Issue 203

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So did everyone have a good week catching up with WWDC videos? I know I've watched a few this week. One in particular that I didn't see while at the conference but thoroughly enjoyed, and learned plenty from, was the Cocoa Touch Best Practices session by Luke Hiesterman. I also really enjoyed the details given in Introducing the New System Fonts on San Francisco. I've still got plenty to go though!

Anyway, I'm sure you'll watch (or maybe have already watched!) them all so I won't link to any more specifically and I'll get on with the links!

News

Swift Education

Hold on... Despite being hosted on GitHub and being very lightly branded, this site is indeed an official resource from Apple. It's not so much targeted at people wanting to learn app development, but towards teachers and trainers. Is this the start of an official curriculum from Apple? Maybe. The first set of resources they have up is an Introduction to App Development with Swift.

Apple’s Bitcode Telegraphs Future CPU Plans

App thinning did get a (very) brief mention during the Keynote last week but it feels like the main focus was on stripping unused image resolutions and architectures from fat binaries. Those pieces are important of course but Bitcode is much more interesting for the long term, giving Apple flexibility with future CPUs and architectures. Inertial Lemon takes a thorough look in this article which is definitely worth your time.

The new objc.io

It's a shame, but objc.io are stopping their monthly issues. Since the first one, published almost two years ago, every month has brought several very high quality articles covering almost all aspects of iOS development. It's a shame the monthly issues are stopping but the archive is still a great resource to have going forward so my thanks go out to all of the authors over the 24 published issues.

Tools

Code spiral

When developers are faced with a code review or pull request containing a small change it's usually pretty easy to quickly get a handle on what's needed. However, larger reviews can be tricky 🙈. There's some good advice on the subject here from Kirill Grouchnikov.

Swift header documentation in Xcode 7

Erica Sadun has a great rundown of the new features available for inline code documentation in Xcode 7. Markdown support, images and plenty more are going to make it much less work to create inline documentation for the code you're writing. I'm really happy to see Xcode moving in this direction.

Code

Protocol Oriented Programming

So Swift 2's protocol extensions were announced last week and detailed in the Protocol-Oriented Programming in Swift session at WWDC. In this article Jordan Morgan gives us a What? and Why? on the subject and then Alexandros Salazar follows it up with a little warning. 😀

Swift 2 error handling in practice

There has been lots written about the new error handling features in Swift 2 this week! Brad Larson does a great job of explaining the current situation with Objective-C and Swift 1.x and the new error handling of Swift 2. Nick Lockwood also has a really interesting take on the situation as well. Both are well worth reading.

UIStackView Playground

Feels like it's been a while since we got a new UI control for inside apps (rather than extensions, today widgets, etc...) and it feels like UIStackView is going to be an important one. It's not complex (which is a good thing) and I can see it quickly becoming an essential part of almost every app. Here's a playground for Xcode 7 by Christopher Truman which puts them to use in various ways. Oh, and if you're worried about iOS 8 compatibility, there's already a rebuilt version of UIStackView for iOS 7/8 called OAStackView.

The state of iBeacons

One thing we heard very little about last week was iBeacons (in fact, the awesome ASCIIwwdc tells me that it wasn't mentioned at all in any session this year). Mateusz Stawecki writes about the recent use of beacons at Úll and a view on the current state of iBeacons in iOS 8.

Design

iOS 9 UI Template for Sketch

Quick off the mark, Philip Amour has put together this Sketch document mocking up the new iOS 9 UI. Grab the San Francisco fonts from Apple and get cracking!

On conversational UIs

Matt Webb with a thought provoking article. I've been really enjoying Lark recently, mainly because of the conversational UI. Although there's a long way to go with a purely automated conversation (it definitely doesn't pass the Turing test!), it's definitely an interesting direction for apps. Matt gives us his thoughts, along with plenty of additional reading material on the subject.

And finally...

Origin of the CMD Symbol

If you didn't know where the ⌘ symbol came from, Jared Sinclair (via Susan Kare's talk at Layers) explains.

Issue 203 June 19th 2015