This makes it sound like Sherlock was named in response to Watson. It was the other way around.
Earlier versions of Mac OS had an app called ‘Sherlock’[^1] that could search local files and the web in a fairly rigid manner.
‘Watson’[^2] was a third party shareware app very much inspired by Sherlock (and obviously, given the name, not trying to hide that!) that was much more flexible, more ‘OS X-like’, arguably much more user friendly, and was open to plugins (like, there was a movie time search plugin, an eBay plugin, an Amazon plugin etc).
Sherlock 3[^3], in MacOS 10.2, was redesigned with a UI very like that of Watson, and also allowed similar plugins, making Watson obsolete.
In the Apple developer world, “being Sherlocked” came to mean “your app being made obsolete by Apple including identical functionality with the OS”.
But here Apple seems like they avoided that by buying the project instead of creating their own clone. Doesn't that make it nothing lime the Sherlock/Watson situation?
Cloning features and UI in your own product is not dishonorable. Outcompeting someone who didn’t bake in a moat isn’t doing anything wrong, or Burger King and Wendy’s shouldn’t exist.
Well at least they didn't have their product managers reach out to "start a conversation" like Google and Microsoft's who then blatantly rip off the product later.
> "Here's how I see it," Jobs said — I'm loosely paraphrasing.
> "You know those handcars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That's Karelia. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks."
> So basically the message was: get out of the way, kid; this is our market.
Hope folks will always keep that in mind as they develop software for proprietary platforms they don't own.
This is a genuinely interesting topic, and as we say in the blog post:
> Together, we’re building a comprehensive package registry to serve the Swift community’s evolving needs.
The great thing about a registry is that it doesn't care where the original source is hosted. We will be moving away from that model completely as we work towards this.
Not optimistic here. While I'm glad the SPI guys are getting paid (that is, a full time job), Apple is pretty bad at open source and developer services both, and they explicitly call out developer identity as a future direction, which doesn't fill me with hope.
I tried to get a personal developer account (I'm already a developer through an organisation). The app required a Driver's license as the only accepted ID. I don't drive because I'm blind. They did a screen share and talked me through applying on the web site. It failed. They never gave a reason and ignored me when I asked for one. They just said
"Hello Robert,
Thank you for your patience while I awaited a response from our operations team.
Upon review, we have found that we can’t verify your identity with the Apple Developer app or provide further assistance with the Apple Account for Apple developer programs.
You can still take advantage of great content using your Apple Account in Xcode to develop and test apps on your own device. Learn more about Xcode development.
I do apologise that I was not of more help to you in this situation but wish you the best of luck for the future.
"
They will destroy the developer experience when they add identity and signing.
My driver's license is in a form factor Apple cannot scan. A few months ago, I tried to get it scanned four times (with the UI telling me various versions of "your ID is too blurry" / "there was a technical issue") before Apple just blocked me from applying for the developer program.
Their support gave me the exact same template: "After reviewing your account details, it looks like we can’t verify your identity with the Apple Developer app or provide further assistance with the Apple Account for Apple developer programs."
I was only unblocked recently (surprisingly -- I thought I was banned forever), and so I decided to try applying with passport instead. That got further, as instead of saying my ID image was blurry, it said "ID Verification Rejected".
I am in contact with developer support right now and they told me that one of my devices or phone numbers was registered with another developer account, but they haven't told me which one (only to "remove phone numbers and devices that you don’t own" -- which isn't applicable as I own all of them).
They're taking 4+ days to reply each time though, which is super frustrating.
Yes, of course, it seems that type of ID was specifically rejected in the story above. Only drivers allowed to sign up. Non-drivers rejected because they don’t drive.
Simply being open doesn't make them good open source projects. Luckily the SPI shouldn't need to conform to Apple's release schedule, and should operate mostly independently, so the worst aspects of Apple's open source projects will be less of an issue.
Even simpler, this is a "no Scotsman" scenario. Apple has unprecedented contempt for Open designs and software standards, even compared to the pitiful example that Microsoft and Google set.
Unlike them, Apple takes a stance of contravening the public good to emphasize lock-in. They refused USB-C for as long as possible to sell licensed serial connectors that their Macs didn't even use. They fought tooth-and-nail to politicize the free distribution of software when the EU wanted to enable sideloading. They abandoned open initiatives like Khronos, for no reason other than to screw over cross-platform developers. They give Safari special OS entitlements that they refuse to extend to competing mobile browsers, and then justify it as if they can't write a safe OS.
