How to Compare Xcode and iOS Beta Release Notes
With regular Xcode and OS beta updates, the release notes become a lot to skim through. Instead of re-reading them each time to find nuggets of new useful information, lets compare them. Apple does not make it any easier — there’s no version history or diffs (like in API documentation). But it’s possible with just a couple of web tools.
First, we need to get a copy of the older beta release notes at the Web Archive. For example, here are snapshots for Xcode 11 Beta 2 and Beta 3. They correspond to these original page URLs: beta 2 and beta 3. This also works for comparing iOS, tvOS, watchOS and macOS beta release notes. Just make sure to create a new web archive snapshot for each new beta.
Next, compare them using some visual page comparison tool, like ChangeDetection. I’m sure there are other online and offline tools for this.
Voila! There’s just a few neatly highlighted paragraphs of added and removed text to process.
