Last week was WWDC, and if you’re worried that Apple spent as much time talking about AI as Google did last month at I/O, don’t worry — they didn’t talk about AI: Artificial Intelligence at all. Instead they talked about AI: Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence looks a lot like regular AI (it’s good at answering natural language questions, will suggest ways to “improve” your writing, and can generate incredibly ugly images on demand) but it feels fancier because the name Apple is in there and Craig Federighi announced it.  

Much like regular AI, one thing Apple Intelligence isn’t capable of doing is writing the Flight Deck. Each and every month we (as in, the living, breathing people of Runway) bring you all the many announcements from WWDC and other events, answer age old questions like “What are mobile release engineering teams and when do you need one?” and fall down the occasional developer rabbit hole.

Read on for this month’s highlights.

Posts we liked

What’s new in Swift 6.0

It’s 2024, which means Swift has now been around for ten years. You’ll notice, though, that we’re not getting Swift 10 this year. Remember 2019? That was five long years ago and also the late time we had a major-version update to Swift. Paul Hudson notes that this is nothing new for programming languages — PHP 6 was so delayed that the team behind it jumped right on ahead to 7 — and he takes a detailed look at what’s new in this long awaited 6.0 edition of Swift.

How I finally memorized modifier ordering in compose

Márton Braun calls himself a long time “proud member of the ‘no idea how Modifier ordering works, just try it one way and flip it around if it doesn’t work’ club.” In the past he’d just kinda guess where modifiers should go and then move them around until he got it right. But he recently accidentally learned how Modifier ordering works and perhaps the way he now understands it will help you too.

Getting started with Swift Testing
Swift Testing is a modern, expressive and macro-based testing library introduced by Apple during WWDC24 as a more modern alternative to replace XCTest when writing unit tests. Pol Piella loves this new way of writing tests and he shows you how to get started with Swift Testing, how to write tests using it, and how to migrate your existing XCTest tests to the new library.

Down a Kotlin rabbit hole

Romain Guy sets out to write a test that looks for intersecting/overlapping rectangles and discovers that even the simplest problems can have a surprising number of possible solutions. You may also be surprised at just how many ways you can test for overlapping rectangles.

Posts we wrote

What are mobile release engineering teams and when do you need one?
Few mobile engineers have bandwidth to focus both on building new features and wrangling the neverending Ruby scripts and automations that support releasing updates to those features, yet they are often expected to do both for way too long. Bruno Rocha looks at when your own team might consider a dedicated mobile release engineering team.

A hitchhiker’s guide to the App Store Connect API

Manually handling tasks through the App Store Connect website is often cumbersome, slow, and error-prone. Plus the site can be unreliable and Apple is not necessarily the best at providing actionable feedback when an internal error occurs. Pol Piella makes his second appearance in today’s newsletter with a look at how you can streamline your process and avoid manual tasks by using the App Store Connect API.

Runway’s WWDC rundown for mobile developers

If reading isn’t really your thing, listen in as our team’s most fervent Apple fans sit down to discuss what they’re most and least excited about from Apple’s annual developer event. What should mobile devs expect from Apple Intelligence? Is a calculator really that exciting? Are the new built-in image swap and generation tools a harbinger of messages, presentations, emails, and docs filled with the ugliest images on earth to come?

Featured feature

Why use a mouse like it’s the ‘90s? If you’re a Runway power user — or anyone who prefers to navigate around and across apps with just their keyboard — Runway’s new Quick Actions Menu allows you to do just that.

Quickly switch between apps, releases, or navigate to specific settings for your app by invoking the Quick Action Menu, which surfaces shortcuts to many of the most important areas of Runway. Enter Command+K / Ctrl+K from anywhere in Runway to invoke the Quick Action Menu and use it to supercharge how you navigate around the platform.

Upcoming events

Where to find Runway over the next several weeks:

• ‍droidcon Berlin (Berlin, July 3rd to 5th) ‍
• Chain React (Portland, July 17th to 19th)  

We’re hosting happy hours at both events. The next one is coming up in Berlin on July 4th, alongside our co-hosts from Codemagic. More details to come for anyone who happens to be in Berlin!

This month’s newsletter is now at a close. If you’d like a challenge, turn your phone or computer upside down and see if you can read the newsletter backwards. Then go through the archive of our ten previous Flight Decks and do the same.