Issue 148

30^th May 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

If all has gone to plan then I’m currently at 35,000ft somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean. The Beats acquisition was finally confirmed and naturally I expect it to get a small mention but apart from that everyone’s lips have remained fairly sealed on what’s going to be announced on Monday. The redesign of OS X seems likely and of course we will get a first look at iOS 8 but beyond that (and don’t forget that there may be nothing beyond that to announce right now) we’re in the dark. Can’t wait!

Dave Verwer

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News

Nik Fletcher with a lengthy (seriously, 7,000 words) look at the state of iOS and Mac development in the lead up to next week’s announcements. While I hope we can all agree that this platform we are sinking our valuable development time into is pretty wonderful, it would be ridiculous to claim that it was without problems. Nik covers all sorts of topics here, more than I can sum up in a paragraph so the easiest thing to do is make yourself a nice cup of tea and read the whole thing.

Bug reporting on Apple products is not the most rewarding process and transparency could certainly be improved. Daniel Jalkut puts the case forward that we should all be filing more bugs in response to Marco Arment’s recent post on the same subject. I can say from experience that if you’re attending WWDC next week and have a problem for the labs, arriving with a bug number gives you a much better chance at getting action on your problem. The engineers will love you for being prepared too!

WWDC

Fun little game using iBeacons if you’re in San Francisco next week.

Tools

If you’re the kind of person who likes to keep your file system as organised as you do your group structure then you need to check this out. Personally I’m actually happy with source files all going into the same file system folder but there is one feature of this I do find interesting. If you ever just remove a file from a project without removing the files from disk as well, Synx will find unused files and clean them up too.

AppCode 3.0 was released this week and the biggest news here is that it now has a full UI designer. I linked to this when it first appeared in beta but at the time the interface editor only supported the old format of XIB files which rendered it pretty useless with a modern Xcode project. Looks like it’s come a long way from there with both new XIB and Storyboard formats now being supported. Impressive work.

Code

I’m still very much on the side of the fence that says this isn’t going to happen next week and it seems like Roopesh Chander agrees. He brings up some great points on why implementing this would be very challenging. Status bar issues, edge swipe issues, keyboard issues and none of them have a clear solution. Edge swipes are probably easiest to fix (if the swipe starts in the other app but then moves, it gets cancelled and occurs as an edge swipe in the other) but even if that happens, this is just going to feel too weird. I’m sticking with a no prediction on this.

If there is a downside to Facebook’s Pop library it’s that it is missing an example project. André Schneider has taken on that problem and produced this project with several examples of getting this going inside your app.

It should be blindingly obvious, and expected, that Apple don’t play by the same rules that we have to (for example, sandboxing and all of their Mac apps) but I did like Mark Sands’ investigation into how iBooks & iTunes U get to use UIPopoverController on the iPhone. I agree with Kyle Richter that there is no scandal here though, public APIs live (almost) forever and it’s certainly not an attempt to gain any kind of competitive advantage (they have that already 😉).

Videos

Great selection of videos from this year’s NSConference covering everything from in depth talk of the FUSE file system, through core animation into a history lesson on Hypercard ending in an explanation of why we are all so bad at poker. If you weren’t able to attend this year (like me!), these give a nice flavour of the conference.

More conference videos this week. This time from the tech talks that happened in Istanbul earlier this year. We’re all very lucky that it’s becoming much more common to make videos like this available after these events. Just don’t forget to attend one or two every year in person, videos are fantastic to grasp the technical content but you can’t replace meeting people face to face.

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And finally...

This is why we made Status Magic.