Give your simulator superpowers

RocketSim: An Essential Developer Tool
as recommended by Apple

Issue 94
Dec 21, 2021

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The other side of launching a big app update.

Like other developers that worked hard on their app release, I was nothing but proud when I released RocketSim 6.0 last week. RocketSim is a typical app that looks like a simple layer on top of an existing tool (xcrun simctl) while it's much more under the hood.

I received many positive responses from the community and gained many more active users over the week. Yet, a few less positive responses influenced me the most.

After posting the update on Reddit, I expected nothing but positive feedback on the newly added features. The tunnel vision I had made me think it was the best update ever (of course!). The responses only focused on the fact that you had to pay for getting RocketSim PRO. Some even stated that a yearly subscription of $13 is way too expensive for an app providing the same features as the default Simulator.

Let me be clear: RocketSim is not the same as the default Simulator. Even though I knew this reply wasn't correct, it did make me feel bad since I was expecting compliments!

Yet, time passed by, and I started to evaluate all replies. I stayed positive, replied in the threads, and tried to benefit from my feedback. It made me realize that these unexpected replies turned out to be super valuable!

And here I am, planning a migration for moving RocketSim out of the Mac App Store to provide better pricing options and allowing myself to take RocketSim to the next level without Sandbox limitations. All due to those unexpected responses to the latest release.

Long story short: try to stay positive when you receive unexpected responses. Please don't ignore them; stay nice and reply to better understand your users.

And with that, enjoy this week's SwiftLee Weekly!

THIS WEEK'S BLOG POST
I've always been interested in the Mirror API for reflection in Swift, but I never had a reason to dive into using it. Last week, I finally found a good reason and I decided to dive all in, resulting in this week's article explaining to you how mirroring in Swift works.

SPONSORED
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ROCKETSIM GIVEAWAY
Last week's RocketSim launch contained a PRO giveaway for which Shiva is the winner! Congrats, I'll get in touch with you soon.
To all others; the next giveaway will arrive in January!

CURATED FROM THE COMMUNITY

CODE
Paul Hudson asked me last week whether I knew when Playgrounds 4 would arrive. Sixteen hours later, he published this article; what are the odds? Playgrounds 4 came and finally allowed us to build apps right on the iPad. Something fun to explore during the holidays!
Full disclosure: I didn’t try it out myself. Though I know the pain of merging Xcode project files, I’m considering trying this solution as suggested by Igor Kulman.
In my opinion, there’s no one architecture to use. At WeTransfer, we use a combination of MVC, MVVM, and Coordinators in which we try to use the pattern that best fits the problem we’re solving. Alejandro Martinez shines a light on App Architecture in 2022.
It’s always interesting to see how Apple adopts Swift and SwiftUI. Alexandre Colucci is here to give us an update.
Josh “So Many Typos” Holtz is well-known for his hard work on Fastlane and is, in my opinion, one of the best devs to do a talk about Xcode Cloud. I gained quite some insights from this presentation around whether or not Xcode Cloud is ready to be used for me. The things Josh was missing are precisely the reasons for me to wait a little longer with migrating over!
I enjoyed this article by Rony Fadel, containing many tips to make you a better iOS developer! I especially like the dispatch queue-related ones, but many more are related to SwiftUI, Xcode, and more.
It’s great that we can use async/await on older OSs now, but what if you also want to use convenient system APIs? John Sundell covered us by adding some of the commonly used APIs in a lightweight package.

SWIFTLEE JOBS
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