Issue 167

10^th October 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I got all excited for the October 16th event yesterday with the talk about Apple TV partnerships. Turns out the partnership only extended as far as bundling an Apple TV alongside a Phillips TV 😆. It’s still possible that we’ll see Apple’s hobby project come up on stage next week alongside the new iPad and Mac models but I don’t expect to see any actual TV hardware if it does, just the little black box.

Dave Verwer

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News

The numbers aren’t disastrous by any means but it looks like I was wrong with my prediction last week that iOS 8 adoption would follow the same trajectory as iOS 7. In the last 2 weeks Apple’s figures have only increased by 1% which is a little worrying. Of course there’s plenty of speculation as to why this has happened but I think John Gruber has it right with it being about the amount of space iOS 8 needs to install OTA.

I’m guessing that this post was prompted by the fact that using HomeKit, HealthKit or keyboard extensions in iOS 8 all now require you to include a privacy policy. However if you look at the list of conditions for where a policy is necessary, I won’t be surprised if this field gets changed to be mandatory for all apps soon. If you don’t have a privacy policy then you might want to check out Iubenda who have a really good, simple policy generator.

Tools

The ability to take screenshots with a perfect status bar (9:41 AM, full battery, etc…) using Yosemite and iOS 8 prompted us to discontinue Status Magic recently as you can easily take screenshots on device with the status bar already fixed. However, what if you take screenshots on the iOS Simulator or don’t have access to all devices? Well, we’ve put this little tool together to help.

Full disclosure: This is something written by my company, but I’m including it as I think it will be useful to you, just like every link I include here 😄

Alexandros Salazar experiments with using Swift as a scripting language. It’s not quite ready for prime time yet but I wonder if this will catch on. He has also put together a couple of libraries to help with creating this kind of tool, SemverKit and OptionKit.

Code

If you’ve not yet tackled development of one of the various types of iOS 8 extensions yet, then Tom Harrington has some excellent tips for some of the issues you might come up against. I also really enjoyed this article by Christopher Truman on a similar subject but he also tackles the issue of what an extension should do as well as the technical details. It’ll be an interesting year while we all figure this stuff out.

Saranyan Vigraham with a list of open source Swift projects which you might want to be aware of. There are some obvious choices here like AlamoFire and SwiftyJSON but there will be a few here that you may not have seen yet like Cartography, Haneke and SwiftTask.

macOS Development

The plethora of NSButton types in Interface Builder for OS X can be a little overwhelming. Where do you use a “Round Textured Button” over a “Rounded Rect Button”? Or should you be using a “Textured Button” instead? Jakub Suder guides us through using examples from Apple’s own apps, which is always a good idea.

Videos

FizzBuzz in Swift… Easy, right? This video of Abizer Nasir talking at a recent NSLondon event is a very entertaining look at so many versions of FizzBuzz that I lost count. Talk about taking a solution to extremes! This is a great talk, definitely worth your time.

Books

If you want a slightly different approach to learning Swift than the official Apple iBook then I would recommend Daniel Steinberg’s latest book available on the iBooks store. It’s a very approachable introduction to the language and has just been updated to the latest version of Swift so is right up to date.

Or, if you fancy learning about Swift using Functional Programming techniques then Chris Eidhof, Florian Kugler and Wouter Swierstra have you covered. I’m really looking forward to reading this as I haven’t had any real experience with FP but it’s been something on my list to really dig into for quite a while now.

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Turning a disastrous change to the iPhone design into a clever marketing opportunity…