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Issue 68
Jun 22, 2021

What are your favorite WWDC sessions to watch? How many did you end up actually watching?

I'm currently at 32 sessions watched, and I still have many sessions on my watchlist. However, I feel I'm able to give you my current recommended list of talks with a little reasoning, so you can decide to at least watch those sessions if you're short on time.

1. Demystify SwiftUI
This session taught me a lot about the lifetime of SwiftUI views and made me realize I'm actually doing quite some things wrong in my current apps built with SwiftUI. A must-watch to understand better how SwiftUI works under the hood.

2. Meet async/await in Swift
Unfortunately, as of now, we can't use async/await on iOS 14 and lower. However, the future of app development is definitely going to involve using this new concurrency API, so you better be prepared.

3. What's new in Foundation
You might want to call this one "Meet AttributedString in Swift". Still, a must-watch as this new value type (yes, that's right!) is a very welcome addition.

4. Make blazing-fast lists and collection views
Although I wish it were different, many of our current apps are still using UIKit. It's also not a given to say your apps are performant by default now that we have super fast devices. This talk will give you great tips on how you can make blazing fast lists and collection views.

5. ARC in Swift: Basics and beyond
Do you actually know what ARC means? How life before ARC used to be? Or maybe you're struggling quite a bit with weak self and unowned self. Either way, this talk was an eye-opener for me as it explains ARC in Swift very well.

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That's it, my top 5 sessions I would highly recommend watching. If this is not enough, keep on reading as this week's SwiftLee Weekly will bring you much more interesting articles and recommendations.

Enjoy!

THIS WEEK'S BLOG POST
New in Xcode 13 is the ability to run tests repeatedly. This is a great addition to the tools I often use when dealing with flaky tests, which gave me reasons enough to share with you my best practices for those cases in which you're about to say: "Merging in as tests succeed locally."

TWEET OF THE WEEK
That’s right; I’m linking to a tweet explaining how you can resize the project navigator in Xcode. Shouldn’t this just work? Yeah, it should! But if you’ve ever experienced it not working, you’re happy to take a look at this tweet by Marius Constantinescu.

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CURATED FROM THE COMMUNITY

CODE
I’m definitely going to favorite this article by Lee Kah Seng once I’m back on improving our reloading logic. Using the ID is smart and the default already when using Diffable Data Sources with Core Data. The reconfigure instead of reloading method will increase performance and is a very welcome addition to the UIKit API.
One of those articles you might find useful soon. I can totally see myself running into issues using images from a package, and Eneko Alonso explains how to solve this for iOS and macOS.
Personally, one of my favorite new features in Xcode. I’ve been running into this so many times, and I can’t imagine how much my productivity will improve. Keith Harrison explains what Xcode Column breakpoints are and likely shows you why I think these are a great addition to Xcode.

WWDC
Only the "behind the scenes" tweets in the very end were reason enough for me to link to this article by Paul Hudson. It also comes with a top 10 recommend WWDC sessions that might give you that little direction you need when your time is valuable. While we're at recommended sessions, you might also like these recommendations.
I found an archive online before, showing an overview of almost all questions asked during the WWDC Digital Lounge. However, I quickly realized it added a lot of noise while I was pretty sure there were valuable answers given. So, The SwiftUI Lab decided to help us out here with the SwiftUI questions asked and brings it in a nice, organized overview.
If you’re using Storyboards (or if you’re not), you’re going to like this update in Xcode 13. The earlier added Accessibility Sheet inside the interface builder is now applying changes live to UIKit storyboards. Worth checking out!

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