I’ve not being doing as much native iOS development this year as usual (my work mobile dev has been in Flutter for a year of so), but working in other ecosystems really highlights how far behind Apple is in quite a few areas.
It’s already been flagged that Apple will be concentrating on AI features this year, as much for their share price as anything.
Here’s some of the things I’d like to see them do …
Make Siri better on all platforms
Siri has been terrible for years.
It consistently doesn’t understand what you are asking, and even when it does the answer isn’t often useful.
Hopefully this year will be the reset it has needed for a long while.
Clearly a mini-LLM under the covers could help with the understanding part, but unless they improve and expand the data sources that feed into the answers, just having it say “Here’s what I found on the web” in a more conversational manner isn’t going to be any better.
It also needs to be able to do more within non-system apps via voice to be truly a worthwhile assistant.
Provide on-device LLM developer functionality
If Apple is shipping an on-device LLM, I really hope they offer this via an API for developers to use.
This would open up a plethora of interesting use cases for text-based summaries and textual understanding without having to do everything online, with the (lack of) privacy that entails.
Not sure how good a small on-device LLM can be, but it will be very interesting to see what we get (if anything)
Improve the donation of app data to Siri
More interesting would be expanding the ways of donating relevant information to the system that it can be surfaced via Siri.
I hope Apple exposes more APIs where useful info from within your app can be integrated in a privacy-first way
2. Allow Copilot in Xcode
I’m been so much more productive this year being able to use GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code and now Android Studio.
The inline code suggestions are often spookily good, and it makes it so much quicker when writing “boilerplate code” to have it suggest the kinda obvious code rather than having to type it out.
It’s been even more useful for me as I work across a whole range of different technologies in a small startup, so it’s of even more help in langauges I’m less confident in.
Of course you always need to check the suggested code is good (and sometimes it’s not), but it’s a massive productivity boost that I already couldn’t do without.
Xcode is SO far behind in not offering this, it must be guaranteed some sort of code based LLM integration must be coming this year.
Only offering an Apple-approved integration would be a massive fail too. I already pay for and am very happy with GitHub Copilot, and I want to use it in Xcode. I don’t need Apple to protect me from non-existent issues in this case. I’m not confident this will happen though 🤞🏻
3. Fix display issues in standby mode
I’ve been using my iPhone 15 Pro Max on a Magsafe stand next to my bed as a bedside clock for a while now.
It’s a really nice feature, but the screen regularly turns itself off in the night, and needs a tap to be able to see the time again.
I’ve triple-checked all the settings, but it appears there is no way for the “always on” display to keep itself always on 🙄
Let’s hope Apple has fixed this in iOS 18
4. Offer layered app icons in iOS 18
Don’t really care about this, but after my feedback to the Upgrade podcast about how “the layered icons in tvOS could work on iOS too to allow customised backbround colors” go read out on air - unfortunately Myke couldn’t find my name - I really want this to happen now (so John was right!)
This also got mentioned on ATP too, so I’m really invested in this coming to pass 🤣
5. Allow more CarPlay integration options
I’ve got a CarPlay screen in my car now, and would really like to bring Sideboard as an app to the platform now.
I think it would be a great fit, but a calendar app isn’t one of the supported CarPlay capabilities (even though the native Calendar app is allowed)
More importantly, I’d like an excuse to build a CarPlay compatible app!
6. Improve App Store flexibility
Apple’s App Store monopoly is gradually being dragged kicking and screaming by the EU into a better future where we can be more flexible in how we get our apps onto our customer’s devices.
There is no way this is going to happen willingly, as Apple is MUCH more concerned with keeping their 30% transaction fees than protecting what they think of as their users, but wouldn’t it be great if Apple changed their review process on iOS to be much more lightweight like the Mac notarization process?
If I get more than 50% of these I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I’ll revisit this after the keynote to see how things went.
