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Should developers ever edit content?
We asked 73 iOS app devs whether they like editing in-app content. Surprisingly, all of them said "no". Also, all of them liked Contentful, a mobile-first CMS with a RESTful JSON API. The editors take care of the content and it immediately appears in the app. Try it! And win one of three Apple Watch bands. Sign up now, and publish an entry saying "iosdevband".
contentful.com
News
A Partial List of Questions About the Native Apple Watch SDK
One thing that was confirmed this week is that we'll see a preview of a native SDK for the watch this week. Marco Arment published his thoughts on it and there's certainly a lot of questions here that'll be answered next week. It's also worth reading this follow up by Jason Brennan.
marco.org
Add Google to your iOS Apps with CocoaPods
Google IO last week saw an interesting iOS announcement from Google. CocoaPods will be the preferred method for installation for all Google iOS libraries. It made the IO keynote and Google also put together a cute introduction video. Congratulations to the CocoaPods team!
blogspot.com
Tools
CoPilot
Think SubEthaEdit for Xcode. Whether you're going to attempt remote pair programming or just want to jump in and convert someones tabs to spaces while they work, this is an interesting experiment by Sven A. Schmidt.
feinstruktur.com
SwiftDoc
How had I not come across this before! Nate Cook (of NSHipster) has put together this useful site containing documentation for the Swift standard library.
swiftdoc.org
Code
Practical and efficient WatchKit tables with view model diffing
In a follow up to this article from a couple of weeks ago, Radek Pietruszewski has put together a great article taking the technique even further. Even with the announcement of the native SDK next week, all networking is still going to be across the connection with the phone so techniques like this are important.
radex.io
OSStatus — Apple API Errors
This one doesn't need much explanation. Ever had to look up an error number for an Apple API? The answer is here, all in one place.
osstatus.com
DynamicColor
Yannick Loriot with a useful little library. It's really common to need to adjust a colour lighter or darker and I've been using a couple of small functions to do this in apps for a while now. This library does that, and more including inverting colours, saturating/desaturating and complimentary colours. Useful.
github.com
EasyAnimation
Marin Todorov with a new animation library. It doesn't stray too far from the standard UIView/CALayer animations but does allow the two to be mixed together which can be really useful. It also includes spring animations for layers and the ability to chain animations together. Looks really good.
github.com
Design
The iOS Design Guidelines
Ivo Mynttinen with his take on a set of iOS design guidelines. When I first started to read this I thought it was going to the usual "Here's all of the resolutions and icon sizes you need" but keep scrolling and you get to a great set of tips.
ivomynttinen.com
Sponsored Jobs
Senior iOS Engineer at GoPro - Cardiff, CA or San Francisco, CA
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thesourcery.com
And finally...
How do you build an app?
David Smith answers the question we all get asked in great style.
david-smith.org
Hello from San Francisco!
If you were planning to watch the keynote at AltConf, it has unfortunately had to be cancelled (Note: AltConf itself isn't cancelled! Just the streaming of sessions). I do understand that it breaks the rebroadcasting rule but Apple could have either looked the other way, or even worked with the AltConf organisers to make it legal rather than do this. Really disappointing.Update: Apple have reversed the decision and the keynote and state of the union sessions are once again going to be streamed at AltConf. Great news! Thank you Apple.
Wherever you're going to watch the keynote, enjoy WWDC! I'll be back next week with a round up of everything you've inevitably already read about! 👍
Dave Verwer