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News
ResearchKit
This is huge news. ResearchKit was promised as open source and I was amongst those who were a little sarcastic on the chances of it happening. However, it's happened, and in spectacular style too. Hosted on GitHub and already accepting pull requests! Several members of the ResearchKit team are actively participating in discussions on pull requests and there's already real work being done.
It even looks like PRs for CocoaPods and Carthage support will be merged. How times have changed... Bravo Apple.
Is this a one off or is this the start of a new thing at Apple? Time will tell on that but I wouldn't get your hopes up for an open source UIKit just yet π.
github.io
Tools
Follow These Guidelines and Never Struggle with Xcode Code Signing Again
Remember when code signing was cryptic, badly documented and rarely worked? While the tools have certainly improved over the years, in some ways it feels harder to actually get right now than it was in 2008/9. Jared Sinclair has a solid set of tips to make sure the process is as smooth as possible for you.
As for "Fix Issue"... never... not even once π.
jaredsinclair.com
Natalie - Storyboard Code Generator
Marcin KrzyΕΌanowski has a crack at the problem of stringly typed code in Storyboards. We've seen solutions similar to this before but if you're working with Swift this is a quick and easy way to get enums generated for working with your storyboards without relying on strings.
krzyzanowskim.com
Code
Researching ResearchKit
Peter Steinberger with an in depth look at what ResearchKit actually contains. I won't spoil the contents here, you should read it all. The only thing I will say is that I bet it doesn't take long for someone to extract ORKVisualConsentTransitionAnimator into a separate library, it's very cool.
petersteinberger.com
Counting emoji groups
How many characters are there in a π¨βπ¨βπ§βπ¦? Erica Sadun looks at working with the new emoji in Swift and uncovers a bug (confirmed by Chris Lattner). It's still an interesting look at how the new emoji have been implemented though!
ericasadun.com
Your Spring Animations Are Bad (And Itβs Probably Appleβs Fault)
Mike Rundle with an investigation into spring animations in iOS. The UIView spring animation method introduced in iOS 7 is his target here and he talks about the problems with it and gives some good alternatives.
medium.com
Kingfisher
New image download and caching library by Wei Wang. Inspired by SDWebImage this is a pure Swift implementation for that essential task of dealing with images from the network.
github.com
Design
Twitterrific for Apple Watch
What would a Twitter app look like on the watch? Looks like you'll be able to find out on the 24th. Ged Maheux explains some of the design decisions that went into the process. Instead of a timeline (the phone is much better for that) it concentrates on replies, favourites, follows, DMs and retweets. It also has support for new Tweets via Siri. This is an interesting look at how you bring a potentially complex app to the watch.
iconfactory.com
Business and Marketing
Thoughts on Increasing App Revenue
Dan Counsell with some tips on thinking beyond that initial purchase and the inevitable(?) decline from the spike in sales that accompanies your app's launch. There's some solid advice here, as always.
dancounsell.com
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π WWDC ticket time! π The lottery system is being used again this year but in a much fairer way where you have to buy the ticket you applied for, if you get lucky. This stops teams applying for multiple tickets to increase their chances when they have no intention of buying them all.
As well as the changes to the lottery process, there are also some changes to the event. Friday afternoon is going to have session content as well as labs, some sessions will be streamed live (my guess is any session in Presidio), the scholarship programme has been expanded, there will be no Stump this year π and no selfie sticks will be allowed inside Moscone π.
I'm sure you've already made the decision and entered the lottery, or not, by now but if you're still sitting on the fence you've got about 2 hours to get that decision made. Good luck if you're hoping for a ticket. I'll hopefully see you there!
In other news, I hope you didn't get comfortable with only one version of Xcode in your dock as Xcode 6.4 and iOS 8.4 dropped into the developer centre this week.
Dave Verwer