Issue 150

News

What Developers Should Know About Apple’s TestFlight

Nick Arnott with more details on TestFlight and iTunes Connect beta testing. I think we can all agree that this is a huge step forward both in terms of the amount of beta testing that will be possible with the new system and the removal of the UDID dance for allowing people to install beta builds but there are still limitations. In other news, the sky is still blue, day still follows night and life still isn't perfect.

The Next Five Years

One thing I heard repeatedly last week was people saying "What are we going to complain about now?". I was pretty confident that we would all find something suitable to fill the void now that Christmas came early, Justin Williams kicks us off.

Tools

Swift Playground Builder

If you've seen the "Swift Tour" in Xcode 6, it's a playground document which has integrated documentation inline with the interactive portions. Wouldn't it be nice if we could also create this kind of documentation to accompany blog posts/training materials. Apple don't provide anything official to help produce this but Jason Sandmeyer has us covered.

IBDesignable and IBInspectable

IBDesignable and IBInspectable are two new attributes available in both Swift and Objective-C to enable live visualisation of views and to expose properties of your objects as editable values in Interface Builder. These are going to be a huge usability win for custom classes. Andrei Puni has the details.

Code

NSHipster does iOS 8

As you would expect from NSHipster, this post sees Mattt Thompson take a look into the darker corners of the API diffs and highlights some less well known changes and enhancements coming down the line from Apple. I found the CMFloor and CMAltimeter classes mentioned here particularly interesting.

Explaining iOS 8’s extensions

The extent of the new extension APIs in iOS 8 was one of the biggest surprises for me last week. I've been going on about needing better interop between apps for a long time but I was realistically only hoping for sharing extensions and had not dared to dream of all of the other goodies that we will be receiving. Andrew Cunningham takes a high level look at extensions and how they work. You might also want to check out Ole Begemann's take on how powerful extensions are going to be as well.

Error Handling in Swift

Chris Cieslak with a timely reminder that we shouldn't just be asking "How do I do this Objective-C thing in Swift?", but instead taking advantage of the new language to make things more explicit and understandable.

Inside Swift

Evan Swick on some of the internals of the Swift language. It's not a huge surprise but there are a lot of similarities with Objective-C here. If this topic is of interest then you should also check out Jay Freeman's talk from AltConf.

macOS Development

Mac OS X Yosemite Under the Magnifying Glass

With all the excitement of iOS 8, it's almost possible to forget that we also got shown a preview of Yosemite last week. Min Ming Lo takes a detailed look at some of the design changes coming in 10.10 and from this and the keynote last week I have to say I love the direction that Apple are taking with OS X.

Business and Marketing

Apple Expanding Curation To More European App Store Categories

Bringing more curation to the App Store is a great move and I'm really happy to see that this type of listing is getting some attention in countries outside the US and UK. With this kind of change and the other store improvements which are on the way with iOS 8 the future of app discovery is looking a little brighter. Let's hope this continues to improve.

Videos

WWDC 2014 Session Videos

It looks like all of the videos have now been published on the official WWDC page. No developer login needed and no NDA either. It's hard to describe how much incredible knowledge lurks within the links on this page. You might also like to keep track of which ones you have watched.

AltConf Videos

On top of all the official videos from WWDC, all of the videos from AltConf have also been published. The content here is much broader than the WWDC videos covering everything from the highly technical, through design and marketing right along to a panel discussion of ethics. Wonderful content.

And finally...

The Future of Custom Keyboards

dot dot dash dot - dot dot dash - dash dot - dash dot - dash dot dash dash

Issue 150 June 13th 2014

Sponsored Link

Up to $30,000 in free tools and services from Facebook