Issue 192

3^rd April 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Friday everyone, it’s a public holiday here in the UK today but you still get your weekly dose of links! Oh and if you’re interested in working with me on Curated, the software used to publish iOS Dev Weekly, we’re looking to expand the team! Come join us.

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

iOS developers are in-demand. On the Hired Marketplace, tech companies apply to interview you! iOS developers typically get 5+ offers over the course of a week. You’ll see salary & equity offers upfront and you’re under no obligation to accept any offer. We’ll even block your profile from your current/former employers so you search is private. Check out Hired today!

News

So the big news this week is that Apple started taking submissions for apps including WatchKit extensions. I hope that if you were planning to be there on day one that you had everything ready and that your review is trouble free! Only three weeks until everyone has hardware in their hands, and on their wrists!

I’ve deliberately not been linking to the articles recently on being fearful of Apple backlash for criticising them. Mainly because I didn’t agree with most of what was said. However I am going to link to this one by Allen Pike as I agree with everything he’s said here 😄.

Code

You should be well aware by now that the Core Data stack that gets added when you check “Use Core Data” in Xcode is more about getting you started than being a production ready/best practice implementation. So when thinking about real apps, who better than Marcus Zarra to school us on what a modern implementation looks like.

There are lots of beautiful charting libraries that do one very specific thing and there are a few not quite so beautiful charting libraries that try to do everything. This is a port of MPAndroidChart by Daniel Gindi and it looks to strike a nice balance between the two.

This is something a bit different. By doing a long tap on the back button in a navigation controller it opens up a iOS multitasking style view with the stack of controllers that you can scroll through and select to move to that point. I can see this working really well in an app where you end up deep in a navigation controller (I’m looking at you TweetBot, but in a good way 😄).

Design

Marc Edwards on why PDF assets may not be the right choice in every (any?) situation. He covers some of the artefacts and imperfections that can occur if you let Xcode convert your PDF to PNGs (don’t forget, even using PDF assets everything is still rendered at build time, not runtime) rather than exporting PNGs directly from your design tool of choice.

Apps like Citymapper, where you need a small amount of information, frequently are where the watch will shine. Situations like the ones described in this article, as well as things like walking directions in mapping apps are so clearly better solved with a glance than by pulling your phone out of your pocket and having to unlock it (even with Touch ID) every 2 minutes.

Business and Marketing

I linked to TopHat a few weeks ago and hot on its heels comes DailySales. If you want to keep a close eye on your App Store figures and the notification centre is more your style than a menu bar item then this is the tool for you.

Michael Simon with a look at the ups and downs (OK, mainly downs) of the rating and review system on the App Store.

Videos

Saul Mora talks about Objective-C and Swift and discusses the question “What is Swift trying to bring us?”.

Sponsored Jobs

iOS engineer & generalist? Help us make expense reports better!

Life is Short. Love your job. Ship tons of code.

We’re crafting the most beautiful cycling app. Join the ride.

And finally...

The perils of naming a language with a common word…