Issue 154

11^th July 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So, Beta 3 is out for both iOS 8 and Yosemite and along with the new operating system builds we got a major set of changes to Swift which really should not be a surprise 😜. If you are looking for a list of language changes then the revision history for the Swift Programming Guide has a good summary of what’s changed along with links to the specific changes.

Dave Verwer

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News

Seems like only a few weeks since we were celebrating the 5th anniversary of the App Store but it turns out that another year has flown by and here we are, 6 years in. Rene Ritchie has put together a year by year history of the App Store (actually, it’s only years 1-4 at the time of writing, but I’m sure the rest is imminent) with links to detailed posts on the history from each year.

Karol Mazur has put together this fantastic document on GitHub to keep track of things which are likely to change in subsequent language updates, as well as a nice summary of the changes that have been implemented so far (and shipped in Beta 3). Chris Lattner’s posts on the Apple Developer Forums are the main source but it’s great that Karol is keeping track of everything that’s going on.

Tools

Ensembles 1.0 was only released a couple of months ago but Drew McCormack has obviously been hard at work as this week saw the release of 2.0. It’s an API compatible replacement for 1.x with a focus on performance and memory/disk storage optimisations rather than features. It’s an interesting business model too, v1.x is remaining free and open source while v2.x is being released as a commercial project. Keep an eye out for Ensembles 3.0 in 3 weeks time closely followed by Ensembles 4.0 the day after 😝.

Code

Understanding intrinsic content sizes is absolutely key to taming Auto Layout and Jonathon Mah has a great explanation of how it all works along with code samples and a full project demonstrating the concepts. I’m no big fan of Auto Layout at the best of times but before I learned about intrinsic content sizes, it sometimes felt flat out broken (which it isn’t, mostly 😇).

One of the aspects of Swift that made it into the WWDC keynote was the fact that it is faster than Objective-C. There have been several blog posts posted since the language was unveiled showing that it’s both faster, and slower 😌. Mike Ash sensibly avoids benchmarks (it’s still a beta) and instead concentrates on explaining the reasons that Swift should be faster.

Peter Steinberger with an interesting story of debugging a problem with his Aspects library. It’s basically a story of swizzling, and ends with an alternative approach to method replacement.

More custom operator fun from Josh Smith. Apple are obviously concentrating on getting the basics right first of all with Swift but I wonder if they will experiment with anything like this as the language matures?

Design

I have linked to several articles over the last few weeks either directly about, or inspired by the new Android L design and here is another one. Arkadiusz Holko talks about the animation curves used in L and recreates them on iOS using a custom CAMediaTimingFunction.

Books

I bet there are more than a few cases of authors feeling like Luca Bernardi and Alberto De Bortoli did when Swift was announced. They started working on this book on best practices in Objective-C late last year and naturally Swift changed everything for them. They have been kind enough to release the work in progress on the Objective-C one publicly while they work on the Swift edition. After all, people are still going to be writing Objective-C for quite some time.

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And finally...

Take a trip back to 2007 if you have an old 2G hanging around.