There is no company on planet Earth that goes this far to undermine FOSS. Apple is the fakest Scot.
I like the SPM, but it definitely has its "rough edges."
Having an index like this, is great.
However, I guarantee that there will be some caterwaulin', if Apple decides to regulate which packages get indexed (which I think should happen, as it's now an official Apple brand).
> … if Apple decides to regulate which packages get indexed
I have mixed feelings here. If they disallow too much, they’ll alienate too many projects and there will be an exodus of non-Apple platform Swift devs.
I guess it doesn’t really gate pulling any dependencies you want, but too much and/or the wrong kind of filtering (e.g. removing non-Apple alternatives to core Apple libraries) would not look (nor feel) good.
Apple has something with Swift similar to what Google has with Go. The language has a lot of desirable features for server development very much like Go and Rust. Especially when compared to Java and C#.
It makes sense for them to build their services using Swift instead of something like Go and the Swift-on-server team has been doing a lot of work to get swift in a usable state on Linux. Having a thriving opensource (starting with a package index) makes a lot of sense to them for that.
My only problem with Swift is personal taste and experience. I tried it on linux few times (admittingly few years ago now) and generally I wasn't a fan. Go and Rust solve all the problems that Swift could have solved for me, so I didn't bother. But just like node got an entire class of developers into server side programming, Swift could be apples approach to get their iOS and MacOS developers a way to easily write server side code in swift as well
Easy and approachable sound pretty subjective to say the least; feature and syntax wise, Swift has become an absolute monster of a language. Rust's tooling and ecosystem are ahead and these points matter to me more than the raw syntax in the age of LLMs.
As per my experience, the learning curve of Swift is easier than rust’s. Yes, obviously, it’s subjective. Yes, if you want to do complex things in Swift (e.g. generic packs), the syntax is more complex, but that’s not needed every day.
As per the tooling, idk enough to report on that.
As per the LLMs remark, I do not use that at all, still, and hopefully never will, though I already know I won’t have the choice at some point, sadly.
The same condition is still true as the first time I was told "Swift on Linux" is somehow a first class experience:
> Documentation for the standard library is presently hosted on the Apple Developer website.
Sure enough, by Apple policy, the documentation pretends no non-Apple platforms exist. What happens for an API which could be different if your system isn't fruit-flavoured? They don't care and won't talk about it.
Is the feature I need available for this Linux device? No idea, but it does work with watchOS and tvOS made by Apple...
> Is the feature I need available for this Linux device?
If it’s in Foundation, yes. Swift 6 on Apple OSes now (since a while ago actually) uses the same open-source foundation as Linux. If it’s a proprietary framework (e.g. TabularData), no. It’s simple.
For the rest, almost all Swift packages developed by Apple are fully compatible with Linux, and the documentation of said packages is usually explicit wrt. platform specifics, AFAIK.
What a mess. A standard library and then apparently on top of that a Core and that's where they put a Foundation, you can imagine Apple architects arguing with the elevator contractors, "No, no, the Ground floor of our building is below our Foundation, it's very straight forward..."
But although that's enough for me to want no part of it, that's not what I was gesturing at. When we dig under the "Foundation" to look at the standard library we find that contrary to your assurance what works and how it works varies from one platform to another, just Apple only care about Apple platforms and so as usual they don't think that's worth mentioning.
They do have this information, they just don't publish it on their Apple pages because they're Apple and yet they insist this counts as the Swift documentation - and that should be all the reason you need not to take such "support" seriously.
Foundation is on top of Core Foundation, not "Core". Core Foundation is a C++ version of certain Foundation primitives for operating system services that can't depend on the Objective-C runtime.
The Swift standard library would be built on top of that, not the other way around.
Isn’t there a performance cost though with runtime binding of functions? (I’ve not looked too closely at Swift since the first couple of years when Objective C compatibility was essential, so maybe that’s less of a default than it was in the early days).
Runtime binding only occurs for Objective-C interop.
Swift functions are bound at compile time when statically known. Dynamic dispatch is done through vtables for native Swift classes, and through witness tables for protocol existentials.
I'm always surprised as well when new languages targeting widespread use launch without an official one. Dotnet/C#, Go and other languages that come batteries included with the package manager built into some kind of compiler/SDK binary, make the out of the box experience so much smoother, and the community hasn't fragmented nearly as much as say Java, Python and JS have into competing third party package management and project build tools.
