Issue 205

3^rd July 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Ever wanted to contribute to clang? I really enjoyed this write up of the process from Alex Denisov who recently had a feature merged. The post covers the feature itself, and some stats from the process of getting it accepted.

I’m a big fan of the new SFSafariViewController, it’s a really common requirement to implement an in-app browser and the quality of the implementations is not always up to scratch. It also brings significant security improvements by being hosted outside the app. Looks like Twitter mostly agree, but they did submit a radar this week with some feature requests. Knowing how much Twitter relies on the web view, the fact that SFSafariViewController is pretty close even in beta 1 is impressive.

Tools

Natasha Murashev with a fantastic tip for those crashes in Swift that don’t really tell you… well… anything 😆. This is definitely going to save some time. On a similar subject, if you’re looking for more Swift debugging tips then Carola Nitz’s recent talk at the Swift Summit is also worth a watch.

Everyone’s favourite documentation browser received a major upgrade this week. The big feature is annotations, both local/personal but also support for remote annotation servers (you can set one up using the open source annotation server). Grab the Xcode Plugin and you’re all set up with a great documentation viewer for both the core documentation, and more.

Code

Andrea Mazzini with a look at the new changes in iOS 9 for UIDynamics while building a simple basketball game. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at dynamics myself but from the look of this app, it no longer fights with Auto Layout which is great news! Not sure if that’s an iOS 9 thing or whether this was previously fixed in iOS 8.

I found that the best way to think about Dixie was to see it as like a mocking framework that you enable globally inside your app rather than only in your test target. This allows various parts of your app to be replaced for integration tests, amongst other things. Just remember to #ifdef it out of your distribution builds 😎.

Michał Kałużny looks at building a complication in watchOS 2. It’s a relatively straightforward API but there are still a few gotchas to watch out for. The example in the article is creating a complication to show the time for the next bus in a transit app. It goes through the basics, and then moves into dealing with time travel 😁.

Want to replicate the look of the Apple Watch/Activity app rings? This library from Petr Korolev should sort you out. It doesn’t do the fancy overlapping rings (as far as I can tell) but it’s an easy way to get that same kind of look and feel. Great support for IBInspectable & IBDesignable as well.

Design

Quite a critical look at the onboarding process that shipped along with Apple Music this week. There are definitely things that could be improved with the process, and I found myself nodding along with the slide deck. However when I went through the process myself, I didn’t struggle at all. On a similar subject, check this conversation comparing the Apple Music UI to Spotify.

Looking for some inspiration for your Apple Watch icons? Look no further.

Business and Marketing

So this post by Brent Simmons has generated a lot of discussion this week. Read it, and then take a look at the replies from Allen Pike, Jason Brennan, Curtis Herbert, Charles Perry and the final reply from Brent.

If more people read this article (and acted on it), Brent might not have made post I linked to above. Even though most consumers won’t change their behaviour at this point, it’s still a good read 😃.

Videos

The Swift Summit was a little while ago now but there were so many session videos they’ve taken a little while to go up. I think they are all processed and uploaded now so here you go! More than 20 sessions from the summit, just before they become obsolete in a couple of months because of Swift 2 😏.

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And finally...

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