Issue 173

21^st November 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

My prediction of analytics in iTunes Connect may have been completely wrong 😎 but the first stage of the WatchKit rollout is here to distract you from my mistake! We were promised a release in November and here it is, with time to spare and so as you may expect, this week’s issue definitely has a WatchKit theme!

Dave Verwer

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News

Serenity Caldwell with a great round up of what is actually possible with this initial release of the WatchKit SDK. If you’ve been busy with other things this week I would recommend starting here.

Now that you’re up to speed with the basics, this post by Craig Hockenberry was my favourite of the more in depth posts published over the last couple of days. This first release is obviously limited but even at this stage, this is far from a being a trivial SDK.

Tools

I’ve been a fan of the OS X version of Dash for a long time now so I was very happy to see the release of an iOS version last week. I’m not sure I’ll use it on iPhone all that often but it’s already part of my essential apps on iPad.

I came across this full Git client for iOS a few weeks ago but it was missing a couple of key features (2FA support for GitHub and SSH key support). However, this new version fixes both of those issues and while you’re never going to be writing serious code with this, it’s useful to be able to do a quick commit on a branch while you’re away from your Mac.

Code

Alongside the release of the WatchKit SDK, Apple have updated their excellent sample project, Lister. This is a Mac and iOS To Do list app which uses iCloud and a whole load of iOS 8 specific features like extensions, and now a Watch target as well. If you’re looking for a more in depth sample, here you go.

Natasha has been busy this week. Yes, the first post I’m linking here is a simple WatchKit Hello World but she then goes on to create a table, add page based and hierarchical navigation, communicating with an iOS app, building a glance and adding a menu. Dig in 😄.

Stephen Celis with a take on what a type safe SQLite wrapper should look like in Swift. This is clearly quite a lightweight wrapper and you can still see the mapping from the method calls to the SQL statements but without some of the downsides of raw SQL. Oh and it gets a special mention for the great documentation as well!

Colin Eberhardt on Swift initialisers and options with optionals 😬.

Design

Along with the release of the WatchKit SDK Apple have also provided a whole load of design resources as well. As well as the HIG, they also released a set of additional resources (scroll to the bottom, there isn’t a direct link) including PSD templates and guides as well as the San Francisco font used on the device.

Erik Kennedy with an excellent post on UI design for beginners. It’s a long article but worth the time if you’re a developer wanting to improve in this area. It’s posted in two parts so you’ll also need this.

Business and Marketing

Paste in your App Store URL and get a basic marketing site generated from the metadata. If the defaults are good enough then you’re done, however you’ll want to tweak things and make modifications as time goes on so you’ll probably want to export it to GitHub and modify it from there. This is a beautiful execution of a simple idea.

Jason Snell with a follow up to last week’s pricing drama around the new Monument Valley release. I touched on this topic in my comment against the article but Jason goes into much more depth here and makes some great points.

Videos

Fantastic set of videos from the recent NSScotland conference.

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And finally...

My first use of version control was 1993, 21 years after the first computer aided implementation.