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tapstream.com
News
Nobility of Effort
An explosion of blog posts, tweets and discussion again this week on whether the App Store is a sustainable place for independent developers to make a living. Jared Sinclair kicked it all off and things exploded from there with commentary on both success and failure stories. My opinion? Regardless of the individual stories, it's still incredibly hard as an independent developer to make a living purely from the app store but it's been this way for a long time. David Smith has a great round up of the whole conversation here in blog post and podcast format. He also includes links to all of the articles from the week if you managed to miss any of the discussion.
developingperspective.com
Startup Launch from Google
This is obviously not directly related to iOS development but I thought this was significant enough to mention anyway. I'm not a fan of this at all as it really hurts the idea of the app stores being a level playing field for everyone. Obviously a plan like this (free training, featured spots, etc...) has to be limited to work logistically but with all the other news this week about creating sustainable mobile app businesses, this programme feels more like part of the problem than the solution.
loopinsight.com
Tools
Introducing the 1Password App Extension
This is exactly why I was most excited about Extensions over every other announcement made at WWDC (yes, even Swift!). As I watched this video of the newly announced 1Password extension for iOS 8 it's obvious just how far Apple have knocked it out of the park with extensions. The only slight workflow issue is having to tap the 1Password button, then select the extension but as I understand it, there's no way around that. At least developers are able to filter the set of extensions listed, as shown in the video.
Oh and if you have an app which has any kind of login screen, please make my life easier and integrate this library!
agilebits.com
Faux Pas
This new tool from Ali Rantakari looks great. It's a cross between the static analyser, Slender and Objective-Clean all in one. This is a very ambitious project but running it past a couple of our apps revealed some good suggestions. You should probably download it and let it judge you 😆.
fauxpasapp.com
GitDiff
While the "M" in the Xcode Project Navigator is handy, what would be really useful is to see what lines were modified compared to the current committed state. John Holdsworth has put together this useful Xcode plugin to do exactly that.
github.com
Code
Alamofire
Mattt Thompson answering the question of what will happen to AFNetworking now that Swift is on the horizon by publishing a new networking library in Swift. Clearly inspired by AFNetworking but now the AF has been promoted from a class prefix into the full name of the library 😀. I'm guessing that AFNetworking will still be maintained (by Mattt or others) for a significant period of time so I wouldn't worry about it being abandoned immediately but if you're already using Swift, this is going to be worth a look.
github.com
Swift Instance Methods are Curried Functions
Ole Begemann with a look behind the scenes of how instance methods are implemented in Swift. He then goes on to write about at how this can be used to make a safer implementation of target/action, with the help of Christoffer Lernö and Jens Jakob Jensen.
oleb.net
AYVibrantButton
Alan Yip with a lovely iOS 8 style button using the new UIVisualEffect APIs. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how people use (or overuse?) these new effects in apps.
github.com
Design
Affinity Designer
This brand new illustration tool went into beta this week. From a quick look it seems to be focusing more on the illustration side of things than straight up graphic or interface design but along with Sketch and PaintCode we are really spoiled for beautiful, reasonably priced design tools on the Mac these days.
serif.com
Business and Marketing
Value-Added Tax
Ole Begemann pulls off the double whammy again this week by not only blogging about the internals of Swift instance methods but also looking into the new EU VAT rules which come into effect next year. Even if you're not based in the EU, this will affect you as you sell apps here through the App Store so you should be aware of this.
oleb.net
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