Each year as it gets close to wwdc developers love to speculate as to what they would love for Apple to release at their annual conference. I’ll not get in to the out there rumours (mixed reality headset being the exception) but rather focusing on what would make my live a lot easier as an engineer.

CoreData uplift

We have seen how amazingly flexible Swift as a language is, particularly how easy it is to create a DSL using result builders is. Having a database persistence layer available that feels native to Swift apps would be a huge win.

  • Modern Swift API
  • Generated classes use swift types (not NSSet)
  • Thread and type safety
  • async / await

SwiftUI Previews from packages

This one has plagued developers for a long time. If you have a SwiftUI view defined in an SPM package along with a preview for the view, you can’t use the canvas if your target is set to the main app. Yes you can change the target to be just the SPM package as a work around but that is really an unplesant experience for developers.

SwiftUI Map enhancements

For building RideStats.app I make use of the Map type in SwiftUI and it’s amazing. It is rediculously limited though and is lacking 90% of the functionality that exists in the MapKit views.

  • Polyline paths
  • Overlays
  • Every feature that MapKit has but in a SwiftUI View

Mixed Reality headset

Everything makes sense for this to happen this year. I’m keeping my expectations open for just what it looks like but my guess is it will involve widgets and live activities somehow.