Issue 218

2^nd October 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Just a quick request before we get into the links this week. I’m based in Bucharest this month and I’d love to meet up with any iOS developers/designers/etc… while I’m here. If you’re local, drop me a mail (just reply) and we’ll organise something!

Dave Verwer

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News

It’s been a bit of a slow news week after the frenzy of announcements and releases in the last month. It’s good to see that iOS 9 adoption is still climbing steadily but as predicted, things are starting to slow down a bit. Since this article by Ellen Shapiro was published on Monday the numbers have of course risen, but much more slowly.

Tools

While the menu options in the iOS simulator for setting the “Force Touch Pressure” look so tempting, unfortunately they currently only work on watchOS. I’m sure that this will be addressed in a future release but until then, Conrad Kramer has put together this handy (and kinda crazy) hack to simulate quick actions over TCP. 😁

It can be a pain resizing images ready for an asset catalog, only to have to repeat it every time you make a change. Blade automates the process and performs all of the resizing for you, just create definitions for what sizes you need in a Bladefile and off it goes. I’m not sure what resizing method it’s using so you’ll want to check the results yourself but the output of the sample project looked great to me! 🔍

Code

So the 6S and 6S Plus have way more subtlety available with vibration due to the taptic engine, but what does it allow us developers to do? It’s not great news unfortunately as we can’t really take advantage of it at all. However, Dal Rupnik has been digging through the private APIs and found some interesting methods to have a play with. Who knows if we’ll ever see this kind of thing in a future version of iOS but I’d say it’s probably quite likely.

Great post by Tyler Tillage which goes beyond using protocol-oriented programming with your own classes and instead concentrates on how you can interact with UIKit using protocol extensions.

I liked this library for simplifying the syntax of GCD in Swift. Much cleaner and more readable than nested calls to dispatch_async.

Design

There’s some really great tips in this article on deep links by Chris Maddern. One that stood out to me as something which would be really easy to overlook is that if you have any kind of onboarding screens, remember to skip them if the user is coming in via a deep link. It’s going to be way too easy to forget while developing and it’s a terrible user experience for your customers.

Eli Schiff with a deep look at the design of the iOS keyboard since iOS 6, focusing for most of the article on the shift key. While it could still use some improvement, as a user I must admit I haven’t struggled with it at all since installing iOS 9. I do love that there’s so much to talk about with something as simple as upper case letters though. 😃

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And finally...

Time zones are hard, but this is becoming a joke now right?