Issue 179

2^nd January 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy New Year everyone! 🎉 Here’s to a great 2015 and all of the goodies that Apple, and this community will inevitably deliver. Are you looking forward to it? I know I am!

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

FbStart offers startups up to $60,000 in free tools from Facebook and partners, as well as mentorship, 1:1 support, and events. Apply today.

News

Yes, the title is a little dramatic, but this subject has also been on my mind since learning Swift. As the Swift standard library expands, how long will it be until Foundation (as we know it) is replaced, and then what? UIKit? Like Mattt, I don’t think this will happen very quickly but jumping forward 5 years I can imagine that the iOS code we’re writing with Swift today will look very out of date.

As I understood it, the existing 90 day returns policy for apps didn’t ask very many questions before granting a refund so I’m not sure this news is as huge as the media is making it out to be. Regardless, in the EU there is now a blanket, no questions asked refund policy not only for the App Store but music and video purchases from iTunes too.

Tools

Marius Rackwitz with a look at what’s coming (or what’s already here if you’re comfortable with a —prerelease flag) in the world of CocoaPods. This is a big release enabling compatibility with Swift through framework support.

Code

Richard Turton on playing nicely with JSON web services and Swift. He’s using SwiftyJSON for the parsing so the majority of this article is about the next step, getting typed data into your models quickly and cleanly.

Great little tip here for continuing the quest to only use vars in Swift when necessary.

Joshua Barczak with a post that I thoroughly enjoyed on why 3D graphics (generally) uses triangles over any other primitives. Not directly related to iOS development but I found it interesting anyway!

Design

A great round up of some of the best in UI animations from 2014 on iOS. My favourite of these? The swaying of the liquid in Lush, just beautiful.

Business and Marketing

Hugh Kimura with a funny post looking at the reviews associated with certain keywords on the App Store. I particularly like the correlation between a decline in average review stars and the number of o’s in sooooooo… 😏

Videos

Last month, in Brooklyn the Functional Swift conference was held and the organisers have been kind enough to release all of the videos. It’s not immediately obvious where the videos are but clicking on a speaker will give you the session description, and video of their presentation.

Also from late last year, the ⌘R Conference videos have now been released. This event was actually streamed live but if you missed it when it happened, it’s all here for you to catch up with now.

Books

This is a wonderful book by David Rönnqvist and if you’ve any interest at all in learning SceneKit I would thoroughly recommend it. It’s extremely well written and uses iBooks features to great effect to explan both the concepts at the practicalities of 3D with SceneKit.

Sponsored Jobs

Engineer the App Store’s #1 aviation app.