Category: Frameworks

Apple highlights Live Activities to developers. These questions include user experience, technical challenges, implementation details.

Apple Developer: 10 questions with the Live Activities team

Swift team announced availability of swift-certificates and swift-asn1 projects. These projects target operations with X509 certificates (which are commonly used in TSL connections) and ASN.1 data type definition language.

Swift ASN.1 provides routines for DER serialization and deserialization.

Swift Certificates provides routines for X509 parsing, chain building, validation and OCSP resolution.

GitHub:

• swift-certificates
• swift-asn1

Swift team: Introducing Swift Certificates and Swift ASN.1

Point-Free Pointers started working Composable Architecture (opinionated approach on SwiftUI application development) quite a long time ago. And now they're preparing the first release of the architecture.

Library is free to use and distributed under MIT license.

GitHub: swift-composable-architecture (discussion)

Reference: Composable Architecture 1.0 Preview

While RevenueCat provides SDK for using its service, some of its components could be used by apps which do not use the service.

Receipt validation API will allow to parse receipt file and gather all necessary information to get list of approved purchases and also verify overall validity of the receipt.

GitHub: purchases-ios

Reference: Introducing ReceiptParser for Apple Platforms

DynamicCow is an app that allows to simulate Dynamic Island on any iPhone. And while this might be just a fun project, it might simplify development testing, and also could provide some insights on how to use Dynamic Island API better.

GitHub: DynamicCow

Referfence: Third-party app brings Dynamic Island to any iPhone, but is it just a party trick?

Google is ramping up the development of the Fuchsia OS. While it remains the primary author of Fuchsia, it is now opening up more parts of the OS's development to the public. Interested developers can take a peek at the open source project's bug tracker, for example, and can even submit patches.

Google also made public the project's roadmap to prove that it isn't simply a skunkworks endeavor. Interestingly, a lot of it involves a "version 2" of the operating system's major components, indicating that the current state of the project is far from the form that Google has envisioned for it.

We can also expect Fuchsia on Nest speakers to Fuchsia, with new models hinted for 2023. Everything shows that Fuchsia can start its popularity soon.

Okta has confirmed that it’s responding to another major security incident after a hacker accessed its source code following a breach of its GitHub repositories.

More:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/oktas-source-code-stolen-after-github-repositories-hacked/

Spotify is now working on Apple Health integration in their app to improve playlist quality. Spotify's approach is find songs that motivate users and improve their fitness results.

Using workout and health data might help improving communication with users and adjust features if app could affect user's workout performance or health in general (like, sleep, heart rate and so on).

Reference: Spotify working on HealthKit integration to provide workout playlists based on user health data

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

One of the problems with SwiftUI is that new APIs are bound to specific OS release and you can't use those on previous releases. And while we all want users to be on latest OS release, usually that is not the case.

Here backport libraries come into play.

Two libraries to improve SwiftUI new features adoption:

• SwiftUIBackports – ports many of SwiftUI components to previous OS releases;
• NavigationBackport – focuses on new SwiftUI navigation components.

Having these libraries might help migrating app to newer SwiftUI APIs while maintaining support for previous OS releases.