Issue 198

15^th May 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Less than four weeks until WWDC! As usual, I’ll do a full round up of WWDC specific links the week before the conference but I do just want to mention a couple of things now so you can make sure you’re registered in time. Of course, there’s AltConf which as always, has a stellar set of speakers. However one you might have missed is a new conference, Layers which is off to a very strong start with an outstanding line up for a design focused conference. There really has never been a better week to be in San Francisco, even if you didn’t get a golden ticket.

Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Dave Verwer

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News

🎉 App analytics for everyone! 🎉 If you hadn’t yet been given access to iTunes Connect Analytics, it looks like Apple have now opened up the beta to all developer accounts. Great news!

Tools

What if p self.window.bounds worked inside LLDB? Craig Hockenberry (via this tweet by Oliver Letterer) turns all of your dreams into reality with this little tip. To top it off, Steve Streza then came up with a great way to automate it.

Interesting little tool from Nigel Timothy Barber that takes a PDF file and spits out Core Graphics code to render the output into a context. Depending on the complexity of the PDF the source files can be (necessarily) large. For example, I managed to generate a 25Mb source file when I tried to give it a challenge. It still rendered perfectly into my app though.

Code

With iOS 8 came a change to how AutoLayout treats views with transformations applied to them. Transformations and iOS 7 Auto Layout were almost the end of me several times so I’m a fan of the changes, but you’ll still run into issues if you maintain support for iOS 7 as well. Vlas Voloshin has an investigation into the problem and information on how to keep everything running smoothly on both iOS versions.

Mike Swanson follows up his general WatchKit tips article from a couple of weeks ago with some more tips for working with images on the watch. I can’t imagine a WatchKit app without images in it so you’ll probably want to give this post a look as well.

I tend not to use a logging framework myself but I know that many of you are! So, if you’re a fan of something like CocoaLumberjack then this Swift logging library will probably be of interest.

macOS Development

If you’re shipping OS X software outside the App Store, it’s likely that you use Sparkle to auto-update it. Sparkle can also send anonymous system information along with the request. Kuba Suder has put together a small Rails project which you can use to host your feed and produce really pretty graphs of the update data being reported.

Design

Marco Arment with a post on the iteration of his watch companion app for Overcast. The first version for the watch attempted to mirror the structure of the iPhone app, but after using it on a real watch realised it was the wrong approach. He redesigned the entire app to get a better experience on the watch, as well as better launch times due to the simplification. In many ways this is a similar story to the post about designing Twitterrific for the watch I linked to a few weeks back.

Another issue of obj.io came along this week and this month time the topic is Audio. As always, you should read the whole issue but I really enjoyed this set of guidelines from Aaron Day on how to effectively use audio without annoying your users.

Business and Marketing

As you may remember, I’m a big fan of perfect status bars in App Store screenshots 😀 but until now there was no easy way to add one to a watch screenshot. Luckily this tool now exists and can remove the charging indicator, add the standard time of 10:09 and generally make your screenshots look more professional. It supports apps, glances and notifications (with some limitations). Great work 👍.

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And finally...

Really great talk by Daniel Steinberg from dotSwift this year.