Issue 188

6^th March 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Is everyone ready to submit their Watch apps? I’d expect to be able to put them in for review early next week after the event on Monday. Good luck if you’re aiming for day one!

Talking of Apple events, if you’re planning to be in San Francisco (ticket or no ticket!) during WWDC week and you would like to give a talk at AltConf this year, they have a call for speakers open now.

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

AppCode is a professional iOS/OS X IDE from JetBrains that helps boost your productivity while developing in Swift. Benefit from smart code completion, one-click navigation, refactoring, and comprehensive unit testing support. Also available for Objective-C, C/C++ and more. Give AppCode a try right now.

News

I don’t cover a huge amount of game related stuff here but this week saw two big stories around 3D game engines for iOS. First up is a brand new version of Unity 5 (Here’s a run down of what’s new by Brian Moakley). They also changed their pricing and made a completely free Personal Edition available. The other big(ger?) news is that Unreal dropped the monthly fees for Unreal Engine 4. There really has never been an easier time to get started, or to finish and release a 3D game on any platform.

Obviously Apple have already spent some time thinking about communication, entertainment and navigation for cars with CarPlay. In this article Us Two take a look at the possibilities for UI while actually driving. With all the talk about the Apple Car recently, I wonder how this compares to what’s potentially going on inside Cupertino right now.

Tools

iTunes Connect sales figures in your menu bar? Looks like a great way to get quick access to your numbers without also giving a third party access to all of your sales figures.

Code

While it certainly seems like there’s still plenty of work on the Swiftification of ReactiveCocoa going on, in the mean time this project by Yasuhiro Inami might be worth checking out if you’re looking for a native Swift FRP library.

Feels like a reactive week this week as Colin Eberhardt teaches himself some of the techniques from React.js. He takes the approach of learning by reimplementing and starts to build some bits of it in Swift.

Design

Here’s a beautiful directory of Watch apps alongside short video demos of the UI, notifications and glances. I really like how this has been put together as it serves not only as a directory of apps but as a source of inspiration for your own.

Neven Mrgan makes a great point here while talking about OneShot about our tendency as designers and developers to only think about absolutes. Is a “good attempt” sometimes good enough?

Business and Marketing

Graham Spencer talks with several independent developers about what they do on a day to day basis. On a similar subject, Mike Hurley’s Inquisitive Podcast has been really great recently with a series (1, 2, 3) of episodes interviewing developers on life and business in the App Store.

Stuart Hall with a short and to the point article on writing a great description for your app.

Videos

The full set of videos from the recent MCE conference in Warsaw, Poland was uploaded this week. There are some great talks here, go watch some 😄.

Natasha Murashev with a talk on sharing data between WatchKit and your iOS device. There’s also a Q&A at the end covering some broader WatchKit topics.

I’d also like to give Realm a quick mention here for the quality, quantity and top quality production values with which they record and report on the meetings they hold. Full transcripts for every talk along with great quality video and synchronised slides. Thank you Realm!

Sponsored Jobs

Join us on the journey towards the future of banking apps

Help build cutting-edge iOS apps that bring music to millions of users.

Help us power the world’s most creative communities.

And finally...

Leveraging the synergy of ligatures 😆