Apple Event, Where are the Swift live streamers?

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the CompileSwift Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Widom. You can find this podcast at powerswift.com. So we have an Apple event on May 7th at 7 AM Pacific time.

Now the likelihood is, if you look at the graphics and and you see the pencil and everything else and the rumors, the likelihood is this is an an iPad event. Which is interesting because we have not had new iPads in quite a while, which hopefully means we are going to see some significant leap in hardware, maybe software but more likely hardware and I think that the timing is also interesting. Right? We have this new hardware coming out before dub dub DC and that's why I'm saying hardware because traditionally of course the operating systems and any of those major changes and things like that would normally come at the, you know, worldwide developers conference every year which is in June. So it's unlikely this new hardware will have any significant pointers to where the iPadOS operating system is going this year because I would expect that at WWDC like I say.

On the flip side maybe they announce the hardware and they say hey, it's gonna take a while and I can't imagine they're gonna say you'll have to wait until June. So it's gonna be very to see what happens there. Now of course, the assumption is that it's iPad because of the pencil. Although one day I would love to see my dream of being able to use my pencil on my iPhone. Please, Apple, please make that happen.

Just saying. The other thing is, and and I've said this before, I believe, but I'm gonna say it again. It's not gonna happen, but wouldn't it be absolutely fantastic if we had some large screen device that worked with the pencil? I would love to see something like, dare I say it, the Microsoft Surface Studio for creatives and art type folks and designers. That massive display that is touchscreen, you could use a pencil on it.

I mean, it will be living the dream. Right? It all started with those Wacom tablets, Cintiq, I think it's called if I remember rightly and having that large display that you could just work with and put your hands on. It will be lovely to see Apple do a thing like that. I think that they could do a phenomenal job on that.

But we won't see it anytime soon if at all because I just don't think that's what Apple wants. And also the hardware cost itself would probably be astronomical having a touchscreen that size. But I'm gonna keep living and hoping for that dream one day. You never know. Right?

So we've got that new event. Other things that I wanted to talk about as well is how I've not been doing a lot of swift lately and folks have asked me about this. And it's interesting because there's no real purpose driven reason behind it. I have not been doing a lot of Swift lately because I've just had other projects that interest me more. That's not to say that I'm any less interested in Swift.

But as some of you have followed us on my livestream at twitch.tvforward/compiledev, you know that I've been working on games with unreal engine, Godot. I've also started learning and working a project with Rust and these are all just because I can. The, I I had the freedom to do that. I have my day job which is mobile and primarily of course Android and Swift and React Native. So I'm lucky that I can do all these side projects myself.

It doesn't mean that I care any less about Swift. It just means that those have had my attention for a while. However, it did get me to thinking because someone in our Discord, and there's a link in the show notes for the dev club Discord, or just go to compileswift.comforward/discord. They asked about, hey, why is it I see so few streamers doing Swift on Twitch for example? And got to thinking about this.

And of course, time zones are a factor. Right? Naturally, for myself and my friends who do live streams, we're all pretty much in the same time zones. So we all end up being evening the US evening time streamers. However, got to thinking about it, got to looking and and sure enough, yeah, there is not a lot of massive amount of folks doing swift on Twitch.

There is. And if you are one of them, please reach out to me. Compile Swift on any of the social networks or like I say, compileswift.com. And I would love to tell folks to go watch your streams, so please do that. Because it is something that doesn't have as much traction on those platforms as some of the other programming languages for example and there's no reason that it shouldn't.

And I would love to anytime I come across the Swift or SwiftUI or Apple platform developer doing stuff on Twitch, I make a note of it because that is in it, obviously, an area that deeply interests me and and folks that I hang out with. But it was interesting that other folks comment about how it's hard to find some. So again, if you're one of them, reach out, whatever platform. Look for Compile Swift or or go to twitch.tvforward/compiledev. Tell me about it.

I I would dearly love to tell folks about your live streams. So there's a request there that's your call to action for this episode. But it also speaks to, I think, the perception of Swift in general because people tend to think of Swift as, oh, that Apple development platform. Well, yes, that is mostly true, unfortunately. But it is also available on other platforms as from a previous episode where we spoke about Swift for making Android apps and Swift on the server And I think that more of the promotion for those kind of platforms need to happen.

It is something that has a a very perceived image. Right? Just like many other things like when folks say Android. Oh, you mean Samsung. No.

It's owned by Yes. You see it on Samsung Galaxy, but it is owned by Google. But the perception is, oh, you mean that Samsung phone. Right? Those kind of problems.

I'm sure you're familiar with these. So it was just interesting to to come across that and to talk about that. And so I wanted to point those few little thoughts out in this episode. I've been extremely busy with other commitments. Doesn't mean I'm any or less committed to swift, quite the opposite.

In fact, I'm doing a lot of Swift in personal projects. I'm just not telling the world about them. It is interesting to see how the developer communities think of, one of our favorite development languages and and the perception that it has. And I think that I would love to see it viewed as something other than, oh, that Apple platform. Because of course, there's a lot of folks out there who just flat out don't like anything Apple related.

And therefore, by extension, in their mind, never gonna do Swift, don't like Swift, blah blah blah. And I think we need to change that and and educate folks that, look, yes, Apple invented it. Yes, Apple has Swift UI and some of the layers, but Swift is an open source language. Anyway, just wanted to put those thoughts out there in this brief episode this week. I wanted to get this out because I missed last week.

Again, I've been very busy with just life things like we all do sometimes. So that's it, folks. Would be interesting to see what the Apple event has on May 7th. I'm sure there'd be things to talk about. If you would like to come on this podcast and talk about something, reach out to me.

Right? CompileSwift on any of the networks. Or you can go to, I don't mention it very often, but you can go to facebook.comforward/compilesw. I've got a page up there as well and like I say, compileswhip.com for for just about everything else. That's it folks.

Hope you have a great week and I will speak to you in the next episode.