Subscribe for weekly commentary and coverage of Swift and Apple platform development. Written by Dave Verwer and published every Friday. Free.

Picture of Dave Verwer

Issue 154

11th 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

Link into your mobile app with App Links

App Links is an open, cross platform standard that’s supported by hundreds of apps with over a billion links indexed. With App Links, you can drive people into your app from stories published on Facebook and other apps. Integrating App Links is easy and free, get started today!

News

History of the App Store

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.


Swift In Flux

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 2

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

Auto Layout and Views that Wrap

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 😇).


The Secrets of Swift’s Speed

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.


A Story About Swizzling “the Right Way” and Touch Forwarding

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.


Custom Threading Operator in Swift

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

Bringing Google’s Authentic Motion to iOS

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

Zen and the Art of the Objective-C Craftsmanship

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.

Sponsored Jobs

Senior iOS Engineer @ Eventbrite, San Francisco, CA

Join a team of passionate, driven, creative, and fun-loving people who are building a platform that event attendees and organizers love. We’re looking for iOS engineers to help us build apps that are changing the way millions of people host and attend live experiences.


Thumbtack

Thumbtack is looking to build an amazing mobile experience for hundreds of thousands of users. Both sides of the Thumbtack marketplace (service providers and their clients) will benefit massively from enhanced mobile experiences. Imagine what you might do if you could run your business or request services from your iPhone? Help us transform lives around the country.


Coursera

Coursera makes the best university courses available for free for everyone. We’re looking for experienced iOS developers to help us make education a basic human right. Work in Swift on our new mobile core architecture to bring learning to millions of students around the world.

And finally...

Getting your iPhone 2G back to iOS 1.0

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