Issue 211

14^th August 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So we had a brief period where iOS 9 TestFlight betas were enabled this week, but then a few hours later disabled again. It’s got to be close now though, time is ticking.

Dave Verwer

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News

Nice upgrade to iTunes Connect analytics this week with the addition of breakdowns by various different factors across all of your results. Wondering how many IAPs you’re selling on iOS 7 compared to 8? Wonder no more.

With the introduction of extensions in iOS 8 and now much better support for linking between apps and Spotlight integration in iOS 9, it really does feel like the last couple of years have seen a significant shift from Apple towards integration with the operating system. Chris Maddern has written up some thoughts on the subject.

Tools

Felix Krause with yet another tool forming part of fastlane. This time it’s the build process which gets the treatment with gym. Built as a replacement for Shenzen, gym’s focus is on better error messages and output.

Do you have an input field in an app? Almost certainly! However, what happens when someone types in a potentially malicious string? Well, now you can easily investigate using this custom keyboard by Romain Pouclet which contains a collection of the worst possible strings you can subject your app to.

Ole Begemann with a look at the huge improvements to error messages which accompanied Xcode 7 beta 5. I’m really glad to see that this kind of improvement is getting attention as it fundamentally improves the usability of the language.

Code

Protocols are certainly an important part of Swift but of course, you need to know how best to use them. In this article David Owens gives us his thoughts on the subject. It’s also worth reading this post by Guy English which was in response to Brent Simmons’ latest post from his Swift diary.

Brent Simmons has been writing up his experiences getting to grips with Swift over the last few months. I was waiting until the series was finished before linking to it, but I’m not sure it ever will! 😃 Luckily, this week he published an index of the journey so far and here it is.

David Owens (again!) proving that no language can stop people writing bad code. 😃

Design

In the spirit of letting apps touch more of the system, and also with the addition of third-party complications on the watch, wouldn’t something like this be a nice way to open up some integration with the lock screen in iOS 10 (iOS X?)?

Business and Marketing

Dan Counsell makes some great points about app redesigns in this article. A fresh start is always tempting and when a redesign is proposed we have a tendency to get irrationally excited by it. As developers we also live with our redesigns for months before they get released, so when users react badly to change it can be a bit of a shock.

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And finally...

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