Fatbobman's Swift Weekly #048
Apple Watch, The Sturdy Linchpin of the Apple Ecosystem
Weekly Comment
Apple Watch, The Sturdy Linchpin of the Apple Ecosystem
Half an hour ago, Apple's 2024 annual hardware product launch event just concluded.
Due to numerous product leaks prior to the event, I've gradually lost interest in Apple's September keynotes, especially considering the need to stay up late (the event starts at 1 AM local time due to time zone differences). In fact, I've rarely watched Apple's live events in recent years.
However, tonight I decided to tune in. What drew me wasn't the new iPhone boasting AI and superior performance, but the milestone 10th generation product—the Apple Watch S10.
I recall when the Apple Watch first debuted, the entire wearable device market was relatively small, with traditional watches still commanding a large consumer base. Few could have foreseen that in just a few years, the Apple Watch and the wearable devices it represents would grow to such an enormous scale, significantly impacting the traditional watch industry.
Since its first appearance in 2014, the Apple Watch has seen continuous performance improvements, larger screens, and increasingly rich features. The only disappointment is that the battery life of mainstream models hasn't significantly increased.
Although Apple continues to strive to make the Apple Watch a smarter hardware product, equipping it with an independent app store, personally, I mostly use it for basic functions like recording fitness data, setting timers, and checking messages. Nevertheless, this product still holds great appeal, prompting me to upgrade at least every two years—making it the most frequently and consistently updated Apple device I own.
As another hardware product line with a decade-long history, the Apple Watch has played a positive role in consolidating Apple's ecosystem, strengthening hardware connections, and retaining users.
Despite its high price point, somewhat ordinary design, and unremarkable battery life, the Apple Watch maintains its market-leading position through a clear and streamlined product line, deep integration with other family hardware, and a continuously optimized development experience.
While high cost-effectiveness, exquisite appearance, excellent battery life, and compatibility with more third-party hardware are important, without the ability to provide a complete and distinctive experience alongside its own products, it's difficult to truly stand out, establish a unique brand image, and win user loyalty. This is a challenge that other wearable device manufacturers need to deeply consider and address.
Previous Issue｜Newsletter Archive
If you appreciate my work and want to promote your product to the Swift and iOS developer community, sponsoring my platform could be an excellent opportunity for you.
Your support through Patreon, or Buy Me a Coffee helps keep this newsletter and blog running. Thank you for finding this content helpful!
Recent Selections
Custom hover effects in SwiftUI
Hover effects serve as an effective visual feedback mechanism that enhances app interactivity and professionalism. In this article, Majid Jabrayilov explores how to create custom hover effects in SwiftUI. It begins with an introduction to the basic application of the hoverEffect view modifier and proceeds to demonstrate how to implement the CustomHoverEffect protocol and create a ScaleEffect structure. This modular approach to reusing hover effects helps avoid code duplication.
The AirDrop Conundrum: Passing Custom Models From and To Your App
Since iOS 17, all non-standard file types transferred via AirDrop (i.e., file types not belonging to Apple's public UTTypes like text files, images, etc.) are by default opened in the Files app instead of the intended target app. This change poses significant challenges for developers, as it prevents the direct use of AirDrop to pass custom models between different instances of the same app. Jordan Morgan's article delves into the complexity and frustrations of this feature, discussing the workings of AirDrop and the broad impact of Apple's decisions on developers and user experience.
Reducing Bundle Size: My Approach After Adopting the Capture Extension
The Locked Camera is an innovative feature introduced by Apple in iOS 18, implemented through the LockedCameraCapture framework, allowing developers to integrate advanced camera control options in their apps. Using this feature may significantly increase the app's bundle size (nearly doubling it). In this article, Weichao Deng explains the reasons for the increased app size and outlines his analysis process and solution strategies. He suggests customizing solutions based on project size and maintaining a streamlined main entry through modular application design to effectively manage the modules included in different targets.
