Issue 209

31^st July 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Beta 5 for El Capitan this week but no movement on the iOS 9 side of things so it’s been a fairly quiet week for news. However there’s still a load of great content, so let’s get straight on with the links!

Dave Verwer

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News

I try not to link to rumours very much but I’d like to make an exception here. I didn’t really believe that Apple TV was bumped from WWDC at the last minute. So much of the conference would have needed re-working as it surely would have made up a large part of the show. However, I do believe that they are working hard on it and a September event seems like a reasonable place to introduce it. Big question is, will we get access to the SDK straight away? There’s going to be an awful rush if they introduce it as being available, which is likely given the rumoured timing of the event, alongside the SDK.

Tools

You just hit the play button, right? 😎 Interesting article from Michael Tauraso on how Square use Jenkins and other tools to get both their App Store and internal apps built and shipped.

If you’re writing about Swift in Markdown, this tool is going to be useful. It extracts code from Markdown code blocks, executes it and inserts the results back into the file. Developed by Chris Eidhof to help with the Core Data and Advanced Swift books that he’s working on, but useful for anyone writing about Swift.

Code

Jesse Squires has come up with a great way to reduce the bloat of your viewDidLoad methods and increase the readability of your code. He suggests using the didSet method of IBOutlets to do any initialisation needed for just that control. Great idea.

With much better support for external keyboards in iOS 9, UIKeyCommand is going to be something we need to get more familiar with. Nate Cook goes through the basics and covers what’s new with these APIs in iOS 9.

Now that we’ve had a couple of months with Swift 2 and the new features, we’re moving away from “Look, new stuff!” and into how to actually use these things for real. In this article, Benjamin Encz takes a deeper look at Swift’s new error handling and how to mix it with Objective-C code.

There are a lot of image downloading and caching libraries out there but this new one from Pinterest is worth a look. The focus is on getting images displayed to the user as quickly as possible, including setting priorities for images, progressive JPEG downloading and support for WebP images and animated GIFs (through FLAnimatedImage).

Design

This is a great read from Pasquale D’Silva on spatial interfaces. I’ve long been a fan of how, right from the very beginning, iOS used things like the default navigation controller animations to show where data is coming from and going to. I even miss the animation showing that your photo was moving to the photo library when you took a photo.

Luke Wroblewski with a fabulously detailed look at the current watch UI and how it might be improved.

Useful tool by James Tang which can take a screenshot (or other image) and dynamically map it onto any quadrilateral shape. Great for putting screenshots into stock device photos.

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And finally...

Great stories at this year’s NeXTEVNT.