Issue 207

17^th July 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

I’m sure we’ve all spent time thinking about the future of Objective-C now that Swift has been here for a while. It’s certainly true that Apple are heavily pushing Swift as a replacement rather than a complement to Objective-C and that, if all goes well with Apple’s plan, Swift will be the language of choice for all iOS and OS X development.

Ben Sandofsky suggests that Objective-C will not so much be deprecated (which I agree with) but that it will instead start to fade away. None of us know how this will play out but I do agree that Apple doesn’t seem like a company that’s going to be happy with this situation of having to give equal love to two different languages.

Tools

Hamza Sood found a little hidden flag in the Xcode 7 beta which enables fuzzy autocomplete. I guess we’ll see this making an official appearance in a future version of Xcode but if you like living on the edge (and risking a crashier Xcode) then you can kick the tyres right now!

Code

I missed this at WWDC but as of iOS 9 UICollectionView will support reordering of cells as part of the standard API. Wojciech Łukaszuk gives a good overview and then talks about some of the considerations when reordering different sized cells.

Alberto De Bortoli writes up the experience of integrating Apple Pay inside an app. It’s clear to me that Apple pay has made their checkout process easier. Not only have they reduced the number of screens from 6 to 4, but the whole process is now native rather than relying on any web views. Apple Pay isn’t something every app is going to need but it’s an interesting post on both the design and implementation of integrating Apple Pay with a checkout process.

If you’ve ever come across a project which shares code between iOS and OS X you’ll probably have seen some kind of custom implementation of things like UI/NSColor so that you don’t constantly have to #ifdef. This project by Michael Buckley takes things much further though. You’ll still need a certain amount of conditional code but it should at least be possible to share more UI code between the platforms.

Design

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’d found the apps on the watch a little underwhelming. Some of this is because of technical and speed limitations, but most of it is related to the design of the apps. This article by Peter Lewis is a thoughtful look at the opportunity of the watch and how we should be considering designing our apps for it.

Business and Marketing

Great new tool by AppBot that runs a quick check past your public App Store page and suggests improvements you can make. It does things like check for significant release notes (no more “Bug fixes and improvements!”) and also runs your recent reviews through sentiment analysis. Useful.

As predicted by many people, app reviews from apps which are not yet compatible with iOS 9 are starting to appear. To me, the simple solution to this is to disable review submission from iOS betas. Yes, it would be possible to go review them from desktop iTunes but that’s not what people who are angry on the internet do. 🙊

Videos

What a treat! Over 60 videos already published from this year’s AltConf. There are a few talks missing but it’s amazing that so many have been published already. If you’re interested to see any of the videos that aren’t there yet, you can also get notified when they are published.

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And finally...

Wise words from Kevin Hoctor.