Issue 190

20^th March 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Apologies for the late issue this week, It’s Friday now! Have a great weekend everyone!

Dave Verwer

News

More information direct from the source about the new features added to playgrounds in Xcode 6.3 beta 3. Better support for resources and additional source files as well as a Mandelbrot playground to demonstrate it! Looks like they got a speed bump too!

Tools

XCActionBar

Ever wish that Xcode had the features of an editor like TextMate or Sublime Text? I know I have. If you’re the same way then you’ll certainly want to check out XCActionBar by Pedro Gomes. Think of it like Alfred or Quicksilver for Xcode. Select some text and pop up a command bar to perform various actions on it. This looks amazing.

Spicing Up Xcode

Zev Eisenberg with a great blog post (and video) containing 13 tips for working more efficiently with Xcode. There are a few tips here which were new to me (searchable Jump Bar menus!) and some old favourites as well. Read this and instantly increase your productivity.

WatchSim

There have been a few apps which mirror the Watch Simulator screen to the iPhone so you can strap it to your wrist and get a feel of how your UI will look on a real device. WatchSim from Danny Keogan takes it one step further though and adds support for feeding input back from the phone to the simulator so you can even start to control your app.

Code

NSCalendar Additions

Nate Cook covers all of the new NSCalendar additions that have been quietly sneaking into iOS since 8.0. There’s a lot of new helpful methods here that developers should be aware of. Hopefully Apple will update the documentation soon, maybe once they have released the watch that likely drove these additions.

Easier File Networking with Carrierwave-iOS

This library from Patryk Kaczmarek and netguru provides a way to upload and download assets from a server with minimal setup. There’s two parts to the solution, a Ruby gem that provides the API end points and a library for iOS. The Ruby Carrierwave gem is solid, we use it 😄, and this looks like a great solution built on top of that.

How to get text input from the user with WatchKit

Voice dictation in WatchKit was something I didn’t think we’d see until the full native SDK was released. It turns out that’s not the case and it’s available already. Brian Gilham has the details on how this all works and it looks very simple.

Design

The best interface is no interface

Golden Krishna with a fascinating excerpt from his new book which suggests that the ultimate UI design is to have no UI at all. As devices get smarter and more of the objects we interact with do the same, will we design apps so that looking or interacting with a screen is the exception rather than the rule?