Issue 156

25^th July 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Birthday to me! iOS Dev Weekly is 3 years old today 🎂 and what a journey it’s been. There have been over 1,800 links in the last 155 issues and there are over 23,000 of you lovely, lovely people who stay subscribed from week to week. It’s also turned into something I used to try and find time in the evenings for, to a profitable part of my business. Thank you all so much for staying subscribed, to all of the sponsors for their support and for every member of this wonderful community for writing amazing articles every single week for me to link to.

Anyway, with a new beta of Xcode, iOS 8 and Swift this week I won’t ramble on here any longer, so let’s get on with the links!

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

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

Finally, it’s not going to be possible to call private methods in the iOS APIs which should make the review process a little more reliable. Like Brent Simmons, I am also a little curious about why internal needs to be default. I am sure there are excellent reasons for it and it will all become clear over time but this is my biggest question mark with the implementation at the moment.

Tools

I first saw this back at NSConference in 2013 when Evan Doll gave his talk on their internal tools at Flipboard and this week it has been released for everyone to use as an open source library. Get quick access to all sorts of runtime view hierarchy information by adding a debugging toolbar into your app. This is going to be extremely useful to leave in your debug builds.

Mattt Thompson on testing in Xcode 6. The prominence of testing features inside Xcode has certainly been increasing over the last few major releases and to quote Mattt in his conclusion, it’s now the case that “the built-in testing tools are good enough to use on their own”. In this article he takes a look at the new features and also investigates how to do mocking in Swift.

I’ve been a fan of Tower since it was first released a few years ago and this new update looks to be a fantastic step forward. With a modernised and reorganised UI, much clearer merge conflict information as well as loads of smaller updates (background fetches!) I’m excited to replace Tower 1 with it.

Code

Arkadiusz Holko with a very clever technique for making motion animations look much more realistic. I actually used a very similar technique to this in one of our older apps where I included a motion blurred transition image but Arkadiusz goes into detail on doing this dynamically.

The Apple reachability code is some of my least favourite code to include in a project (and I guess the feeling inside Apple is mutual as it’s never made it into any of the frameworks). Jared Sinclair has taken a crack at cleaning it up and adding some block based handlers for network status changes.

Class prefixes (in Objective-C) clearly make sense for library code, but I have never subscribed to the viewpoint that app specific classes needed to also be prefixed. I always justified it to myself by thinking of the app namespace as the “un-prefixed namespace” 😬. Brent Simmons speculates that maybe it’s Swift which has caused the removal of the “Class Prefix” text field in the latest beta of Xcode.

Design

Oscar Nilsson on the design changes in recent versions of iOS and OS X. While I didn’t hate the leather bound, ripped paper look and feel of iOS 6 like some people did, the more modern look of Yosemite and iOS 7+ certainly feel more at home on Apple hardware.

Business and Marketing

If you don’t have $1m a day to spend on marketing then building great relationships with the press is going to be essential to your success. As always, Dan Counsel has some great advice.

Videos

There are some fantastic talks in this collection of 15 session recordings from UIKonf earlier this year. You should watch them all.

Sponsored Jobs

TaskRabbit is revolutionizing how work gets done - for our Taskers, our Clients and importantly, our employees. Since 2008 we’ve been building a peer-to-peer marketplace that safely and reliably connects neighbors to get things done. Come join our iOS team and help us build the next generation of our award-winning app!

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.

We are looking for experienced iOS engineers to join our team in Zürich, as part of Numbrs. Come and help us to revolutionise the banking industry. Despite its reputation as a banking capital, Zurich is rapidly becoming one of Europe’s great cultural destinations. Much like our cutting edge banking app Numbrs, the city is at the technological forefront.

And finally...

Just in case you’ve forgotten that the world has changed.