add Launch Screen in SwiftUI by Sarun W.;
  
  
• Sarah Reichelt shares open source project for a real life – To-Day;
  
  
• Supporting multiple iOS versions is hard, Leonardo Maia Pugliese proves that – How to Change the Background Color of Navigation Bars in all iOS versions?;
  
  
• Non-nominal types workaround for domain modeling by Alejandro Martinez is great exploratory article on working with types in Swift.

And one more thing. Apple Treats podcast is back with new episode. Our guest is Natalia Panferova whose articles you've already read.

Swift team announces future plans on Foundation framework.

Goal of the team now is use Swift across the framework, split it into simple separate packages and unify implementations to avoid and cross-platform issues.

This would result in more predictable app behavior, more cross-platform libraries and easier support of those.

Swift Blog: The Future of Foundation

Apple updates its Open Source website. New site makes it easier to navigate on Apple's and community open source projects.

Site also contains Releases section which provides access to open source parts of Apple operating systems and tools.

Apple: Open Source at Apple

Reference:

Apple promised to open source DocC. And now Swift team announces that documentation compiler becomes Swift open source project.

Developers now could contribute to DocC and also request new features via Swift JIRA.

Project depends on several related projects:

• SymbolKit is a Swift package containing the specification and reference model for the Symbol Graph File Format.
• Swift Markdown is a Swift package for parsing, building, editing, and analyzing Markdown documents. It includes support for the Block Directive elements that Swift-DocC's tutorial files rely on.
• Swift-DocC-Render is a web application that understands and renders Swift-DocC's render JSON format.