Issue 197

8^th May 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Feels like it’s been fairly quiet in iOS land this week, which makes a nice change. It won’t last though as we’re less than a month away from WWDC now which will inevitably turn everything on its head again.

Dave Verwer

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News

Interesting post by the Microsoft Visual C++ team on the process of compiling iOS and Android code to Windows via Clang. It’s also worth checking out this video from the Build conference if you want to learn more. Think back a few years, would you have imagined that our tools would be so different now? Clang/LLVM has had an astonishing impact.

Tools

The fastlane suite of tools has been around for a while now but this week Felix Krause shipped 1.0. The release includes OS X support, better documentation, auto update and a few other smaller features and bug fixes. Even if you don’t want to automate an entire CD process, there are a whole load of useful individual tools in here.

Sam Dods with a quick introduction to his new tool Stencil. It’s an Xcode plugin (available via Alcatraz) which allows easy creation and maintenance of Xcode file templates. I really like that you can store the templates per project (and therefore commit them to source). Looks like a great tool.

While developing Buildasaur, Honza Dvorsky ended up learning more about Xcode Server than anyone outside the development team should. In this post, he takes a comprehensive look at the structure and architecture of Xcode server and bots. Even if you probably won’t end up digging this deep yourself, it’s an interesting read.

Code

Fancy more of an in-depth read this week? Norman Tasfi has a write up of the project he undertook for Flipboard to reduce the size of images without losing as much quality as with traditional techniques. I’ll admit that the implementation of this went well over my head but the discussion was fascinating.

While the concept of retain cycles is easy to understand, this post by Ignacio Nieto Carvajal is a good recap. His post covers the concept, ways you might be creating them with ARC and a brief discussion of tracking them down with Instruments.

Like SwiftBox, this is based on the Facebook implementation of flexbox. This time, Robert Böhnke has had a go at bringing this layout technology to Objective-C. Check out the included playground for an example of how it works.

Design

The HIG for the watch has existed for a little while but received a new design and an update this week. It’s a great resource but feels a little light on details. Maybe it’s just the new page design but it feels more like a marketing document than something you’d really refer back to as you design. That said, it’s a good overview of the various components and functionality of WatchKit.

I’ve been waiting for this series of posts by Eli Schiff to come to an end before linking to them and sure enough the final post arrived this week. As you might guess by the title of the series, this isn’t a very positive look at design on iOS but it’s worth a read. Here you go: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Business and Marketing

This post has received a lot of attention over the last few days. It’s important to note that this conversation is around unit sales, not revenue but even so these numbers are disappointing. It’s also possible that this is affecting the charts but after seeing this follow up of a snapshot of RealMac revenue the units are not orders of magnitude apart.

Videos

I was very sad to have to miss the final NSConference this year, it’s been a wonderful conference over the years and I can’t wait to see what Scotty gets up to next. Luckily if you also missed it, all of the videos are now available online for you to watch.

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And finally...

“Why is it trying to kill you?” — I enjoyed this amusing piece by Craig Mod.