Issue 151

20^th June 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It feels like things are calming down a little after all the news of the last couple of weeks but there are still loads of tiny unearthed treasures to be found (some of them linked below!) so you had better get reading…

Dave Verwer

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News

Measuring touch pressure on the iPad has been the most requested feature from artists since the very beginning. Unfortunately, as David Barnard points out, the title of this video is very misleading and these new properties do not measure any kind of pressure, only surface area. However, as this video shows this can still give some impressive results. Read more with the official documentation.

One of the changes in the new App Store Guidelines document means that Bitcoin trading apps are now eligible for sale again after the blanket removal of this kind of app back in February. I am surprised, but pleased to see this change.

Tools

Always struggling to remember which -W pragma to use to silence that pesky “performSelector may cause a leak because its selector is unknown” error? Mattt Thompson has put together a comprehensive list of warnings and their associated -W pragmas for silencing them selectively. There is also a quick reference site (NSFW domain name). After all, what better way to ship with no warnings than to just disable them 😎.

One slightly curious new feature of Xcode 6 is the ability to define custom simulators. Select a device type (including non standard screen sizes), and a version of iOS (7+) to install on it and off you go. Erica Sadun has the details.

Code

Tom Harrington with an overview and early opinion on CloudKit. I don’t expect Core Data iCloud sync to be deprecated any time soon but I do believe its days are numbered. CloudKit has less magic, more control and while that will require more code on our part, we learned a long time ago that there is no magic bullet for sync.

It’s rare that anyone outside academia ever gets to work on a new language without the baggage of at least some kind of compatibility. Swift is certainly no exception to that rule as Objective-C compatibility is essential and it has affected the language design significantly. Chris Adamson elaborates.

Operator overloading in Swift allows this new experimental Auto Layout library from Robert Böhnke to work. I find this interesting mainly because this is starting to show some of the advantages of Swift over Objective-C. I think we’ll all be watching closely to see how the Apple framework teams handle things like this and at what point new Swift only syntaxes get introduced.

Generics are a big part of Swift and Andrew Hulsizer takes us through what they are and how to use them. You’ll want to pay close attention to this if you haven’t used a language which includes Generics before.

Design

I told you that we’d find things to complain about even though iOS 8 has solved so many long standing issues. Henri Liriani has some great suggestions for improvements to how Apple could help with the problems of user app reviews.

Business and Marketing

Michel Fortin on using the new iOS 8 app bundles to hack some sort of upgrade pricing. It’s an interesting idea but I can see all sorts of confusion with this. From having to leave your old version on sale, to customers mistakenly buying the bundle without having previously purchased an original version. We’ll have to wait for the release to see whether this is allowed but even if it is, I would tread carefully here.

Sponsored Jobs

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And finally...

It’s possible everyone knew the origins of this symbol, but I didn’t…