WWDC 2023 Day 1: Sessions That Caught My Eye
Thoughts on what sessions I'll be paying attention to this WWDC23.
Today was technically the second day of WWDC 2023 but the first day of the video sessions posted on Apple’s developer portal. WWDC23 will be ongoing from Monday, June 5 through Friday, June 9.
In this article, I’ll share the list of what videos and sessions I’ll be watching and paying attention to. I’ll be covering some of the session videos in depth in future articles.
So far, I have watched some videos that I found interesting and skimmed others. While there are some videos that I will be rewatching to analyze and understand better, there are others (I’d say most) that I likely will completely ignore and skip entirely as they are either of no consequence to mobile development or are just not that interesting or significant.
For reference, the list of all the sessions, published and unpublished yet, broken down by category can be found here, and the list of sessions broken down by day can be found here.
Session Videos I’m Interested In
What's new in UIKit
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10055/
UIKit is still the best UI library for iOS so it’s always good to stay up to date on what’s new with it. It is very good to see that Apple still makes updates to it and does not completely cut it off in favor of SwiftUI.
From what I’ve glimpsed so far, it looks like we’ve got a new lifecycle event for view controllers that could be useful, traits system (meh, not sure how I feel about that), Xcode Preview (yes!), and a bunch of other little things.
What’s new in Swift
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10164/
Always good to stay up to date with Swift. There is nothing that specifically excites me here, perhaps with the exception of macros. Hopefully we will get more useful stuff this year (unlike Actor and async/await in previous WWDCs).
What's new in Xcode 15
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10165/
I’m always pleased with the IDE enhancements and new Xcode features. Seems like this time Apple has these in store for us: Xcode previews for UIKit, code generation with macros, testing experience improvements, better debugging, and more. I definitely will be digging into this video.
What's new in SwiftUI
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10148/
Even though I am very much against SwiftUI’s paradigm of coding, I am still paying attention to the changes Apple is making to it in hopes that it someday will finally be useful in production apps. So far, it doesn’t seem like they are addressing the biggest problems with SwiftUI (such as navigation and architectural subversion of your codebase into react-like paradigm of coding).
Unleash the UIKit trait system
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10057/
As I mentioned before, trait system doesn’t seem as useful to me, but I can see some value in it. I’ll be looking into it more closely to understand how I can take advantage of it in my apps if doesn’t breed any anti-patterns in my code.
Expand on Swift macros & Write Swift macros
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10167/
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10166
It is very interesting to see how Apple approaches code generation. Contrary to the hype, they decided not to go with an LLM approach. Definitely a video on my watchlist.
Meet SwiftData
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10187/
Oh Apple, promoting poor code practices again…
This, seemingly good tech, that improves on current Core Data shortcomings, is in fact a promotion of poor architecture, broken and blended single responsibility, and layer coupling in code.
The way Apple wants you to use this is not a simple replacement for Core Data but also a model storage data layer that creeps into your UI code and couples it with itself. Very bad coding practice.
I’ll definitely be watching this video carefully and covering SwiftData in the future.
Conclusion
What videos and sessions are you excited about? What do you not care to watch? Let me know in the comments below or by replying to this email, I’d love to hear from you!