What's new at WWDC 2021 | Part 1
The most relevant announcements from WWDC 2021: Swift Playgrounds on iPad, async/await, Xcode Cloud, DocC documentation and the SF Symbols update.
What did WWDC 2021 bring us?
As every year, Apple brings us an annual conference dedicated to developers building for their platforms: WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) has been the event I look forward to most throughout the year, and this one didn’t disappoint. On the contrary, I’m excited about all the new changes presented.
Here are all the new improvements I consider important for our future development — in no particular order.
1. Swift Playgrounds
I’m certain that with this iPad app, many developer colleagues had their wishes come true. With time we’ll see if it really lives up to the day-to-day demands of a real development environment.
This addition lets you create, test and submit to the App Store applications made for iPhone and iPad from playgrounds on the iPad. With the launch of the M1 iPad, we get a clear sense of Apple’s intentions for the future of this great device.
You can code using SwiftUI, you’ll have a preview of your application and you can even run the app from the iPad to do the necessary tests. After a few clicks you’ll be ready to publish your app to the store.
2. Async/Await
Apple improved the way we make async calls in our code and brought the concept of await and async to Swift.
This lets us execute complex async calls in a simpler way, using the async keyword for any function we want to execute this way, and then calling it elsewhere with await. Developers who work with multiple programming languages will find this very familiar, since it’s a pattern that already exists in C# and JavaScript.
I’ve read some opinions on this. Many have even gone so far as to say Combine could be replaced by this new approach. But like other developers also note (and I agree), they’re two different and complementary approaches: while Combine lets us use publishers and subscriptions to build reactive apps, async calls allow a single one-shot async call — nothing more, but much easier than those closure-based functions causing what many of us dread: “the pyramid of doom.”
3. Xcode Cloud
Something that started around 2018 with Apple’s acquisition of Buddy Build now shows its results — a complete CI/CD tool that I’d been waiting for since then, to stop depending on so many third-party applications.
Xcode Cloud lets us upload our code to the tool and it will compile, run tests on devices in parallel and can release the app to a group of people we specify through TestFlight. At the end it will also take the app to the store.
All of this integrated with our Xcode, showing us what’s happening in the cloud, the crash feedback users send and everything integrated with TestFlight — which will also be available for Mac.
4. New documentation system (DocC)
Something that really caught my attention is this new documentation system called DocC. I think it’s a great way to share the documentation we generate for libraries we share with our development team, all through Xcode. Using Markdown (the language Apple uses to document code), it will also help document code from third-party libraries we depend on.
It will let us add code examples, images, build rich instructions so users of our documentation can better understand what our library or module does. All from an interactive perspective.
This sounds very interesting without doubt, and it’ll be a topic I’ll follow very closely to understand how it works and the advantages we can get from it.
5. SF Symbols update
A tool that has become my faithful companion is without a doubt SF Symbols. It lets you add icons to our applications, made by Apple and incorporated into the system font called San Francisco.
In this WWDC it also received a very significant update with 600 additional symbols to use for free in our apps. But not only that: we can now create color combinations for symbols and there’s also support for custom symbols.
There’s still a lot more information to review. This article will continue with a second part. Many thanks for reading, and greetings to everyone.