Apple Announced Swift Assist at WWDC 2024... So Where Is It?

[Rafagon]

This isn't the only thing missing in action at Apple. And far from the most important.

 

[svish]

Not surprised with the delay. Hopefully Apple will give an update at this year's WWDC and it will be made available soon after.

 

[rbart]

This isn't the only thing missing in action at Apple. And far from the most important.

It's more important for developers than an "intelligent" Siri.
It shows how much Apple is late if they are not able to provide such tool (which works on servers).
Each LLM, including open source, is capable of doing that.

 

[bhirt37]

More apple vaporware. I have started doing all my server side swift coding in vscode on windows 11. Moving away from Xcode would have been unthinkable a decade ago. I abandoned windows back in the very early 2000s for anything other than games or helping family and friends out. I still do all my iPhone Development and android Development on my Macs, but I’m getting ready to migrate my android development environment to Windows too. I might even try a hobby ios/swiftui app in vscode as an experiment. For all its faults, microsoft has really made a U-turn (maybe 120 degrees, lol) in the last decade. It has become much more developer friendly. They have embraced open source more and more. Things like Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) are a nice to have if you want to run things locally instead of on a server. Docker leverages WSL which is great if your development workflow relies on it. Windows Terminal keeps getting better. Command line tools like winget (think brew, pacman, apt) are great for managing software. And I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but power shell keeps improving and is no longer the dreadful experience. These are a few of my personal observations.

Is Microsoft perfect? No. Are the things I don’t like? Yes. Do I feel like they are moving in the right direction? Yes.

I still prefer macOS, but I feel like Apple has lost its magic and is moving in the wrong direction. Things are slowly getting worse and worse.

I will never use android phone as my daily driver, because I loath Google and their stance on privacy and data collection. Their business model is abhorrent. You are the product, not the customer the amount of data they have collected on you and sell is mind-boggling. So for better or worse, I will stick with the iPhone.

This might be a bad analogy, but I view Tim Cook’s takeover like McDonnell Douglas’s management taking over Boeing when they merged. Boeing was a company of engineers run by engineers. MD were pencil pushers that had trouble making planes. Things looked great for a long time, but that corporate culture slowly eroded. Now we have the Boeing of today that puts profit above employees, that puts profit above innovation.

 

[Graphate]

Guess I have a different opinion. An operating system (especially when the company chooses to make its apps part of it) should never ever have ads.

I didn’t see this earlier, and I can’t speak for the person you’re responding to… I agree there is both a difference between an operating systems and individual apps, there’s also some core apps that blur the lines (some more than others).

(Is terminal an app or a window into the operating system, is finder an app or is it functionally the operating system itself, there are less obvious ones I’m sure)

But I don’t think I would call maps, pages, or mail part of the operating system (I would entertain an argument for Safari/webkit). Putting ads within a place you need to seek-out to see them (ie opening maps to see the ads, opening mail to see ads) isn’t offensive to me (perhaps others too)… provided (a) the ads are related to the thing you use it for (maps advertising local business with physical locations), and (b) I can avoid the ‘thing’ and still use the rest of the operating system to do other ‘things’ and never see ads again.

I whole heartedly agree… if Apple put an advertisement for anything in a main window (any place a person must use at least sometimes, system preferences, springboard/finder) it would be very inappropriate (didn’t windows do that recently?). Charge whatever you want for the thing, but don’t show me ads as part of the deal. Make an ads “app” that doesn’t hide its purpose.

 

[gokhano]

I'm surprised to hear, that other LLMs are not good at Swift Code. Is there not enough code publicly available to train them on?

There is. But Apple engineers can't help making too many breaking changes and overly frequent - no AI can keep up with them.

 

[johnalan]

I guess now it's just ChatGPT, and they threw out their own model... per WWDC 25

 

[rbart]

I guess now it's just ChatGPT, and they threw out their own model... per WWDC 25

ChatGPT or the model of your choice. I think it’s a good decision to leave developers free to choose the model they want.
LLM are evolving a lot for development, we can’t be stuck for one year with an outdated solution

 

[Astuces iOS]

Finaly something good for devs !