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News
Using CocoaPods with watchOS 2
Talking of watchOS 2, Justin Ehlert has some advice on getting CocoaPods working in your app extension. The main thing is that the podspec needs to indicate that watchOS is supported, so if you maintain any pods make sure their specs get an update... and I guess you should make sure the code works too! 😝
medium.com
Open Sourcing the Windows Bridge for iOS
Back at the Build conference in April this year, Microsoft announced that they'd be building Objective-C support into the next version of Visual Studio, allowing Windows Phone apps to be ported/built with it. It's very much early days 😁 and there's still plenty of stuff missing, but it's an interesting project. The big question remains though, even when it's further along will developers bother porting apps given that they'll probably still need to build some Windows UI on top of their app's core?
windows.com
Tools
Xcode Server Tutorials
Honza Dvorsky with a great tutorial on getting your projects setup for CI using Xcode Server and bots. This is a getting started post, which was followed up with a second post on integrations but you'll want to keep an eye on the site as there's more to come.
honzadvorsky.com
How to symbolicate watchOS 2 extension crash logs from device
Aleksandar Vacić with a walkthrough of the rather involved process of getting symbolicated crash logs from a watchOS 2 app. I'm sure this will all be seamless in due course, but until then this will save you some time and frustration.
aplus.rs
Code
So you're thinking about adding a 3rd party library to your app?
I'm not against 3rd party libraries at all, I use them every day. However, I do exercise plenty of caution before adding a new one to a project. This is a great checklist you should go through before adding that extra line to your Podfile.
roadfiresoftware.com
Arrays, Linked Lists and Performance
Airspeed Velocity with an investigation into the performance of map/reduce in Swift. Maybe the lowly for loop isn't dead after all. 😃
airspeedvelocity.net
Spacetime
Interesting project from Facebook for splitting content into several different layers which can be positioned independently. I see this being used mainly for things like fancy transitions but I bet there are some more subtle uses as well. Worth checking out and doing a little experimentation with.
github.com
Ji
Remember XML? 😃 You might occasionally still come across a situation where you need to parse some. Actually, it's more likely that you'll need to consume the odd bit of HTML these days rather than XML. Luckily, this new library by Honghao Zhang does both and looked pretty good to me.
github.com
Design
Ephemeral Undo
Lukas Mathis on the problem of designing a UI for undo on mobile platforms. I've been using Outlook for iOS recently which uses this ephemeral undo style and it works well, except when it doesn't! If you're too slow and the UI disappears, it's gone and there's no way (that I know of) to get back at it. It's a tricky problem for sure because shake to undo also has plenty of problems.
ignorethecode.net
Crafting Icons
This set of slightly nostalgic icon design time-lapse videos is a fun way to spend a few minutes. Of all the changes that the iOS 7 design brought with it, I do miss the beautiful icons that people made the most.
elischiff.com
Business and Marketing
Is it too early for me to start a pay-per-click campaign?
This isn't specific to iOS but there's some great lessons in this article by Nathan Kontny. He talks about running PPC campaigns, but more importantly some alternatives and additional steps you should take to get the word out.
signalvnoise.com
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So, beta 5 of iOS and watchOS appeared last night and no workaround is needed to get Xcode running on El Cap this time! 😃 Russ Bishop has a nice summary of the changes to Swift but otherwise it's very much business as usual.
We're probably 5-6 weeks out from a final iOS 9/watchOS 2 release and while we haven't yet got TestFlight support for iOS 9, watchOS 2 apps can now be uploaded and distributed to internal testers. I'd expect to see full iOS 9 support added very shortly, maybe even before the next beta.
Dave Verwer