Issue 193

10^th April 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Looks like the watch sold out pretty quickly this morning and browsing through my timeline on Twitter, I didn’t see anyone with an April delivery date. Plenty in May of course but if you’re still pondering at this point you’ll be lucky to be wearing one before the end of the summer 😎.

However, iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3 were released this week and they include a Vulcan Salute emoji so even if you didn’t get a watch you should already be having a great Friday 🖖. I can’t wait for iOS 8.4.

Oh and finally, now that Xcode 6.3 is shipped you can submit apps compiled with Swift 1.2 which is great news if you’re on the bleeding edge!

Dave Verwer

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News

This time it’s for real, for updates as well as new releases. If you’re still being held back by a 3rd party library it’s time to drop it and find a replacement.

Abdel Ibrahim talking on the fact that the UI for the watch is not centred around apps like the iPhone and iPad are. The kinds of apps that are possible with the current SDK don’t suffer too much from this because they are basically acting as a 2nd screen to an phone app. However, when the full SDK is released, I don’t see the watch UI changing in any fundamental way, so will apps always take a less important role on the watch?

Tools

Having trouble getting your WatchKit app signed with Xcode 6.3? Nick Arnott has advice for you, including some information on additional issues you might face if you’re using Jenkins for CI.

Code

There have been lots of posts on Swift performance since the first beta was released but I’m always reluctant to link to them as it still feels too early to compare performance fairly given how young the language is. Certainly performance has improved drastically since those early beta versions but, there are things you can do to write code to be more performance friendly as well. This post covers some techniques to remove dynamism from your code to give a performance boost where needed.

This is beautiful, and the API couldn’t be simpler. I think the first place I saw these kind of animations was in the Skype app, but they are becoming more common now and used sparingly they can be very effective.

JSON → Core Data, the eternal struggle of getting remote data synchronised with a local store. This library doesn’t get into the networking side of things but does provide a simple way to take received JSON and sync it with your Core Data models.

This is a neat little library by Didier Brun, define some paths and have them automatically recognised. Obviously this isn’t going to be suitable for UI in every app but if you’re experimenting with more complex gestures than single path swipes you might want to look at this.

macOS Development

Fabricio Rosa Marques talking about the Yosemitification (it’s a word, trust me) of Tower. Even though it was nowhere near as drastic as the iOS 6 → 7 visual update, there are still a surprising number of design changes to take care of. It’s much more than slapping a transparency on your sidebar.

Design

I speculated on whether this would come to iOS back in Issue 189 and I’m more convinced every day that it’s going to be a thing come September (notice I’m not saying which September!). Jason Brennan writes here on the possibility of it being introduced and how we might use it.

Business and Marketing

I’ve never needed help making sure my apps fail 😬 but if you’re struggling with being too successful Ken Yarmosh has some great advice!

Videos

Ayaka Nonaka talking about building a spam detector using the NLP APIs from Swift.

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And finally...

Panic found a way… Amazing 😏.