Issue 181

16^th January 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Sad news this week with the passing of Jordan Breeding, I only had the privilege of meeting Jordan a few times but it was always a pleasure. He’ll be dearly missed. My condolences go out to his friends and family.

Dave Verwer

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News

I don’t put a huge amount of stock in these kind of programming language rankings like this or TIOBE but they do show that Swift is already an active language. My hunch is that there is a lot of experimentation/learning code and some initial stabs at libraries but that not a lot of people are writing in anger yet. But that’s OK! Despite what Apple said in the WWDC keynote, I think we all know by now that this is the time for experimentation with the language, not wholesale adoption.

This story (which I linked to a couple of weeks ago) turned out to be a bit of a non-story but this is kinda interesting. As Dave Mark says, “Seems fair”.

Tools

I’ve linked to several of these tools by Felix Krause independently in the past but he’s put them all together into a collection now. If you’ve got any interest in continuous delivery on iOS, there will certainly be something here for you.

Ever wanted to run your project on all your connected iOS devices at the same time? Eric Mika has the answer.

Code

Still a work in progress but this library from Jonathan Wight looks like it’s going to be great. There’s some Swiftification of various bits of Core Graphics already along with some more interesting things like basic SVG support. One to watch (or contribute to?) for sure.

This is a clever little library for working with URLs and URL Schemes from Wes Smith and Chris Maddern. Rather than parsing URLs you can use this library to register a route and execute a block of code when your app is opened from that URL. Reminds me a bit of Rails and looks very simple to get started with.

Chris from Duolingo shares his experience of using Swift for a real shipped app. He lists many good and bad points but concludes that they did gain from choosing Swift over Objective-C for a new app. I know many are feeling the pain around the tools and I agree with him in that I hope Apple shifts more focus onto improving Xcode when using Swift.

Design

I’ve linked to several articles about the problems with hamburger menus before so you may wonder why I’m linking to another one. I’ve never seen it demonstrated quite so effectively as the graphs at the end of this post.

Business and Marketing

Since the new year there have been several posts with developers publishing their revenue from 2014. Marco Arment (linked above), UsTwo with a Monument Valley revenue infographic and Bogdan Popescu with the revenue for Dash. All of which show that it’s not all doom and gloom on the App Store.

After attempting to study the App Store pricing matrix following the recent changes, I tweeted my frustration with the readability of it and within a few days, the team at equinux had put together a much, much better version.

Is this how it works? I tweet something I’d like and you all build it for me? Great! I’d like a time machine please.

Videos

This short video from David Smith’s series As I Learn WatchKit gives a run through of all the UI components available in WatchKit. It is early days so I expect we’ll see more UI components available when we can write native apps but just imagine how long the video would be for UIKit 😳. David uses Apple’s sample project WatchKit Catalog to go over some of the limitations and interesting details of the standard UI.

More WATCH videos, this time from David Hoang and Curt Clifton speaking at Seattle Coders a couple of weeks ago. Three videos here, one on the design side of the watch, one on the code side and then a Q&A. Worth a watch (pun intended 😎).

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And finally...

Great stories.