Swift Package Index joins Apple

82 pointsposted 2 hours ago
by JDevlieghere
(swiftpackageindex.com)

23 Comments

peterspath

an hour ago

Well I was thinking about making a competitor to SPI because they only support GitHub repo’s.

This news makes it easy. I’m starting the engines on this…

unfunco

an hour ago

Working on an idea after it has been Sherlocked is a bold choice.

nish__

39 minutes ago

What does Sherlocked mean?

julianozen

36 minutes ago

It means Apple (or big tech) has adopted/cloned your product basically killing your products ability to succeed

In reference to when Apple created a project called Sherlock that was a direct copy of a popular Mac app Watson

jrmg

22 minutes ago

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”.

1: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/f2d124c36d74f71c6... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)

xd1936

37 minutes ago

It's a reference to Sherlock (and later Spotlight) being added to macOS, rendering the previous third-party search-launcher tools obsolete.

cavoirom

17 minutes ago

Thank you, I learned it today. On the other side, some users replaced Sherlock (Spotlight) with Alfred.

rahkiin

an hour ago

Or send in a PR for gitlab/… support?

peterspath

29 minutes ago

They did not want that and discouraged it.

bigyabai

24 minutes ago

Merging a PR with Apple is harder than merging into the left side of a six-lane highway during rush hour.

trollbridge

21 minutes ago

Please get in touch, as I've wanted this to support Gitlab (et al) for a while, and I'm nervous about the future of SPI now.

aaronvg

22 minutes ago

kind of surprised Swift didn't launch with this by default, built in-house

jshier

an hour ago

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.

marcelox86

an hour ago

I see the opposite, they have a lot of oss projects nowadays and most of their new, interesting stuff is getting open sourced too, a la Microsoft

jshier

an hour ago

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.

y1n0

an hour ago

No true Scotsman…

SoKamil

an hour ago

This acquisition sounds like a sign that Apple wants to get better on that front.

jshier

an hour ago

That's a pretty low bar, and doesn't necessarily mean "good".

eddythompson80

17 minutes ago

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

frizlab

11 minutes ago

Swift on Linux has changed since a few years ago. A lot.

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.