Issue 192

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.

News

Preparing Your App Submission for Apple Watch

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!

Moving mountains

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

My Core Data Stack

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.

iOS Charts

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.

SAHistoryNavigationViewController

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

Why I don't use PDFs for iOS assets

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.

Citymapper on Apple Watch

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

Daily Sales

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.

The Plying Game

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

Videos

Think Different

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

And finally...

That was NOT what I was looking for

The perils of naming a language with a common word...

Issue 192 April 3rd 2015