Issue 204

26^th June 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Beta 2 week! New builds of iOS 9, watchOS 2 and OS X El Capitan (macOS?) as well as a few updates to Swift . I haven’t yet taken the plunge yet with my primary devices, maybe with beta 3. 😀

However, I did finally take delivery of my watch this week. I’ve only been wearing it for 4 days so far so take my views with that bias. First thoughts? I really love the activity tracking and having notifications on my wrist is also useful. I have been using the glances occasionally but I really haven’t found myself using the “full” apps at all which was a bit of a surprise. At the moment, to me it’s an activity tracker with notifications - oh and it tells the time too. It’s early days though and long launch times on apps certainly don’t help so maybe this will change a bit over time, and with the release of watchOS 2.

Dave Verwer

Tools

XcodeServerSDK

Honza Dvorsky with a Swift interface to the Xcode server API. There’s a mix of supported and unsupported functions available here (along with a handy list in the readme) but if you’re working with automating your builds from Swift, this is going to be very useful. This library was extracted from the Buildasaur project which you’ll also want to check out.

UI Testing with Xcode 7

Laurin Brandner on his experiences while converting UI tests in one of his open source projects, ImagePickerSheetController from KIF to XCTest. On the same subject, Felix Krause also blogged some tips on running tests from the command line with XCTest this week.

Code

The Best of What’s New in Swift

Mike Ash with his take on Swift 2. If you read Mike’s blog regularly (you do, right?) you might not be surprised to hear he starts out this post by looking at function pointers 😄 but he then carries on to protocol extensions and a comprehensive discussion of the new error handling.

Swift 2: “for… in” filtering

Natasha on the for…in filtering introduced with Swift 2. This is not a huge feature but it is going to make our lives easier on a day to day basis. Did this need adding? Not necessarily. Is the language better as a result? Yes. I love little language enhancements like this.

Valet

I’m really surprised that by iOS 9 we still don’t have a higher level API to Keychain. I actually had this saved just before WWDC but I postponed it, just in case it finally happened… Anyway, it didn’t so here you go. Yes, there are loads of these already but this is going to be a great choice if you’re looking for something friendlier than the C APIs.

Using sendMessage for Instantaneous Data Transfer

Kristina Thai with a follow up to this post on phone ⇒ watch communication in WatchKit 2. The first post was an introduction but this time she takes a more in depth look at using sendMessage.

Design

On Visual Hierarchy

Contrast, size, colour and spacing. This is a great, clearly written article on the fundamentals of building a readable, well organised UI by thinking about visual hierarchy.

Business and Marketing

Impact of iOS 9’s Space Requirement

Great stats from David Smith here on the percentage of users that currently have enough space to install iOS 9. The situation is looking much more positive for quick adoption than with iOS 8, and for those who don’t have enough space finding 1Gb should be much easier than finding 4Gb.

Do The Simple Thing First

Harry McCracken with a look at engineering inside Instagram, both before and after the acquisition. The main focus of the article is on the original desire for simplicity and speed and how that works inside Facebook. However, it also gives some interesting details on why they distribute multiple apps rather than adding features to one main app.

Videos

WWDC 2015 Swift Panel Discussion

Recorded during WWDC, this panel discusses the current state, and future of Swift.