Everyone in the Go community more or less uses the same Go modules support built into the SDK binary, much like how almost the entire DotNet community uses the NuGet package manager support built into the dotnet SDK binary. There are no extra dependencies to grab your project dependencies and build it.
My experiences in those langauges is that there is so much less debate over tooling, and people just get work done. No one in DotNet is waging an equivelent holy war about Gradle vs Maven etc...
I'm all for choices, but the languages who have made package management a first class citizen in their SDKs tend to be the languages I've enjoyed working in the most. I think package management tooling is a critical piece of developer ergonomics.
People used to joke a lot about how JS has a new framework every week, but I feel that way about Python build tooling! I've now had to use uv, poetry, pipenv, hatch...
I find your choice of examples (dotnet and go) baffling to me. Both enjoyed a very long life (8-10 years) past “1.0” before getting a standard package manager. The other examples, Java, python and JS are significantly older than Go (and even dotnet). Python and JS also had a significantly different intended use (scripting) than where they ended. Expectations of a language and its ecosystem changed. The compiler, linker, build system, package manager, LSP, linter, formatter, debugger, and plenty more are expected of any new language now.
Well not Go's package manager, right? Go modules came out 2019, Swift 2015?
I wasn't arguing against Swift needing a default package manager, I agree with that. Just the examples you picked to compare with are odd in context. You could compare Swift to its contemporaries like Rust or Zig and come to the same conclusion.
Always great to see community members see success.
This news makes it easy. I’m starting the engines on this…
In reference to when Apple created a project called Sherlock that was a direct copy of a popular Mac app Watson
Earlier versions of Mac OS had an app called ‘Sherlock’[^1] that could search local files and the web in a fairly rigid manner.
‘Watson’[^2] was a third party shareware app very much inspired by Sherlock (and obviously, given the name, not trying to hide that!) that was much more flexible, more ‘OS X-like’, arguably much more user friendly, and was open to plugins (like, there was a movie time search plugin, an eBay plugin, an Amazon plugin etc).
Sherlock 3[^3], in MacOS 10.2, was redesigned with a UI very like that of Watson, and also allowed similar plugins, making Watson obsolete.
In the Apple developer world, “being Sherlocked” came to mean “your app being made obsolete by Apple including identical functionality with the OS”.
1: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/f2d124c36d74f71c6... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)
> An hour later, Steve Jobs called me.
> "Here's how I see it," Jobs said — I'm loosely paraphrasing.
> "You know those handcars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That's Karelia. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks."
> So basically the message was: get out of the way, kid; this is our market.
Hope folks will always keep that in mind as they develop software for proprietary platforms they don't own.
https://www.paulgraham.com/road.html
> If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS.
> And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.
> Together, we’re building a comprehensive package registry to serve the Swift community’s evolving needs.
The great thing about a registry is that it doesn't care where the original source is hosted. We will be moving away from that model completely as we work towards this.
- https://swiftpackageregistry.com
- https://swiftpackageindex.com
"Hello Robert, Thank you for your patience while I awaited a response from our operations team.
Upon review, we have found that we can’t verify your identity with the Apple Developer app or provide further assistance with the Apple Account for Apple developer programs.
You can still take advantage of great content using your Apple Account in Xcode to develop and test apps on your own device. Learn more about Xcode development.
I do apologise that I was not of more help to you in this situation but wish you the best of luck for the future. "
They will destroy the developer experience when they add identity and signing.
Their support gave me the exact same template: "After reviewing your account details, it looks like we can’t verify your identity with the Apple Developer app or provide further assistance with the Apple Account for Apple developer programs."
I was only unblocked recently (surprisingly -- I thought I was banned forever), and so I decided to try applying with passport instead. That got further, as instead of saying my ID image was blurry, it said "ID Verification Rejected".
I am in contact with developer support right now and they told me that one of my devices or phone numbers was registered with another developer account, but they haven't told me which one (only to "remove phone numbers and devices that you don’t own" -- which isn't applicable as I own all of them).
They're taking 4+ days to reply each time though, which is super frustrating.
Unlike them, Apple takes a stance of contravening the public good to emphasize lock-in. They refused USB-C for as long as possible to sell licensed serial connectors that their Macs didn't even use. They fought tooth-and-nail to politicize the free distribution of software when the EU wanted to enable sideloading. They abandoned open initiatives like Khronos, for no reason other than to screw over cross-platform developers. They give Safari special OS entitlements that they refuse to extend to competing mobile browsers, and then justify it as if they can't write a safe OS.
