Issue 164

19^th September 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So how was your week dealing with code signing, provisioning and submission problems? Are everyone’s extensions working? Those issues, along with the pulling of all HealthKit apps due to a bug, made this year’s iOS release feel a little bumpier than usual. Things will stabilise though, and congratulations to everyone who got their app out there for iOS 8 day one.

Dave Verwer

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News

Bryan Irace with a roller coaster of a post about extensions on iOS 8. There were always going to be difficulties with a feature like this being added to iOS and this post is required reading if you are even considering jumping into developing one.

Alex Payne with a great article looking at recent trends in language design. Swift gets a mention and LLVM gets several. A very interesting read.

Tools

With @3x being something that we now have to worry about, the possibility of switching iOS apps to use vector art has popped up several times on Twitter during this week. Cory Bohon reminds us that Xcode 6 actually supports automatic rendering of @1x, @2x and @3x assets at build time from PDF artwork in an asset catalog. However, you should read the whole thing before implementing this as there are some important notes at the end of the article.

Code

If you took advantage of the tip for replacing launch images with a storyboard which I linked to in Issue 161 you’ll want to be careful and test before shipping. Marco Arment implemented it in the iOS 8 version of Overcast and found a bug which looks as if it enables your app as a native iPad app when using this technique.

With the new iPhone and iPhone Plus models giving us even more pixels you’d think we would be happy, right? No! We always want more screen space! Luckily Natasha has a great article here on the new UINavigationController properties which allow us to grab a few extra pixels by animating away the navigation bar.

Radek with a great article about method naming and verbosity in Swift. This is one (of many!) of the reasons I’m being cautious when considering Swift for production code right now. Not only with method names, but with all aspects of writing quality Swift code, there hasn’t been a consensus on best practices and what suits the language best yet.

Design

Christian Klotz with a look at the design process for text annotations in his app, Annotations. I’ve said it before but I love a post which doesn’t focus on the result of the design of a feature but the journey of it.

So here’s an interesting document. It’s short (so far) but I think this gives the most detailed look at how Apple see the Pay process working in apps. I would expect this document to grow over time so I’d also come back and take a look at this in a few weeks/months.

Business and Marketing

We’ve been asking for video previews on the App Store for a long time and back in the summer, Apple made our wishes come true by adding them. Bad news is that now we have to actually make them! These are going to be an essential part of a successful App Store listing very soon so you need to get to grips with this quickly. Dan Counsell has what you need to know.

The slightly disappointing thing about being featured on the App Store is that once the featuring is over, you’ll always know you were featured but no one else will. One fantastic change with the iOS 8 App Store is that certain featured spots, such as Editor’s choice are now permanently visible. Let’s hope this expands to more types of featured spots in the future.

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And finally...

James Dempsey with a look back at the top few pixels of apple.com over time.