Issue 206

10^th July 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Beta 3 week, and with it came the release of the public beta program for iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. Brace yourselves for those bug reports!

Of course there was also a new release of Xcode 7, which included a few nice changes to Swift as well.

Dave Verwer

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News

It’s hard to keep track of every last thing that gets announced at WWDC. Luckily, Kuba Suder has put together a lengthy list of changes for both users and developers alike. Loads of links to explore if you need more information too. Think of it like an index for WWDC. 😃

Tools

Mike Ash with a detailed look at the new Address Sanitizer which will ship with Xcode 7. If you haven’t investigated it yet, it’s probably also worth watching the WWDC Session on Advanced Debugging (The Address Sanitizer portion of the presentation starts at 13m40s).

NSLog is a powerful tool but like Matt Rozema, I’ve come across projects where logging is completely out of control and it really makes debugging much harder than it needs to be. In extreme cases, it can even affect app performance. Does this mean I should remove my NSLog(@“here”); NSLog(@“here2”); NSLog(@“here3”); before shipping? 🙈

Felix Krause with a write up of the process of screenshot automation for the App Store. With multiple device resolutions, or if you do any kind of localisation, then you should be considering automation. This detailed guide will take you through how to get it done. 👍

Code

It’s interesting to look back and see that many of the features that were added to Objective-C over the last few years were to support the move towards Swift. It’s still happening too! In fact there were several new Objective-C features introduced at WWDC this year. Jordan Morgan has the details.

I mostly agree with this article by Jared Sinclair. It’s perfectly fine to just get something up and running quickly without worrying about code quality at every step of the way. However, you should also be working on improving your personal coding skills so that good code appears more naturally when you’re hacking something together. There’s always an opportunity to go back and improve things later.

Drew Crawford with a lengthy article looking in detail at a question which has been asked hundreds of times since the release of Swift. Structs or Classes?

Ethan Fan with a little proof of concept to get streaming heart rate data out of watchOS 2 and on to the phone.

macOS Development

Animated GIF notifications for everyone! Hamza Sood has been digging around with an undocumented feature in El Capitan. Check out the demo video for a quick look at what’s possible. Note: This may never make it as a feature we can use, but it’s interesting anyway. 😃

Design

When designing it’s hard to get a sense of how something will work without adding content. However, once you have content included, making changes becomes much harder as you play with different layouts. What if Sketch included support for laying out content using FlexBox CSS? Matej Hrescak has put together a Sketch plugin that does exactly that.

Fascinating article by Anthony Tseng on thinking through button placement. He suggests developing standard layouts for your app and gives some other tips to save your users from frustrating mistakes.

Business and Marketing

Try and ignore the click bait title and get through to the article itself. John Pavlus speculates on whether apps will eventually be less about what’s behind the icon and more about enhancing the core operating system experience. This is already happening in a minor way on iOS with things like custom keyboards and widgets but what will apps even look like in five years?

Launching an app and need a quick site to get your basic app details on there? Sure, you could build it all yourself but it’s probably easier to use this. It’ll grab your app details from the store and has a load of different themes to use as well. It’s also hosted for free. Looks great.

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