What a week of Activity in Apple World

I think we should just start with the September 15th event and I’ll point you to my podcast episode in which I cover the details on the new hardware.

Compile Swift Podcast Season 1 Episode 30

You Get 24hrs Notice!

It was an unusual move by Apple, they gave everyone, developers and users alike 24 hours notice that the final versions of iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS would be releasing on September 16th.

Personally, this is not a big deal for me and apps I work on. But it did mean a scramble to ensure that nothing had changed since the last beta and GM that would break applications for many developers.

Xcode 12 GM (which is also the final release) also dropped on the 16th. Everything feels very last minute about these releases from Apple and I would say is a bit of a sour taste with the way they dropped it all on the development community. This year really has not been Apple’s best relationship with the development community that they seem to forget makes them a ton of money. Maybe Phil is getting out at the right time!

macOS Big Sur beta

I have been running the Big Sur beta releases for a while to test Xcode mostly. This week I cloned my install of 10.15 with my whole set up over to an external drive and installed Big Sur beta over the top of it. The main goal here to to find all the things that are going to be a problem when the final macOS release drops, presumably some time this month or in October.

Audio apps are a problem, which is never a surprised. The one that caught me out though is Unity, Big Sur does not like it right now, not a deal breaker and to be honest I usually run it on Windows as it just feels better. But the tests did serve to tell me that I should wait a while for sure even when the final release drops.

Notifications Are Cool

This week I re-wrote some of my UI updates in my blogging application (macOS) to take advantage of notification center rather than linking with @IBOutets and all that fun. I have to say, not only was it easier than I expected, but also requires very little code. I will make a video on how to do this soon, once I find a good way to present it.