Streamlining iOS Performance and Compilation: Practical Insights and Techniques
In this article, Dai Ming provides a comprehensive and in-depth review of iOS performance and compilation, starting with issues most directly affecting user experience such as stuttering and memory problems. The article extensively explains monitoring, prevention, and solutions, particularly offering practical code examples and steps in asynchronous rendering, large image processing, and various rendering optimization techniques. It also covers compilation optimization techniques, such as using Bazel to enhance compilation efficiency, which are beneficial for improving development efficiency and program performance.
Revolutionizing Surgery and Medical Treatments with visionOS
Although Apple's Apple Vision Pro, a spatial computing device, has not yet gained wide acceptance in the consumer market, it has shown exceptional performance in specific areas. In this article, Francesco Perchiazzi extensively explores the application of Apple Vision Pro in surgery and medical treatments, particularly highlighting its revolutionary potential in spatial computing within the medical field. From medical education and training to surgical planning, patient monitoring, and the visualization of medical education, the technology's application scope is broad, significantly enhancing surgical precision, the quality of education, and patient care experiences. At the end of the article, Perchiazzi poses a thought-provoking question: faced with the choice between high-cost traditional surgical robots and low-cost, highly flexible technologies like Apple Vision Pro, how should we choose to ensure the broader dissemination of medical services? This discussion not only addresses economic considerations in technology choices but also touches on important issues of fairness in medical services.
Github Contribution Graph with Swift Charts
Github showcases each developer's code submission history through a unique contribution heatmap, visually presenting their activities and highlighting their accomplishments. In this article, Artem Novichkov will guide readers on how to replicate this feature using the Swift Charts tool. Despite some gaps in documentation for Swift Charts, its declarative syntax and the extensive examples provided by the community make it an intriguing tool worth exploring.
肘子的话
Apple Watch，苹果生态的坚实纽带
半小时前，苹果公司的 2024 年度重要硬件产品发布会刚刚落下帷幕。
由于大量新产品信息在发布前已遭泄露，我对苹果 9 月的发布会已逐渐失去兴趣，尤其是还要熬夜观看。事实上，近几年我已经很少观看苹果发布会的直播了。
