Issue 202

Comment

Great week, right? So much news about the ~~two~~ three platforms, Swift 2 and the announcement that Siri in iOS 9 is going to be scripted by Jimmy Iovine. Amazing! 😧

I'm not going to try and cover everything that was announced here but I do want to highlight a few of my favourite bits. UIStackView looks fantastic and should make it much easier for the last of you who haven't yet adopted Auto Layout to finally get on board. You'll need to as well.

Swift 2 also looks like a great update. It adds a few features including @testable and availability checking but also has some sensible syntax changes too. Oh, and the new nullability changes in Objective-C makes writing code which interacts with UIKit and friends much smoother.

There's also a new set of Apple Developer Forums! The biggest change here is that they don't require a login which is great both for convenience and also the fact that Google will finally be able to index the content.

All in all, a very solid set of updates for both iOS 9 and OS X and as always, it's been a fantastic week in San Francisco. It was great to meet and talk to so many of you, thanks to everyone for saying Hi!

News

Your Updated Apple Developer Membership

Fairly big changes to the developer programmes were also announced this week. No more separate iOS and Mac developer programs and increases to the number of devices you can use for testing with up to 100 each for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch (finally!). It also sounds like Safari extensions will be getting included in the paid developer programme and also have their own review process when El Capitan is released.

Swift 2

Probably the biggest news of the conference was Swift 2. I'm thankful that there were no fundamental changes but there are a whole load of new additions and some small syntax changes. This post by the Swift team gives some details and Airspeed Velocity also has a good summary of the changes.

Tools

CocoaPods and the Quality Index

The biggest problem with any third party library is assessing its quality. CocoaPods has now added a quality index for all pods which takes into account things like whether it has tests, how many issues are open, whether there is a README and a whole load of other checks. This quality index is also used to order search results when browsing for a library. Very cool.

Swift Standard Library.playground

When I first saw playgrounds in Xcode 6 it seemed like a great format for distributing documentation. Updates throughout the year brought various changes which helped towards that goal and the work continues with Xcode 7. Playgrounds now support Markdown, have multiple pages and can include separate sources and resources in addition to the actual playground. There are several good example playgrounds available, along with all of the other sample code from the conference, over on the WWDC Sample Code page.

Spaceship

This is interesting, a Ruby gem which uses an API to communicate with Apple rather than screen scraping. There's already a new version of the sigh tool from fastlane available which uses this rather than the old method. It'd be great if we had an official way to do this, but until then this is a great improvement.

Code

watchOS 2.0

So as we knew before the conference, the native watch SDK is now available in beta. The good news is that it's not going to be a huge change to get your apps transferred across as the basic structure is the same, it just runs on the device now. But what else does it include? Read on to find out.

How Not to Crash

Brent Simmons on the ultimate developer question, how do I stop my app crashing? This 9 part series of posts covers lots of the common mistakes we make. I especially liked the last post in the series on having the right mindset to avoid code which is too clever. This is certainly something I constantly try to do myself and is great advice.

Configuring App Transport Security Exceptions

I almost missed this in amongst everything else announced this week. iOS 9 is going to be much stricter with HTTPS connections and while it's already the case that you should be using secure connections wherever possible, iOS 9 really pushes you down that road. It's also forcing connections that are using HTTPS, to be TLS 1.2 to avoid recent vulnerabilities. This is a great step in the right direction.

Design

Apple Design Awards

Congratulations to all of the winners, there are some gorgeous apps here.

Business and Marketing

How I killed app sales by going freemium

Shuveb Hussain on his experience of taking an app from the traditional pay up front pricing model to freemium. Freemium is certainly something which has to be approached carefully, Marco Arment also had some thoughts on this which are worth reading.

Videos

UIKonf 2015 Videos

Just in case the WWDC videos weren't enough for you this week. Here's the full set of videos from this year's UIKonf in Berlin. Enjoy!

And finally...

NSHipster Quiz #7

I'm definitely not linking to this because our team won. Oh no. 😎

Issue 202 June 12th 2015