Issue 213

28^th August 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So it’s September 9th for the iPhone announcement and presumably the final release of iOS 9 will also ship on or around that date. The betas are all performing really well for me and it looks like it’s going to be a really solid release. 🎉

Even though it’s been a while since we had an OS beta, we did see some new Swift goodies this week in the form of Xcode 7 beta 6. Russ Bishop has a great overview of what’s new. The most interesting change to me was probably the addition of try? which Erica Sadun has dug into.

On with the rest of the links!

Dave Verwer

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News

Over the years there has been quite a bit of talk about what an app subscription service might look like and in a very roundabout way, Amazon are going to be the first to try it. Unfortunately there won’t actually be any subscription costs for the user. Instead, an interstitial ad will be played each time the app is launched. Amazon are then going to pay developers (~$0.002 per minute) based on how much their apps are used. This feels more like a way for Amazon to get their store app installed on more Android phones than an actual experiment with usage based pricing. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how this works out from the developer’s perspective. There’s more information here if you want the full details.

I missed this one last week, but it looks like Xcode won’t be the only Swift IDE in town for very much longer. Unfortunately third party implementations of Swift are always going to be playing catch up with Apple, and sure enough this version of AppCode does not support any of Swift 2.0. However, it’s a start and as Swift settles down it may become less of an issue.

Tools

These two concepts have to be the least understood bit of Auto Layout but they are really powerful when you get to grips with them. This short but sweet post by Jake Marsh does a great job of explaining what’s going on.

Code

I love that iOS 9 is going to make HTTPS connections mandatory (by default) with ATS. It can only be a step in the right direction to push developers down this route a little more. I could even see this becoming harder to ignore in future releases of iOS. In this article, Tim Ekl gives us a run down of what it is and how to work with it. You should switch it on, unless you want to show Google Ads… 😬

FOOMs and BOOMs 😄. Are you tracking when your app is being ejected from memory and why? Ali Ansari and Grzegorz Pstrucha go into detail on how they track, and deal with these “crashes” in the Facebook app. You’re probably not going to have to go to quite the same lengths as described here but measuring it seems like a great idea.

These posts by Chris Grant have been appearing since WWDC but the final one was published this week and that’s what I was waiting for! Eight tutorial style articles on various new features/APIs in iOS 9. Everything from Xcode features like UI testing and code coverage to APIs like Apple Pay and UIStackView.

Simon Gladman with a very cool UI concept for sketching in 3D using CoreMotion. Not entirely sure how useful this is going to be but it’s a great demo! 😃

macOS Development

Gus Mueller on integrating the web help for Acorn 5 into the OS X help menu search box. Having relevant suggestions show up rather than simply matching menu item text will probably save many, many hours of support as well.

Design

Paul Taykalo details some techniques for reducing the amount of time your users have to wait for UI, especially around network operations. We’ve been doing something similar to this in an app recently with uploads that are not time critical. At the point the upload needs to happen we just drop a file onto the disk and the upload process then takes any pending files and processes them all at once.

Hot on the heels of Principle which I linked to last week comes this. Flinto has been around for a while but the OS X app is new. There really are some great tools around these days for building rich prototypes.

Videos

We have amazing control over typography on iOS and this talk by Zev Eisenberg is a great high level overview of what’s possible and how to implement it. He’s also working on BonMot which makes putting together attributed strings much easier, and that can only be a good thing!

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