Issue 212

21^st August 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Rene Richie with a look at the accessibility features of the iOS camera app. A few years ago, the idea of a camera being fully usable by people with visual impairments would have raised some eyebrows. But while most companies would have just skipped over it, Apple didn’t. We should all look at our apps again to rethink what’s possible when it comes to accessibility.

Looking for some good examples of what people have been coming up with in their watch apps? Here’s 9 of the best. I’m still pretty sceptical about apps on the watch, but it’s good to see what people are already doing to push the platform forward.

Tools

Mike Ash on the development and debugging of an Xcode plugin. I also liked the tip in the comments which suggests badging one of your Xcode app icons while debugging the other. However, for me the real question raised by this article for me is how anyone manages to read Monaco 9pt. 🔍

Debugging Auto Layout constraints can be a pain. Rafael Machado has a handy tip on how to automatically output useful information about where your ambiguous layouts are in the view hierarchy. This week also saw Keith Harrison publish a tip on using identifiers to aid with Auto Layout debugging. Both are worth a read.

Code

I linked to the beta of GitUp a while ago but this week saw it reach v1.0. It also became open source and includes a new framework, GitUpKit. The API looks to be really understandable so if you were planning to do something interesting with git then you’ll find this gives you an easy way to integrate it.

Now that you have access to Mobile Safari cookies through SafariViewController, it’s possible to pass a user seamlessly from a logged in session on the web directly into your app. Based on the idea from this article by Riz Sattar, Kuba Suder has put together a proof of concept app. The only advice I have is just to be careful with the UI. Done right, and explained well to the user they’ll feel amazing. However, if you do it silently they may be confused and wonder what just happened!

New routing library from Marian Paul which includes some nice features like passing parameters and wildcard routes. If you’re looking at making all aspects of your app linkable then this might be worth a look. Funnily enough, Orta Therox also wrote this week about building a routing engine, this time on top of JLRoutes.

There’s been lots written about the new Swift error handling since WWDC. This week, Nick Lockwood had a crack at putting down his thoughts on the subject.

UPDATE: Apologies! I missed that this was posted by Nick in June, not this week. Take it with that context.

Design

This looks great. It’s a combination of a prototyping and timeline based animation tool. There’s some really nice touches though, like automatic animations between layers which have the same name on different artboards. You should check out the video on the home page and the tutorials to see some of what’s possible. Oh and if you are in the market for a prototyping tool, there was a recent round up by Tes Mat which is worth a read.

What a great idea. Obviously this was taken from a web page but there’s no reason you couldn’t implement this inside your iOS login screens too (along with the 1Password plugin, naturally). If you like this, then you should also be subscribed to Little Big Details which will give you regular dose of this kind of thing.

Business and Marketing

It’s always the dream to launch your app and get a prominent feature on the App Store, right? M.G. Siegler argues that maybe it’s not what you’re looking for and even that it could be harmful. Especially with your v1 product.

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