但今晚，我决定观看直播。吸引我的并非标榜 AI 和卓越性能的新款 iPhone，而是具有里程碑意义的第十代产品——Apple Watch S10。
还记得 Apple Watch 初次面世时，整个可穿戴设备市场规模相对较小，传统手表还拥有庞大的消费者基础。当时很少有人能预见到，仅仅几年后，Apple Watch 和它代表的可穿戴设备就会发展到如此巨大的规模，并对传统手表行业造成了显著的冲击。
自 2014 年首次亮相以来，Apple Watch 的性能持续提升，屏幕越来越大，功能日益丰富。唯一的遗憾是，主流款式的续航时间并未显著增加。
尽管苹果公司不断努力将 Apple Watch 打造成更智能的硬件产品，并为其配备了独立的应用商店，但个人而言，我大多时候只使用它来记录健身数据、设置倒计时、查看消息等基础功能。即便如此，这款产品依然具有极大的吸引力，使我每两年至少更新一次，这是我所有苹果设备中更换频率最高、最稳定的产品。
作为苹果公司另一个拥有十年历史的硬件产品线，Apple Watch 在巩固苹果生态、加强硬件联系和锁定用户方面发挥了积极作用。
尽管 Apple Watch 定价较高、设计较为中庸、续航表现不突出，但它凭借清晰且精简的产品线和与其他家族硬件的深度整合，持续优化的开发体验，始终保持着市场领先地位。
高性价比、精美的外观和优秀续航，以及与更多其他品牌硬件的兼容性固然重要，但如果无法与自家产品共同提供一种完整而富有特色的体验，那么很难真正突出重围，建立独特的品牌形象，赢得用户的忠诚。这是其他可穿戴设备制造商需要深入思考和面对的挑战。
如果您发现这份周报或我的博客对您有所帮助，可以考虑通过 爱发电，Buy Me a Coffee 支持我的创作。
近期推荐
自定义悬停效果 (Custom hover effects in SwiftUI)
悬停效果是提升应用交互性和专业感的有效视觉反馈机制。在这篇文章中，Majid Jabrayilov 探讨了如何在 SwiftUI 中创建自定义的悬停效果。文章首先介绍了 hoverEffect 视图修饰器的基本应用，随后展示了如何通过实现 CustomHoverEffect 协议并创建 ScaleEffect 结构，以模块化方式重用悬停效果，避免代码重复。
AirDrop 难题：在应用间传递自定义模型 (The AirDrop Conundrum: Passing Custom Models From and To Your App)
自 iOS 17 起，所有通过 AirDrop 传输的非标准文件类型（即不属于苹果公共 UTTypes 如文本文件、图片等的文件类型）均默认在 Files 应用中打开，而不是原本意图中的目标应用。这一变化给开发者带来了显著挑战，无法在同一应用的不同实例间直接使用 AirDrop 传递自定义模型。Jordan Morgan 的文章深入分析了这一功能的复杂性和挫败感，探讨了 AirDrop 的工作原理及苹果的决策对开发者和用户体验的广泛影响
🪜减小应用包大小：采用 Capture Extension 后的方法 (Reducing Bundle Size: My Approach After Adopting the Capture Extension)
Locked Camera 是苹果在 iOS 18 中推出的一项创新功能，通过 LockedCameraCapture 框架实现，允许开发者在其应用中集成更高级的摄像头控制选项。使用此功能后，应用包的体积可能显著增加（接近翻倍）。在本文中，Weichao Deng 详细解释了应用包体积增大的原因，并展示了他的分析过程和解决策略。他提出，应根据项目的规模来定制解决方案，通过模块化应用设计，保持主入口尽可能的精简，有效管理不同目标中所需包含的模块。
二刷 iOS 性能与编译，简单点说
在本文中，戴铭对 iOS 性能与编译做了全面而深入的梳理，从用户体验最直接受影响的卡顿和内存问题入手，详尽讲解了监控、预防和解决方案。特别是在异步绘制、大图处理以及各种渲染优化方法上，提供了具体的代码示例和操作步骤，非常实用。同时，文章还涵盖了编译优化的技术，如使用 Bazel 提升编译效率，对提升开发效率和程序运行性能都有积极意义。
Apple Vision Pro 彻底变革了手术和医疗治疗 (Revolutionizing Surgery and Medical Treatments with visionOS)
尽管苹果的 Apple Vision Pro 作为一种空间计算设备，还未在消费市场得到广泛认可，但在特定领域它已展现出卓越的性能。Francesco Perchiazzi 在本文中深入探讨了 Apple Vision Pro 在手术和医疗治疗中的应用，特别是它在医疗领域革命性的空间计算潜能。从医学教育训练到手术规划、患者监护，乃至医学教育的可视化，这种技术的应用范围广泛，有效地提升了手术的精确性、教育的质量和患者的护理体验。文章最后，Perchiazzi 抛出了一个值得深思的问题：在面临高额投资的传统手术机器人与低成本、高灵活性的技术如 Apple Vision Pro 之间，我们应如何选择以实现更广泛的医疗服务普及？这一探讨不仅指出了技术选择的经济学考量，还触及了医疗服务公平性的重要议题。
用 Swift Charts 创建 Github 贡献图 (Github contribution graph with Swift Charts)
Github 通过独特的贡献热力图，为每位开发者呈现了其代码提交历史的可视化展示。这种直观的图形方式不仅记录了开发者的活动，还彰显了他们的努力成果。在本文中，Artem Novichkov 将带领读者探索如何运用 Swift Charts 工具来复现这一功能。作者认为，虽然 Swift Charts 在某些方面缺乏文档，但它的声明式语法和社区提供的大量示例使其成为一个值得探索的有趣工具。
招募
SwiftGG 计划从社区招募 10 名校对官，帮助校对翻译的内容和优化整体的阅读体验。 如您有意向，请与他们联系，期待您的加入！
