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Attribution goes free at Tapstream, gains iTC integration
Earlier this month Tapstream made its attribution service free, with API access behind a pay-wall. The newly launched attribution dashboard also integrates with Apple’s new iTC App Analytics so all of your Tapstream campaigns will also show up in iTunes Connect.
tapstream.com
News
A company made of people
Allen Pike on the "new" Apple. We all knew Apple was going to feel different without Steve and the transition has taken a while (as it should have done) but it has never felt more obvious than in recent months. There was certainly a very different feel to WWDC this year and I, for one, welcome our more open overlords.
allenpike.com
iOS 8 Privacy Updates
Luis Abreu with a detailed look at the changes to privacy and security in iOS 8 (and Yosemite). Both new operating systems include significant enhancements in this area but it's sometimes hard to keep track of everything that has changed. This article is a great place to start to get a sense of what's changed from both a user and developer perspective.
lmjabreu.com
Code
Strings in Swift
Ole Begemann's article this week might as well have been titled "Unicode is Hard" instead of "Strings in Swift" 😄. It's a great article, as always, and what makes it even better is that Ole has included a Swift playground alongside the post. These playgrounds are going to make blog posts like this a joy to follow along with as you can experiment with the code as you go. I'm guessing that we'll see a lot more playgrounds accompanying posts in the future.
oleb.net
The Case for Message Passing in Swift
Plenty of discussion this week on Swift not using message passing for method invocation and Michael Tsai has a great round up of the key posts that made up the discussion. Obviously message passing isn't going away any time soon but the fact that Swift only uses it for interop with Objective-C code means that as the pendulum swings away from ObjC and into Swift, it might eventually. Is that a bad thing? Hmm, I'm not actually sure 🙊.
mjtsai.com
QueryKit
Kyle Fuller with a new Swift project to give a more readable syntax to common Core Data querying, fetching and deleting. I really love seeing what directions people are going in with Swift and how everyone is experimenting with the language right now.
github.com
ZFRippleButton
I wondered how long it would take for someone to implement a version of the new tap sensitive button animations that we recently saw announced with Android L and "not long" turns out to be the answer. Amornchai Kanokpullwad has put together this UIButton subclass which supports the animation starting from the touch location. I really like this.
github.com
macOS Development
Inspecting Yosemite's Icons
Like Nick Keppol, I also really love (most) of the icons in Yosemite. In this article he takes a long and detailed look at the iconography in the new OS. Nick has also very kindly created a template Photoshop document containing the three new grids for the Yosemite icons.
martiancraft.com
Design
How to build a nice Hamburger Button transition in Swift
Despite how uncool the hamburger menu is these days, this animation is beautiful. Robert Böhnke has implemented this using Swift (although the implementation language matters almost nothing for code like this). The technique of animating strokeStart and strokeEnd has been around for a long time but I have never seen it used to such great effect.
robb.is
Business and Marketing
How to Produce an App Promo Video
Dan Counsell on creating promotional videos for your apps. There are so many ways to do this kind of video, from a simple screen recording, through screen recordings & motion graphics, right through to the type of videos Dan is talking about here. These videos are definitely a step up in time/cost/effort but really do make your apps look more professional. Dan also published a related piece last week with some great examples of app promotion videos which is also worth checking out.
dancounsell.com
There is no later for your customers
The web development mantra of "Ship early and ship often" is something that iOS & Mac developers have not been particularly quick to adopt but with automatic app updates now being taken for granted, review times which are quite predictable and some teams even switching to weekly releases it's worth keeping Joshua Porter's advice from this article in mind.
bokardo.com
Sponsored Jobs
Leading mobile banking app Numbrs seeks talented iOS engineers
We are looking for experienced iOS engineers to join our team in Zürich, as part of Numbrs. Come and help us to revolutionise the banking industry. Despite its reputation as a banking capital, Zurich is rapidly becoming one of Europe's great cultural destinations. Much like our cutting edge banking app Numbrs, the city is at the technological forefront.
centralway.com
iOS Engineer at Thumbtack, San Francisco
Thumbtack is looking to build an amazing mobile experience for hundreds of thousands of users. Both sides of the Thumbtack marketplace (service providers and their clients) will benefit massively from enhanced mobile experiences. Imagine what you might do if you could run your business or request services from your iPhone? Help us transform lives around the country.
grnh.se
Coursera iOS Software Engineer - Mountain View, CA
Coursera makes the best university courses available for free for everyone. We're looking for experienced iOS developers to help us make education a basic human right. Work in Swift on our new mobile core architecture to bring learning to millions of students around the world.
coursera.org
And finally...
App: The Human Story
Cool project, but I'm mainly linking to this because of Craig Hockenberry's Helvetcia T-shirt which I noticed in the video 😊.
kickstarter.com