Issue 152

27^th June 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Google have been taking over the tech news this week as I/O came and went, leaving bits of Android everywhere! I quite like the look and feel of the new Android UI and even if you’re not interested in the tech at all, new sites like Google Design are worth a look just to be aware of what’s happening. However, we aren’t here to talk about Android so let’s get on with the regularly scheduled iOS links…

Dave Verwer

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News

I talked about this a few weeks ago but with WWDC behind us and with iOS 8, Yosemite and Swift in our hands it’s even more important to log bugs in this period of beta testing. Now is the time to get the feedback in to Apple on bugs and feature requests, especially with Swift, as things will inevitably get harder to change when 1.0 hits. Rene Ritchie has more information.

I agree with the vast majority of what Jared Sinclair says here but I have a feeling that Apple never intended for HealthKit to be as tightly integrated with real medical records as they are in Jared’s vision. To me, HealthKit seems like a way to track and monitor your own health data to keep yourself better informed rather than trying to be integrated with official health records. I think it could succeed in that more modest goal.

Tools

Marcus Zarra takes a look at the default Swift templates for Core Data apps in the Xcode 6 beta. The bad news is that nothing much has changed from the Objective-C templates. The good news is that Marcus has provided his own version of what a default Core Data stack could/should look like in Swift.

Code

It’s always a treat to get a new David Rönnqvist Core Animation article and this one is no exception. This time the subject is multiple animations and with the new iOS 8 defaults for UIView animations being “additive” (See WWDC session 236 for more information) there is no better time to learn about this topic in depth. Go.

I have been waiting for this article since the announcement of Swift a few weeks ago. Mike Ash takes a fairly high level look at some of the more interesting bits of the Swift language.

Tom König with a very cute UILabel subclass which supports beautiful morphing between text values (including emoji 🎪). Much nicer than a simple swap if you are changing the text of a label.

Design

I love Path. I use it in a very specific way (only personal friends. Industry people, I love talking with you on Twitter, please don’t add me on Path ✋) and part of why I love it is the beautiful UI. Brian Lovin digs in to the details of the major new update that it received.

Business and Marketing

Lucas Dowiak with a fascinating look at the average number of reviews that an app could receive on the App Store. How many reviews do your apps have?

Videos

Meng To with a video of his recent presentation at the Mobile Designers who Code event held in San Francisco. He talks about how designers can, and should be working more closely with Xcode and gives several demos of how he does it. He has also written extensively about this subject in his Design+Code book.

Books

I think we would all agree that LLVM/LLDB give us a huge amount of power but the documentation can be a little daunting, especially if you are looking to do something more than simply using the binaries shipped with Xcode. This new book by Bruno Cardoso Lopes is an in-depth guide to the various LLVM technologies and is the first of its type that I have seen. Worth a look if you’re interested in digging into LLVM in more depth.

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And finally...

I had no idea the dev forums had this feature.