The Apple Worldwide Developer (WWDC) conference has come to a close, but there’s still plenty of session videos to keep us busy throughout the summer. Here at MartianCraft, we pride ourselves on attempting to watch as many of the sessions as possible so that we can increase our knowledge of the new items released, and share that knowledge with our clients.

If you haven’t seen our recap article for WWDC ‘22, give that a read to learn all about the new items that Apple announced at WWDC and what we’re most excited about.

In this post, some of our developers take a look at the sessions they’ve watched over the past week and discuss their favorites.

Chris Wagner (@cwagdev on Twitter)

In my opinion it’s always best to start off with the “What’s new in [the thing that interests you]” sessions. This year for me that included:

• Session 110354: “What’s new in Swift” My favorite new Swift feature is the improvements to generics surrounding the some and any keywords.

• Session 110427: “What’s new in Xcode” As someone using Xcode every day I always welcome performance improvements with the editor and build system–as usual we got both. There are also some excellent new features like the build timeline I am excited about.

• Session 10052: “What’s new in SwiftUI” I’ve been focused on developing with SwiftUI for the past year and I am ecstatic to see improvements to NavigationLink and the addition of NavigationPath, Stack, and SplitView.

• Session 10068: “What’s new in UIKit” It feels like UIKit will always be around for a long time doing most of the heavy lifting behind the scenes, I was happy to see new SwiftUI integration points like easily using SwiftUI in Collection and Table view cells (table who?).

Josh Levine (@joshualevine on Twitter)

• Session 110354: “What’s new in Swift” Probably the first session I watch every year and it did not disappoint. In addition to the performance improvements, there were tons of great quality of life changes like shorthand if/let unwrapping and improved closure result inference.

• Session 110355: Meet Async Algorithms Brings the power of Combine operators to Async sequences allowing you to do things like merge, zip, debounce, and much more.

• Session 10022: “Create Camera Extensions with Core Media IO” This is probably one of those more obscure topics that only a handful of developers will be interested in. Coming to macOS 13 is a new api for creating “Virtual Cameras”. If you’ve ever worked with the existing DAL apis you are probably jumping for joy at this addition, especially that it will now work with Apple’s own apps.

• Session 110351: “Eliminate Data Races Using Swift Concurrency” While not really covering anything new, it provides a broad look at the Swift concurrency model. I like how it doesn’t look so much at specific features such as async/await or Tasks, but instead explores the different concepts to understand Swift concurrency like isolation and atomicity.

Evan Stone (@evankstone on Twitter)

• Session 110352: “Embrace Swift generics” Generics are not a straightforward concept to grasp, but Holly Borla from the Swift compiler team really helps us to get a good understanding of how’d your generics work,. She also explains very well how the “some” and “any” keywords work, and how they can be used effectively.

• Session 10003: Meet WeatherKit At some point in most of our iOS developer careers, we either build or consider building a weather app. Prior to Apple’s new WeatherKit Framework, we had to use a third-party service for accessing weather data. Now, Apple provides first party support for accessing that data. Additionally, third-party services were usually expensive in the long run due to all of the requests that needed to be performed. In this session, Novall Khan gives a really nice explanation of WeatherKit, the WeatherKit Server API, and the kinds of things that we can do with them. It’s really awesome to have first party support for weather data now, and it lends itself to adding unique experiences and icing on the cake for our users.

• Session 10054: “The SwiftUI cookbook for navigation Navigation is a core part of any app, and prior to iOS 16, the story for navigation in SwiftUI was a challenge to understand and implement easily. With iOS 16, the SwiftUI team has come up with a whole new set of components and a much better methodology of handling navigation in SwiftUI apps going forward. This session really helps us to see what that new direction is, and how to use it.