Issue 163

12^th September 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So of course we got the new iPhone, and yes the “wearable” turned out to be a watch. The big surprise of the event to me was Pay. Huge news! As for the watch? I’ve tried but I just can’t get excited about it, not because of the 1st gen hardware which will be revised and refined over the next few years, but because of the fundamental limitations of a device with a screen on my wrist. I’ve read a few things which have almost changed my mind but it doesn’t feel like the future of Apple to me.

When we look back at this keynote in years to come, I think we’ll see Pay as the big announcement rather than the Watch. I’ll probably end up being completely wrong about that though, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time 😉.

Dave Verwer

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News

The most overshadowed news of the week was that the iOS 8 and Xcode 6 GMs were released as well. No changes to Swift in the GM but there are more changes coming in Xcode 6.1.

With the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus it’s not as simple as just having a couple of new screen sizes to deal with, we now have a 3x scale to worry about too. Unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as that as while the iPhone 6 Plus renders at 3x, it doesn’t display at 3x. Confused yet? Read on, all the answers are here in this exceptionally well explained article from PaintCode.

Tools

I’ve always liked the idea of doing this but solutions up until now have always seemed too fussy for me and not worth the effort (although I can see the effort being very much worth it for larger teams with lots of different versions flying around). Jared Sinclair explains the issues with previous techniques and highlights a much easier way to get automated, incrementing build numbers.

New release of mogenerator this week with a new set of sensible defaults for modern Objective-C code. We should all thank Jonathan Rentzsch for not breaking our build scripts with the —v2 command line option. I love the idea of semantic versioning for command line flags!

Code

I haven’t seen many people blogging about getting started with Metal since it was announced in June. Obviously the big game engines are all embracing it but if you want to understand it at a lower level point of view, Ray Wenderlich has written about getting up to speed from first principles.

Mathew Sanders with the second part of an excellent article on interactive view controller transitions. Not only is it a well written and illustrated article, it’s got sample projects at every stage of the process. The fact that it’s in Swift isn’t the point here, it’s just a great article on what can be a tricky thing to get right. Also check out Part 1.

If, like me, you learned about Garbage Collection a long time ago and then haven’t really looked back at the details since, this article is definitely worth a read. The excellent visualisations really helped me to understand what was going on as well. Naturally, an article about garbage collection isn’t directly related to iOS development but consider this something you should read to round out your knowledge of memory management techniques.

Design

Lovely collection of Photoshop documents here with mock ups for various iOS apps. Best way to think about this is that it’s Pttrns but with layered images that you can dig into and modify. Really nice idea.

The ever helpful Bjango actions for Photoshop have already been updated with several enhancements to support working with @3x resources.

Videos

Fascinating video from this year’s GDC. Ken Wong, lead designer of Monument Valley talking about the inspiration for the game, a look at all of the concept art, level design and concentrating on the play experience. Such a great talk about a wonderful product.

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