There is no company on planet Earth that goes this far to undermine FOSS. Apple is the fakest Scot.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200421143520/https://twitter.c...
If they’ve ever done something we don’t like we’re not allowed to celebrate anything.
Might send the wrong message.
I like the SPM, but it definitely has its "rough edges."
Having an index like this, is great.
However, I guarantee that there will be some caterwaulin', if Apple decides to regulate which packages get indexed (which I think should happen, as it's now an official Apple brand).
I have mixed feelings here. If they disallow too much, they’ll alienate too many projects and there will be an exodus of non-Apple platform Swift devs.
I guess it doesn’t really gate pulling any dependencies you want, but too much and/or the wrong kind of filtering (e.g. removing non-Apple alternatives to core Apple libraries) would not look (nor feel) good.
It would not be a good thing, if they did that, here.
It would be interesting to see what they do with some of my packages.
I release alternative UI views, and Apple is infamous for wanting to force all developers into conforming to their UX.
It would make me sad, if they blocked things like these:
https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner
https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Checkbox
https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_RetroLEDDisplay
It makes sense for them to build their services using Swift instead of something like Go and the Swift-on-server team has been doing a lot of work to get swift in a usable state on Linux. Having a thriving opensource (starting with a package index) makes a lot of sense to them for that.
My only problem with Swift is personal taste and experience. I tried it on linux few times (admittingly few years ago now) and generally I wasn't a fan. Go and Rust solve all the problems that Swift could have solved for me, so I didn't bother. But just like node got an entire class of developers into server side programming, Swift could be apples approach to get their iOS and MacOS developers a way to easily write server side code in swift as well
I prefer Swift over rust as it has the same memory-safety guarantees with a much more approachable syntax, and is generally easier to work with.
As per the tooling, idk enough to report on that.
As per the LLMs remark, I do not use that at all, still, and hopefully never will, though I already know I won’t have the choice at some point, sadly.
> Documentation for the standard library is presently hosted on the Apple Developer website.
Sure enough, by Apple policy, the documentation pretends no non-Apple platforms exist. What happens for an API which could be different if your system isn't fruit-flavoured? They don't care and won't talk about it.
Is the feature I need available for this Linux device? No idea, but it does work with watchOS and tvOS made by Apple...
If it’s in Foundation, yes. Swift 6 on Apple OSes now (since a while ago actually) uses the same open-source foundation as Linux. If it’s a proprietary framework (e.g. TabularData), no. It’s simple.
For the rest, almost all Swift packages developed by Apple are fully compatible with Linux, and the documentation of said packages is usually explicit wrt. platform specifics, AFAIK.
But although that's enough for me to want no part of it, that's not what I was gesturing at. When we dig under the "Foundation" to look at the standard library we find that contrary to your assurance what works and how it works varies from one platform to another, just Apple only care about Apple platforms and so as usual they don't think that's worth mentioning.
They do have this information, they just don't publish it on their Apple pages because they're Apple and yet they insist this counts as the Swift documentation - and that should be all the reason you need not to take such "support" seriously.
Also I’m not sure what the Core thing you’re talking about even is.
The Swift standard library would be built on top of that, not the other way around.
Swift functions are bound at compile time when statically known. Dynamic dispatch is done through vtables for native Swift classes, and through witness tables for protocol existentials.
Everyone in the Go community more or less uses the same Go modules support built into the SDK binary, much like how almost the entire DotNet community uses the NuGet package manager support built into the dotnet SDK binary. There are no extra dependencies to grab your project dependencies and build it.
My experiences in those langauges is that there is so much less debate over tooling, and people just get work done. No one in DotNet is waging an equivelent holy war about Gradle vs Maven etc...
I'm all for choices, but the languages who have made package management a first class citizen in their SDKs tend to be the languages I've enjoyed working in the most. I think package management tooling is a critical piece of developer ergonomics.
People used to joke a lot about how JS has a new framework every week, but I feel that way about Python build tooling! I've now had to use uv, poetry, pipenv, hatch...
I wasn't arguing against Swift needing a default package manager, I agree with that. Just the examples you picked to compare with are odd in context. You could compare Swift to its contemporaries like Rust or Zig and come to the same conclusion.