Post-WWDC scorecard
Here’s my scoring:
🟡 Make Siri better on all platforms (partial credit)
❌ Provide on-device LLM developer functionality
✅ Improve the donation of app data to Siri
❌ Allow Copilot in Xcode
❌ Fix display issues in standby mode
❌ Offer layered app icons in iOS 18
❌ Allow more CarPlay integration options
❌ Improve App Store flexibility
Pretty underwhelming WWDC all in all, with the focus on “Apple Intelligence” which doesn’t have much of a dev story, isn’t shipping yet and will be en-US only at first 😦
My first new app in quite a while, and I made Club MacStories "App Debuts"!
After over two years of development, I can finally unveil my new Sideboard app
You can read all about Sideboard on the app’s main page, so I won’t repeat everything it does here, but to quote that page
Sideboard is an iOS, iPadOS, Mac, watchOS and visionOS app designed to summarise your upcoming meetings and enhance your productivity
I’d been working on Sideboard for probably over 2 years on and off, as was really a side project to keep my hand in native iOS development - my day job is mostly Flutter and NodeJS/JavaScript at the moment
It was originally a lot more ambitious app to control things “on the side”, including
Shwoing your upcoming meetings
Controlling your Apple Music or Spotify music player
Showing the latest weather forecast
… all while running on a dock
However the music part either didn’t work well (for Spotify) and when I gave up using Apple Music after a brief experiment, I lost interest. Also, when iOS 17 brought standby mode, I gave up on the app for a while, thinking it had been properly sherlocked.
After a while longer though, I figured out that if I built a nice widget the app would still have some value in standby mode for just the meetings part. That gave me the energy to finally get everything ready to ship, and here we are!
Press Coverage!
I thought I’d actually do some (minimal!) promotion of the app, so I made a press pack and got in contact with a few Apple-focussed websites
I didn’t expect anything to come of it, but I was very pleasantly surprised when John Voorhees from MacStories got in contact to say Sideboard would be featured in issue 419 of Club MacStories(behind a paywall, but see the image at the top of the article)
Still to early to say how may downloads this will result in, but TBH I’m happy enough just to get in the newsletter!
Sideboard is “Charityware”
I decided early on not to charge for Sideboard. I’m not 100% convinced it adds a ton of value, and definitely not enough for my original plan of it being a subscription app
What I have done though is put a prompt in the settings asking for charity donations if people want to “say thanks” in some way
I’m really happy doing it this way, rather than putting in some probably awful ads or asking for money
Next Steps
I’m not sure I have any great ideas to extend the product, but if you do have any ideas for improvements do let me know
Big changes for the business, small changes to the website
2024 has meant a big change to my working life, as Bravelocation Software Limited is no more ☹️
I’ve taken on a full time position as Head of Development at Paradym after working with
Courtney and the team there for all of 2023. I’m really enjoying my work with Paradym, and our mission to make getting mental health help more available to everyone
What that’s meant is I’m shutting down my Brave Location business, and stopping being a contractor after many (many!) years and become a salaryman again
I’m also taking the opportunity to simplify my online life, which means:
This site is now my “personal” site, rather that pretending to be a “business” site
I’ve moved my blog back here (and old links from Writing on Tablets will be redirected here)
I’ve stopped doing any external support work for a couple of apps, and obviously taking on new contract work
I’m also making some other technical changes that I may blog about, although seeing that this is the first post for over a year I feel like that’s a promise I may not keep
Finally, I’m working on a not very exciting app in my spare time, mainly to keep my hand in at native iOS development (work is Flutter plus backend work now). I’ll hopefully be shipping v1.0 of that soon
Thanks for listening
John - no longer the spokesperson for Brave Location
I started my Count The Days Left iOS app back in 2015(!), mainly as an exercise to learn the (then) new Swift language, but also to have an app to count down to end of my current contract work!
I’ve made the occasional tweak over the years, but decided it was time it received a bit more love, so I’ve completely rewritten it - even though it basically works in the same way.
For such a simple app, SwiftUI is perfect. I’ve done quite a few SwiftUI projects recently and am happy that the ease of development and increased productivity outweigh the occasional glitches.
