Issue 159

15^th August 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

Learn from our extensive library of iOS tutorials covering topics like: Core Data, Auto Layout, Collection Views, Networking, Parse, Sprite Kit, and more. Get unlimited access for 14 days using the link below.

News

Brent Simmons and Guy English both commenting on Louie Mantia’s recent post on Tinkering. iOS has never been particularly tinkering friendly and there are always going to be challenges as software and platforms get more sophisticated. I do think Swift playgrounds are a step in the right direction though and Brent is right that people will always find a way!

Alex King with a follow up to all of the discussion on indie developer sustainability. He argues against the point that a race to the bottom will stop large scale, sophisticated apps and takes a look at how the Wordpress software market reacted to a similar situation.

Tools

Unlike web apps, it’s a little more time consuming to ship software on iOS (and other mobile platforms) and while 175 deployments in a day is definitely not what you should be aiming for, Klaas Pieter Annema puts the case forward for shipping an app every single week.

Nicolas Spiegelberg with a fascinating article on a recent debugging challenge at Facebook.

Code

We’re probably about a month away from an iOS 8/Yosemite release right now and it’s possible we’ll see a “1.0” of Swift from Apple at the same time. Obviously development of a language is never done, but what is a 1.0? Erica Sadun investigates and speculates.

Back at WWDC one of the most impressive uses of Swift playgrounds was the Balloons demo that was demoed in the Keynote. The playground file from that demo hadn’t been released publicly until now but here it is, updated and ready to experiment with. Note that this playground requires OS X Yosemite as well as Xcode Beta 5

Nick O’Neill with a great idea for a site. It’s a collection of Swift implementations for all those common iOS development tasks that you’re completely comfortable with in Objective-C but feel a bit lost with in Swift. This is probably one to bookmark (do people still do that? 😩) as I am sure it will be continually updated as the language goes forward.

Kyle Sluder with a cautionary tale if you are using the new UIPresentationController APIs in iOS 8.

Business and Marketing

I’ve been wanting something like this since the App Store Review Guidelines were first published but it was never possible (or at least never sensible) to attempt it while they were protected behind the developer login. They are now openly available on the public interwebs and so this feels like fair game to me now. Fingers crossed that this doesn’t disappear.

Sponsored Jobs

Join the IMDb iOS development team to work on one of the most popular applications in the world. As a key team member of a small team, you will get the opportunity to shape the future and own major deliverables through all aspects of the development cycle: scoping, design, implementation, and testing your solutions.

You will be working with a team of smart, friendly, and dedicated developers in one of Toronto’s top Dev shops. As part of the development team, you will work along side a team of expert mobile developers from other platforms to deliver a seamless sports app experience to 5.5 million sports fans across all mobile and tablet devices.

As an iOS Prototyper, you’ll work closely with our design team to bring ideas to life. Combine a hackathon-mentality to transform fleeting “what ifs” into real functioning prototypes. Your eye for UI/UX will give you the creative confidence to develop v1.0 of new Snapchat products. We’re located in Venice Beach, LA. Drop us a line if you’d like to come visit ([email protected]).

And finally...

The perfect solution to the problem of hidden consequences with operator overloading.