It’s the most wonderful time of the year for developers and fellow Apple enthusiasts! WWDC 2023 kicks off on Monday, June 5th in beautiful Cupertino, California. There are a lot of items on our “wish list” this year, so let’s jump right in with the things we hope to see coming out of Apple’s HQ!
Xcode
SPM Handling
We’ve all seen the annoying message, “Build operations are disabled: Package loading in progress. Please try again later.”
Our team has spent a lot of time working on Callisto, which is a large app! We have dependencies split out into frameworks and it can take SPM a while to resolve all the packages when switching branches. Usually, Xcode does a great job of queueing up actions when it’s busy. For instance, if you do a clean build and then run nut tests, it will finish the clean and then do the testing – that’s all we want for SPM resolution.
Siri for Xcode
We’ve spent time playing with ChatGPT as a coding assistant. It’s been awesome for small tasks with temperamental parameters like getting a timestamp of files. It’s a straightforward process that doesn’t need to be done often, so it can be a hassle to look up the specific API to start the file. ChatGPT generates that code right out, but there’s friction there and opportunities for a bespoke Xcode experience. We’re hopeful that Apple will do something in this space, but have reservations…we’ll see!
Better SwiftUI Tooling
When trying to build a few screens for Callisto a while back, we ran into a lot of roadblocks with SwiftUI. One of the key features of SwiftUI is the live preview. To make those work, Xcode compiles bits of your code behind the scenes and shows them in a preview pane. Callisto is a Catalyst app but has an AppKit plugin for doing Mac system things. Xcode could not handle that when trying to make a SwiftUI preview. Xcode would try to compile the AppKit code with UIKit and become very upset when it didn’t work. That left our foray into SwiftUI dead in the water. We’d be thrilled to see these issues addressed at this next WWDC.
Catalyst & iOS Updates
Dynamic Type on Mac
Dynamic Type has been around on iOS for over 10 years! This is the function in your iOS settings that allows you to adjust the size of the text on your device. It’s great for our aging eyes that increasingly glare at our phone screens, but we would love to see this supported on macOS. This recent announcement about new accessibility features coming in iOS 17 mentions the possibility of adjusting text size across Mac apps such as Finder, Messages, Mail, Calendar, and Note. We’re hoping WWDC23 takes our dream and makes it a reality!
Auxiliary Window Replacement
In the past, Mac apps used auxiliary windows for things like inspectors and floating tool panels. Some apps, like Photoshop, had multiple auxiliary windows for paintbrushes, color panels, and more. These auxiliary windows would disappear when switching apps to reduce clutter. Currently, Catalyst lacks a similar feature. The UIScene API for window management does not provide the same level of distinction. Hopefully, at WWDC, we will see a more advanced Stage Manager implementation and some means of distinguishing main content windows from helper windows.
Miscellaneous Items
Passwords
Our team has been using 1Password for the past several years, and we really don’t have many complaints about it! However, it would be awesome if Apple could produce a dedicated Passwords app instead of burying its password management in Settings. We’d also like to see Apple make it easy to share passwords within your Apple family! If we had these abilities, they might just get our team to make the switch from 1Pass.
Better Siri for Mac
While macOS does have Siri, we’re hoping for much better quality. We’ve found that Siri fails at the most basic requests sometimes. For example, when you try to open an app in the Applications folder with the phrase “Open AppName”, it fails usually 2 out of 3 times. We don’t know why it’s SO bad and have no clue if there’s a way to debug it.
The real dream is to have a conversational Siri. Think of how Tony Stark talks to Jarvis as he works. Playing with ChatGPT has teased this kind of reality for Siri in the context of Xcode. “Write a method to delete all the files in a given directory.” That’s a thing ChatGPT can do in a web browser window. Why can’t Siri do that in Xcode? Imagine an Apple-trained LLM that especially knew about Swift, UIKit, and all the Apple technologies. Add in the context of the project you’re currently working on. Talk about a developer accelerant. But that’s a big leap, so it’s doubtful we’ll see that this year, but maybe the first step?
HKSV Streaming API
We are overall, pretty happy with the HomeKit ecosystem. The only complaints we have revolve around Siri! Right now, HKSV (HomeKit Secure Video) records events from cameras and saves to iCloud, but scrolling back through time is only available via Apple’s Home app. Third party apps aren’t able to access the history of clips because there’s no API for it. With HomeKit (hopefully) maturing a little more this year, Apple should make that available to developers.
That’s all of our hopes and dreams for this year! Keep an eye out for our highlights and overall review of WWDC23!
