Issue 200

29^th May 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

200! OK. Almost 4 years, and yes we had cake! 🎂

Thanks for subscribing, spreading the word and most of all for writing all the amazing content I get to read and share every week. Here’s to the next 210 issues (I get to retire at Issue 410, right?).

Dave Verwer

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Apple banned selfie sticks at WWDC so we’re throwing a Selfie Soirée at the nearby 111 Minna. Come join us from 8 to midnight for an open bar, brick oven pizza and an evening of fun!

News

Ben Adida with a great post on ethics in software development. As Ben says in the article, “We, software engineers, have superpowers most people don’t remotely understand.” People put a huge amount of trust in our apps with no reasonable way to know what we’re doing with their data. The linked podcast on RadioLab is really worth a listen as well. Of course, none of this is going to be news to you but it’s probably something we should all spend more time thinking about.

WWDC

Just over a week to go. Whether you’re going to the show, or whether you’re heading to AltConf or Layers. Enjoy the week and here’s a few tips from me this year:

• You (probably) don’t need to queue unless you want to be right at the front of the keynote. The last couple of years there hasn’t even been an overflow room so you don’t need to queue. However, the queue can be an experience in itself (I met several people who are still friends to this day on cold mornings outside Moscone) so if you do decide to do that, make sure you talk to the people around you. Oh and bring a coat, it’s freezing at 5am in San Francisco.
• Bring Radar numbers to the labs. So you’ve got this bug you’ve been struggling with for months. The labs are your chance to put it in front of a real engineer and show them your pain. It’s your moment of glory, right? If you haven’t already, file it as a Radar right now. The engineers will love you, and if you haven’t already filed it they will still need you to do that before it gets fixed.
• Book a UI review appointment for the Design Lab. They open up the appointments one day at a time and you’ll stand the best chance if you’re waiting at the doors when they open them. This is your only opportunity to get an Apple designer to critique your app. Don’t miss it.
• Pace yourself. You don’t need to go to every session and you don’t need to queue for every lab. Strike up a conversation with someone and take a few minutes out of the queues and relentless bombardment of information.
• You will be more inspired than you have been all year during the week. I always struggle with the battle between the incredible desire to code new ideas and keeping the laptop closed as much as possible so I can have interesting conversations. My advice? Write your ideas down and keep the laptop closed as much as possible. You can dig into code when you get home but having thousands of iOS and Mac developers in the same city as you only happens once a year, enjoy it!

I would also have recommended going to the lunchtime “brown bag” sessions which can really be one of the conference highlights but I can’t see them on the schedule this year. I hope they haven’t been dropped.

Dave Verwer

As usual, Adam Swinden is keeping an unofficial list of everyone who wants to indicate that they’ll be in San Francisco (ticket or no ticket). Alongside the Google Doc and map, there’s also a Slack which might come in handy if you’re looking to organise meetups or events during the week.

So. Many. Parties… Crazy. You can’t go to them all, but you should go to some. Grab the app or follow WWDCParties on Twitter for details.

Tools

Great post by Sam Marshall on xcconfig files. It’s possible you haven’t dug into them at all yet as there is very little documentation on them. However, they are gaining popularity and can make the settings for your app much more readable and explicit.

Remember BugShot? Well it has a new home and a new release! It’s still a great way to quickly annotate and share a screenshot on iOS.

Code

Radek Pietruszewski has an amazingly easy way to improve how your text labels render on the watch. It comes down to using an attributed string with the right paragraph style and boom hyphenated text, that simple. 👍

Another helpful tip, this time relating to Split View Controllers and iOS 8. Turns out it’s pretty easy to change the default width of 320 points for the Master View. Keith Harrison has the details on which properties to change and the gotchas related to getting this working.

Russ Bishop explores some little known and undocumented Swift Attributes. @availability looks to be useful for cross platform code. Can anyone help Russ with some of the other obscure ones?

An interesting walkthrough from Victor Baro on recreating the rubber band effect for views in iOS and the maths used to get it right. Don’t miss the project on Github which has all the code and demos of the effects as well. Playgrounds are really proving useful for tweaking and getting animations just right.

Design

The title of this post might make you think it should be in the code section, and sure enough you should definitely check out the code that they open sourced but the post is more about the design. Oh, and I love that loading animation, just gorgeous. Worth a read.

Business and Marketing

This, very comprehensive list of tech focused news outlets, along with all sorts of information about them is an incredible resource. From Twitter handles, an idea of how much traffic they get, what categories and platforms they cover, but most importantly, how they prefer to be contacted/pitched. It’s so important to approach journalists in the way they like to be approached and all the information is here.

Yes, you’re not Apple. Yes, this isn’t a practical article on things you can do to help your business. However, what it is is a long and detailed look at the Apple PR machine and you should read it anyway. 😄

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And finally...

See you all there in just over a week!