WWDC is almost here again. This year, my attention will be limited; I have family coming into town and a wedding to attend. Much more important things. For some reason, Apple didn’t check my calendar before scheduling it, or they could have avoided this…
But, just to make sure my blog’s upload script still works, here is a low-effort wishlist.
- Very much looking forward to the delivery of Swift regex support. Concise, mostly-standard regex literals, with typesafe captures and baked-in support for Swift’s Unicode model? Count me in. My wish is that this feature launches with runtime support at least back to Catalina, like they ended up doing with async/await, so I can start using it right away.
- My main macOS wish is for Apple to finally admit that the new (Big Sur/Monterey) alert style was a big mistake and fix it. The vertical button stack, the centered, narrow, scrolling text field, all of it. Mac alerts should look good even when text-heavy or when they have three or more buttons, and that means they should be horizontally oriented. We’ve had two years now, and overall the Big Sur redesign has worked well, but this alert design is the GUI equivalent of the hockey-puck iMac mouse—it’s not something that gets better as you get used to it.
- My main SwiftUI wish is for more support for native Mac-only idioms and techniques. It would be nice to be able to use a pure SwiftUI lifecycle but launch without a window open, or to be able to programmatically pop up the preferences window. I wrote a bit on this before.
- And my main AppKit wish is just for there to be a nice, meaty session on “what’s new in AppKit”, maybe with some surprises that let us know they’re still paying attention to it. (Nothing that requires me to rewrite anything, of course…)