October 7, 2021

🍏+ 🔥 = ❤️ - Not Only Swift Weekly - Issue #6

Hello there!

I am writing this on my way to SwiftLeeds - it’s the first time in almost 1.5 years I’ve been at an in-person conference, and I couldn’t be more excited to be talking to a crowd of developers face to face and share the latest developments of the Firebase SDK for Apple developers!

If you’re at the conference, do say hi - it’d be nice to meet some of you IRL. I’ve even got some Firebase swag with me.

My talk is titled “🍏+ 🔥 = ❤️”, and will cover SwiftUI, Combine, async/await, how it all relates to Firebase, and what we’ve been up to at Firebase to make Firebase work better on Apple’s platforms.

If you’re not at the conference, there is a recorded version of this talk on my YouTube channel. Some things have evolved since I created that recording, so you’ll have to take some of it with a grain of salt. I will upload the slides and the source code for my talk after the conference, so you can compare notes.

And with that, enjoy the newsletter! As always, feel free to reach out to me to share any feedback you have, and if you like the newsletter, share it with a friend!

Thanks for reading!

Peter

Firebase 🔥

Firestore Audit Logs

Being able to figure out who changed the data in your app when and where is a feature that you will need sooner or later. Thanks to Firestore’s new audit logs, this is now possible. Check out Puf’s Firebase Release Notes to find out more about this feature.

Firebase Summit

The cat is finally out of the bag - we’re excited to host another Firebase Summit on November 10th, and you are all invited! Check out the event page to learn more about the event and secure your spot.

SwiftUI

Advanced Environment propagation

Last week, Frederico wrote about how the SwiftUI environment works under the hood, and this week he continues his series to dive deeper into advanced use cases. For example, did you ever wonder why a sheet doesn’t seem to be seeing the same environment values as the view your opening it from? Well - it’s got to do with the hierarchy… Check out his article to learn more.

SnapHStack

You might know snapping grids from the App Store app, but they are actually quite useful in a number of scenarios, such as a list of tags, or a horizontally scrolling list of transport modes. Trent has built a component for this UI pattern. Check it out:

Combine

Combine: Asynchronous Programming with Swift, Third Edition

The Ray Wenderlich team have announced the third edition of their Combine book. Combine wasn’t a big topic at WWDC21, but from my own experience, I am convinced it will continue to be an important tool in your development toolbox, especially for UI-focused tasks. The previous editions of the books have provided a lot of insight into Apple’s reactive framework, and I expect nothing short of great from this update. Check it out on the book page.

Presentation tools

Logitech Presenter Spotlight

This is one of the best investments I’ve ever made - at least as far as gadgets are concerned. Not only does it look and feel great (it’s made from aluminium, and comes in three great-looking finishes, to match the colour of your MacBook), the software is actually well-thought-out and has some really nice features: you can use it as an air-mouse / pointer, with three different highlighting modes (laser, loupe, and the namesake spotlight). You can also set a countdown timer that buzzes the presenter at configurable times (e.g. 5 minutes and 1 minute before the end of the countdown).

It might be a bit pricier than your average presenter, but it’s worth every penny - and a great way to strike up a conversation:

Whenever I use this at a conference, one of the audience questions is inevitably “which presenter did you use” - so maybe I can preempt this question with this newsletter 😂

Keynote

Apple’s Keynote is easily one of my favourite apps, and if you’ve ever been to one of my talks, you’ll know why. With the latest release, Apple has added the ability to embed live camera video per slide - and of course, Keynote being Keynote, this video feed can be animated.

Check out the video in Steven Sinofsky’s tweet:

Fun stuff

LoremSwiftum

There are plenty of lorem ipsum generators out there, and loremipsum.io is one of the nicer ones, plus has some interesting background information. However, if you need a lorem ipsum generator in your app, look no further than LoremSwiftum, which provides a bunch of convenience methods to generate words, sentences, tweets, random URLs, and even random names. Really useful!