I’m not sure the Mac app settings screen is that great though. For SwiftUI to be truly great for cross-platform work, it’s on the Mac that is by far the most problematic. If I have the energy I may go back and try to improve that.
I think the app’s UIis so much better now. It was a lot easier to add a nice animation on the progress view - take a look at this preview video to see what I mean …
WatchOS now supports iCloud Key-Value store sync
The app uses both UserDefaults and iCloud key-value store to store the user’s settings. The latter is used so you can sync your settings across devices.
Previously, pushing the settings to the watch meant some complicated logic in manually pushing the settings across from the phone every time they changed, which was problematic and a bit unreliable.
Now in watchOS 9.0, the watch also supports iCloud Key-Value store sync, which made the code MUCH simpler as it can now reuse the data management code from the main app.
This has meant that the watch app now has a minimum OS version of 9.0+, but again I think the trade off of much increased reliability is worth it.
New features
I’ve completely rewritten the widget code, and also added some nice lock screen widgets for iOS 16 users.
Moving to watchOS 9.0 also means I can reuse the widget code to improve the watch complications.
The Siri shortcuts code is much improved too - moving to the new AppIntents framework and SwiftUI for the visual component.
I’m also using the new shortcut provider API to suggest an appropriate shortcut to access your days left data directly in the Shortcuts app.
Modernised Swift code
It’s probably to be expected, but some of the 7 year old code was VERY out of date, and a little embarrasing 😳
I’ve restructured so it’s much better organised, uses protocols and generics where appropriate, and is a much better showcase for what I can do (I hope!)
Accessibility Improvements
Using SwiftUI means the accessibilty features are generally better straight out of the box, but I have spent some time making sure that voice over works well, as well as making the UI scalable using differemnt font sizes.
Removed some legacy extensions
The old school Today widget has gone, as has the iMessage extension - that seemed a good idea at the time but they really haven’t take off (to say the least!)
I’ve also removed the “tip” option, where people could do an in-app purchase to say thanks. TBH so few people were using it - and I definitely wasn’t promoting it in any way! - that I couldn’t be bothered to spend the effort porting the code.
Summary
I’m really happy with the updated code, and I’ll be much happier in potential customers looking at it as an example of my work.
If you want to take a look yourself, it’s here on GitHub
iOS 16 should be available any day soon now, so I’ve been adding some new features to the Yeltzland app to take advantage.
Lock Screen widgets
The biggest visible change in iOS 16 are the new lock screen widgets - which presumably will be great with the heaviliy rumoured always-on screens of the new phones.
The widgets show either the latest score, the last result or the next upcoming fixture, whatever is the most relevant at the current time.
The app already had Apple Watch complications, which made it very little work to add similar widgets on the lock screen.
It took a bit of fiddling to get the update frequency working correctly, especially during the match. This works quite well now, especially if you have the game time tweet notifications feature turned on (which I can use to trigger an widget update out of the scheduled timeline)
As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve also added a new “badge only” widget, which just shows the club badge if you just want to personalise your phone a bit.
Improved complications on the Apple Watch
Watch complications and lock screen widget code has been unified, so I’ve been able to combine the code for both into a single extension.
This also means the watch complications are a bit better now, as they benefit from the work I put in to keep them better updated as the goals fly in.
Better Siri Shortcuts
Thankfully the old intent definition code has been deprecated into a much nicer system using AppIntents. This makes it much nicer to both define and build the logic for Shortcuts support, as well as to be able to donate shortcut suggestions directly from the app.
This means I have been able to delete a whole load of code - which is always nice - and simplify the discovery of the shortcuts the app supports.
There’s how I use the shortcuts (so I can ask Siri the latest score) …
… plus how it looks visually when this shortcut is run
Summary
It’s been the quietest summer for a while on the new feature front, with not many customer facing changes of note in iOS 16.
However, I think the lock screen widgets are a big improvement, and I’m pretty happy how they’ve turned out.
Let’s see if we have any surprises later today when the new hardware is announced 🤞
