Issue 199

22^nd May 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Rumours! Lots and lots of talk of some of the potential details of iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 this week. Will we see another new system font? Split screen apps? or better transit support in maps? Who knows… I’d make a bet on the change of system font to San Francisco being likely though, it never made a huge amount of sense to me for the watch not to use the same system font as iOS and OS X.

More interestingly, some commits to the WebKit project revealed a few new things as well. We’ll have to wait and see what makes it into the release though.

Dave Verwer

News

Little Bites of Cocoa

Jake Marsh has started up a new site with a daily Cocoa tip. The first few days have covered UIViewController Initialization, Chainable Methods, the Timepiece Library and Singletons. Great idea, you should subscribe (good luck with keeping up the daily pace Jake!)

You Do Not Have to Make a Watch App

I’ve been quite surprised at just how many apps have implemented a watch extension so far and it seems I’m not alone. Paul Kafasis urges you all to really think about whether you have an app which makes sense on the watch before jumping in. The Fandango app is a perfect example of an app which really shouldn’t exist on the watch in its current form, although it’s unintentionally hilarious on a 38mm watch 😆.

Tools

SwiftLint

The holy grail of perfectly consistent code crops up in every language and Swift is no exception. The folks over at Realm have put together this small tool which can be integrated into your build process to highlight inconsistencies in your Swift code as errors/warnings.

GitUp

Pierre-Oliver Latour has obviously been hard at work implementing his new git client. Except, this isn’t just a GUI sitting on top of the git command line tool — it’s a completely independent tool which uses the same underlying git data formats so it can work seamlessly on your existing repositories. I love the QuickLook style history/commit detail view, it’s really good.

Code

Reducing WatchKit Traffic With View Models

So as we’ve all now realised, app startup time on the watch can be pretty slow and is something you should be paying attention to when developing. Robin Senior takes us through using View Models to reduce the traffic moving between the two devices.

Which features overcomplicate Swift? What should be removed?

Rob Rix‎ takes a step back and considers some of the complexity of Swift. The main problems are all related to Objective-C compatibility of course, but he has a list of other annoyances as well. Oh and who knew you’d be visiting Quora today huh? 😄

Swift: Six Killer Features

Erica Sadun with a slightly more upbeat look at some of Swift’s features.

DKChainableAnimationKit

I do love Core Animation, but it can be a little… long-winded. This library provides a shorthand syntax for many common animations along with the ability to chain them together. I hadn’t come across JHChainableAnimations before but this is a Swift port of that library.

Design

My icon design workflow

Marc Edwards with a lesson on how he sets about creating icons. The article covers Illustrator and Photoshop specifically but these are great tips no matter what tool you use to actually do the creation.

Optical Adjustment

Luke Jones with a wonderful article on throwing away our mathematical approach when designing. I know I get drawn into this time and again (I blame my developer brain — 49 pixels‽ Surely it should be 50! 😬). Definitely worth a read.

The Apple Watch: User-Experience Appraisal

Raluca Budiu for the Nielsen Norman group with their look at the UI/UX of the watch. Fairly obvious that button and control sizes are the biggest target for criticism (pun intended 😆). However this is a good look at the design conventions of the watch. I also really liked the section on using Handoff to move more complex interactions (like logging in) to the phone temporarily.

And finally...

The early days of Apple

There’s a couple of comments on the video by Woz as well.