Issue 186

20^th February 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

0-60 in 2 seconds, 12 seats, self driving, polished sapphire crystal windscreen and doors made from solid 18 carat gold. It will be the best car they’ll never build 😄. My advice would be to skip the rumours this week and set aside an hour to read Jony Ive’s amazing interview in the New Yorker instead.

Dave Verwer

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News

Jeff Hunter with a suggestion that developers starting out with the App Store should get a different revenue split for their first $100k before going to 70/30, or that it should be a sliding scale while you’re becoming successful. It’s a good suggestion as it wouldn’t hurt Apple’s bottom line in a significant way. However I won’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

Craig Grannell with a look at some of the Watch apps that are targeting their release for launch day. I also liked that he started the article with apps from independent developers before moving on to the big names. It’ll be really interesting to see how it all goes.

Tools

If you’re doing a lot of Core Animation code by hand this looks like it will save you some time and frustration. Design animations with a visual editor, then export CA code to Swift or Objective-C. I wonder if we’ll see it support other output formats like SpriteKit or Cocos 2D as it seems to me that most of the hard work is in building the editor.

Code

Swift Moment is a new library from Adrian Kosmaczewski which takes inspiration from the JavaScript library Moment.js. This library makes the syntax of dealing with dates in Swift beautiful and is a perfect example of where operator overloading is used to enhance readability.

Keith Harrison guides us through migrating from UISearchDisplayController to the new UISearchController that was introduced in iOS 8. Despite UISearchController not being available yet in Interface Builder the code looks simple to setup. I’ve struggled getting UISearchDisplayController to work consistently in a couple of apps and this does look like a big improvement.

Is it just me or have we heard very little about HomeKit since WWDC last year? David McGraw has an excellent overview of what to expect when developing an app that interfaces to a HomeKit enabled device. Looks like HomeKit removes the burden of device discovery and creating your own protocols.

Design

I thought this article by Allison Messner was a nice exploration of how the “little things” can really matter when designing a feature for an app. It’s obviously a little biased given what their company produces but the points made about the design of the features stand up on their own.

Neil Cybart with a thoughtful piece on the place of notifications through history and how the Watch might be about to slightly change things, if notifications are used intelligently.

Business and Marketing

As you might have guessed, I’m a big fan of email (when used appropriately). Hugh Kimura has a post here on what your options are if you do have a list you’ve not been making the most of. You might also find some inspiration here to start collecting emails in your app if you don’t already.

Videos

Andy Matuschak with a great talk about types in Swift.

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And finally...

David Smith with some suggestions for Apple in case they’re struggling with tag lines for the invitations.