Issue 159

News

Tinkering

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!

The Race to the Bottom Benefits Platforms (not Developers)

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

Ship your app weekly

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.

Debugging file corruption on iOS

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

Code

Swift: What does 1.0 mean?

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.

Balloons

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

That Thing in Swift

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.

UIPresentationController is (currently) a deficient API

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

Business and Marketing

App Store Review Guideline Diffs

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.

And finally...

Three Letter Prefix

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

Issue 159 August 15th 2014

Sponsored Link

Treehouse: Code Better iOS Apps