Issue 160

22^nd August 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I want to start with a bit of announcement this week before diving into the links. I hope you’ll excuse the interruption!

Assembling iOS Dev Weekly used to be a totally manual process. Then, at the end of last year, we built a web app to make my life a little easier. It helps me collect links every week, write commentary, send out issues and publish the web site.

As we were building it, it was obvious that other people could use it to build their own publications so we turned it into a product.

We’re calling it Curated, and we soft launched it this week.

I’ve been using it to publish iOS Dev Weekly for over 6 months and it’s working really well. If you’ve ever had a thought about building something similar (on any subject!), you might want to check it out.

Putting together a weekly publication like this is an amazing experience and I could not have imagined the things that have happened as a result of it. I couldn’t have done it without you all subscribing, the sponsors who helped to fund development of it, and the wonderful iOS developer community for the fact that it’s never a struggle to find incredible articles to link to.

I can’t wait to see what you all produce with it. Say Hello to Curated.

Dave Verwer

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News

Ayaka Nonaka with a lovely post about what it’s like to work on open source software in this community. So much of what I link to here every week simply wouldn’t exist without so many people putting time and effort into it. There’s also a great set of steps here on how to get started with some smaller things if you’ve never contributed to a project before.

I’ve deliberately not linked to any of the performance tests that people have been doing on Swift so far, mostly because early beta is definitely not the right time to be measuring the speed of a new language. Even now, I would say it’s not possible to make a judgement on performance and that really we’ll only be able to judge it a few releases after 1.0. However, Jesse Squires has found that with recent releases, the language has become much swifter 😎.

Tools

I’ve linked to Lookback before and I really like the concept. This update changes the feedback you’ll be able to get from it though as it can now record the entire OS, not just your app. Sure, it requires a jailbroken phone but in a user testing environment that’s not going to be a problem. This looks like a great update to what they had already.

Using GitHub Pull Requests and Xcode bots? You might want to check this out.

Code

After a shaky start with the release being pulled and then restored, we did get a beta 6 of Xcode this week (but interestingly, no iOS 8 beta!). Airspeed Velocity has again put together a good round up of the Swift language changes with this release. Oh and while we’re on the subject, it’s also worth checking out this post on the official Swift blog about the protected keyword.

Chris Lattner has some clarification on the whole “Swift isn’t Objective-C without the C” idea thats been doing the rounds ever since WWDC. Developer login required for this one as it’s on the Apple Dev Forums.

What do you get if you cross AlamoFire, ReactiveCocoa and functional programming concepts (using swiftz)? Ash Furrow is experimenting.

Design

I’ve got to the point now with Sketch that Photoshop is becoming an expense that I’m not sure I can justify every month for the amount I’m using it. Sagi Shrieber has put together this (long!) post about his experiences along with some great resources and illustrations explaining some of the features.

Business and Marketing

You should really be subscribed to Dan’s “Business of App Design” site and newsletter directly as I’m not going to link to every article, even though they are all worth reading. The latest one continues on the recent conversation on sustainability and looks at the fact that an app on its own is not necessarily a business. Definitely worth a read.

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And finally...

There is no middle ground, unfortunately.