Issue 149

Comment

WWDC is drawing to a close and what a week it's been. It feels like Apple took the list of things we have been ~~complai~~ providing constructive criticism on for the last 6 years, put them into a massive to do list and checked each one off one by one... Once that was done, all we got was a BRAND NEW LANGUAGE! 😍 iOS 8 is going to be an incredible release for developers and I am very optimistic about the future of Swift as well. Thank you to everyone involved for a wonderful WWDC and all of the enhancements.

In summary, best WWDC ever... Who else feels like this?

News

Apple Has (Partly) Lifted the NDA for Beta Releases

Ole Begemann on the changes to the NDA that accompanied this week's announcements. I read this the same way as Ole does, which is to say that we shouldn't post screenshots (not something that technical articles tend to do much anyway), don't post consumer focused reviews of iOS 8 or OS X Yosemite (no problem there either) and don't distribute the software (obviously!). This is great news for technical discussions of the new technologies though and should keep me busy with plenty of material to link to before the public releases. Even the App Store Review Guidelines are no longer behind the developer portal login.

Clarification on Beta App Review

Ole Begemann (again!) on the new TestFlight service which is going to go live later in the year. Provisioning for beta has been a huge issue for a long time now and it looks like Apple have fixed the vast majority of complaints with these changes (along with adding a whole load of other features like analytics and better sales reports). Craig Hockenberry also makes a great point that this might be a good way to get feedback from Apple on apps before final review. Thank you Apple!

Tools

Game On!

There was plenty of Sherlocking in Monday's keynote. It's a fact of life when developing for any platform really that the vendor could expand their feature set and trample all over you in the process and there is nothing that can, or should be done about that. However, it's not necessarily the end of the road if it happens. Apple will usually try to cater for the general case and usually only provide major updates once a year. As an independent developer, you can iterate faster and cater for the edge cases which Apple will probably steer clear of. Plus, pre-keynote probably only 5% of developers knew that they needed this kind of tool, now 100% do.

User Experience Archives

Joachim Bengtsson on a new site launched to collect sessions from his Lookback service. It's intended to be a collection of interesting sessions in apps highlighting common UI problems. There are already a good number of videos uploaded and they provide some useful, and sometimes amusing insight into various design problems.

Git 2.0 is here and it's full of goodies

With all of the WWDC related announcements this week it's easy to forget that the rest of the tech world still rolls on regardless. This week saw a git hit 2.0, Nicola Paolucci has the details.

Code

Swift Language Highlights: An Objective-C Developer's Perspective

Matt Galloway with a great rundown of some highlights of Swift. You should, of course, read the language guide but if you haven't had time to run through that 500+ page tome then this is a nice introduction to some of the more interesting parts of it. You really should read the full book though, there is a huge amount to learn about this new language.

Swift & AFNetworking

There are always going to be issues with a brand new language (especially one which has been kept secret) so this isn't criticism so much as a slight warning that if you jump in with both feet on Swift development in real apps then you are going to find issues. Markus Persson has a write up here of a small issue with bringing AFNetworking into Swift, even if you don't use AFNetworking this is an interesting dive into fixing this kind of problem. Also, check out the follow up post for a better solution to the original problem.

Swift Initializers

It's going to be so much fun learning this language over the next few months and Ash Furrow kicks us off at the beginning with a great guide to initialisers (yes, s not z 😄).

What's New

Since iOS 7 introduced silent, automatic updates to apps we have lost much of our ability to communicate with our users through release notes. Matt Zanchelli has taken a crack at the problem and produced this configurable "What's New" screen. My only caution with this is not to use it for every release but save it for when you really need to talk to people, give it some impact.

Design

How Slack Onboards New Users

This is a topic I've been thinking about in depth for a while now for a product I'm currently working on. It's an area of application design which is often overlooked and can be critical to the success of an app. This specific example is around a web application, Slack, but might just inspire you to think about that first run experience and onboarding process in your app.

And finally...

Flappy Swift

Time from announcement to Flappy Swift was about 8 hours by my count...

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Issue 149 June 6th 2014