Issue 217

25^th September 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy new iPhone day!

As well as shipping millions of iPhones this week, Apple also found time to get watchOS 2 out of the door, release beta 2 of iOS 9.1 and tvOS and also pushed a significant revamp of iTunes Connect. The new beta of Xcode also included Swift 2.1 (here’s a good high level summary of the changes). It’s been a busy week in Cupertino!

iOS 9 adoption is also progressing nicely and usage is is already being reported higher than iOS 8. I’d expect adoption to start to slow down a little now (as usual) but this is a great start.

Dave Verwer

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News

Probably the biggest news this week is that the App Store is haunted 👻 (I never thought I’d get a chance to use that emoji in iOS Dev Weekly!). Claud Xiao digs into what it means and how it works. If you’re outside China it’s unlikely this directly affected you but you can validate your version of Xcode to double check. If you’re interested, the source has also been uploaded to GitHub.

Chris Dzombak has done a bit of analysis on which popular apps have actually shipped with ATS switched on. It’s very early days, and I’m not surprised by this at all. I think this year will be our chance to opt in voluntarily before it becomes mandatory with a future version of iOS. I’d expect there always to be a whitelist available, but maybe no way to switch it off entirely. We’ll see.

Tools

Last week I linked to a tip on using .gitattributes to help with merging project files. Pretty quickly after publishing, I was notified of mergepbx by Simon Wagner which uses a similar technique but also has knowledge of project files to make the process more reliable. This article by Matt Oakes has more details.

It does seem like it’s maybe a little too early to jump in with Bitcode right now. However, Frederic Jacobs puts together a case against it ever being a good idea due to the security implications.

Code

Support for colour (yes, with a u) in the iOS SDK has always been quite basic but this library by Vicc Alexander changes that. Just a quick look at the documentation tells you this is a comprehensive library. With support for everything from a better default palette, hex support, grabbing colours from images and commonly needed utilities like picking contrasting colours, it’s definitely worth a look.

This looks interesting. It takes Core Bluetooth and adds a higher level abstraction on top of it, all written in Swift. If you’re not looking for low level control of Bluetooth communication this library by Rasmus Taulborg Hummelmose looks like a good place to get started with something simpler.

Blurable is a new library by Simon Gladman and caught my eye for two reasons. First of all, who doesn’t love a blur library. 😄 Secondly the implementation is interesting as it’s been created as a protocol extension in Swift. Matthijs Hollemans also published a great article on protocol extensions this week which is worth a read.

Design

Akinori Machino takes an in depth look at San Francisco (the font, not the city). I have to say since living with the beta for a couple of months now I absolutely love the new font. So clear and readable and the design features mentioned in this article really do make a difference. It’s also worth watching the WWDC session on San Francisco if you enjoy this.

If you got a new phone today, you’re probably itching to try out 3D touch in your apps. However, even if you didn’t then you’ll still want to dig into what it makes possible. Nick Keppol has put together a good overview of what can be done, from quick actions to peeks and pops!

Business and Marketing

I agree with Brent Simmons here that this is not purely about the screen size, and certainly productivity is a big justification for higher prices. However, I also think that the Mac carries with it quite a bit of legacy in terms of pricing. People pay more for Mac software because “desktop software costs money” is still very much a thing. Will that survive to the next generation though? Or for that matter, will Mac OS survive to the next generation! 😁

Videos

Great introduction to Swift 2 from Ben Scheirman as part of the (usually paid) NSScreencast series. It’s a really clear and simple getting started guide and has been followed up already with another free episode on Functions and Extensions.

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And finally...

This is genius. 😂