🎵 I was happy to discover today that NPR has added curated playlists to Apple Music. It will be another, alternative source of new music recommendations for me.

SwiftUI is definitely the way forward for development on all Apple platforms, and I am excited about it. That said, it is only going to be supported on new OS releases going forward. My plan is to support the current version of iOS and macOS going forward for at least a year, which will make it challenging for me to switch my UI code to SwiftUI at that time. Next fall, however, when Apple’s OS cycle turns over again, would be a great time for me to finish up SwiftUI-based rewrites and push them to production. I have a lot of prep work I can do in the meantime.

My wife and I baked a cake for her mother’s birthday. It was really good!

🎵 Somehow I made it from Beats 1 to Robyn Hitchcock’s “Chronology”, which is a fun listen but very far afield from the hip-hop I started the day with.

🎵 It’s a Beats 1 morning for me. I don’t often listen to Beats 1, but today I had no idea what to listen to while I worked.

Thompson Park

Thompson Park

Marlu Lake

Turtles at Marlu Lake

Marlu Lake

One of the bat houses I saw today. For some reason, I thought they were really cool.

🎵 Texas 25 is a great pop (ahem, blue-eyed soul) album. The band reworked eight of their hits, and added four new songs, to celebrate their 25th anniversary.

Ocean Grove, New Jersey

My MacBook Pro came back to me with a brand new top case and all its data intact. It looks great. I hope it gives me a couple more years of service.

Ocean Grove, New Jersey

FedEx just sent me a text saying I have a delivery scheduled today, which can only mean that my MacBook Pro is coming back to me from Apple’s repair center. Apple never gave me a case number, sent me an email, put a record of the repair on its support website, or gave me any idea that it knew that it had my laptop. It seems weird to me to get no type of receipt after handing over my laptop, but if it comes back today, all is well in the end, I guess.

Ocean Grove, New Jersey

Ocean Grove, New Jersey

🎵 “What’s Up Danger?” by Blackway and Black Caviar. (I’m starting my day in the Spider-Verse.)

I took my 2013 MacBook Pro to the Apple Store yesterday to get a new battery. It’s quite an extensive repair (whole case-top replacement), so I will be without it for about a week. I have multiple backups, but hope that its SSD does not get wiped.🤞

Answers to the most common questions about SwiftUI:

SwiftUI is not compatible with earlier versions of iOS, macOS, or any of Apple’s other operating systems. So, to start adopting it, you either need to decide that it’s acceptable for the app in which you’ll use SwiftUI to only work on the latest operating systems — or you’ll need to ”gate off” the features written in Swift UI from older versions, using Swift’s @available syntax.

I found this post by @johnsundell to be a very useful, concise explanation of what I need to know right now about Swift UI.

Right off the bat, it tells me that I can wait a little while to adopt it. My time this year would be better served refactoring my codebase to prepare for a SwiftUI transition next year. For example, I can already start work on getting rid of storyboards in SwiftoDo for iOS, and that will prepare me for the storyboard-free future with SwiftUI.

🎧 Listening to ATP’s WWDC live show at the top of my work day.

My Simple Call Blocker app won’t be that useful once iOS natively allows users to block all unknown callers. I still would use my app, because I need to answer certain unknown callers for work reasons, but most people wouldn’t need it anymore. That doesn’t bother me, however, because I released my app for free, and I get a lot of support email related to it.

It looks like the iPad Air 2 is not supported by iOS 13, at least based on the beta downloads available on Apple’s developer site. It may be time for me to trade it in and upgrade.

I’m looking forward to watching the WWDC keynote and state of the union later today. I am curious what kinds of changes are in store for iOS, both on iPads and on iPhones. If a iOS 13 beta drops later today, I will immediately install it on my older iPad Air 2.