Issue 219

9^th October 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So a second round of Apple TV developer kit hardware got released this week. If you missed out last time, hopefully you got lucky this time! My lottery ticket did come out a winner in this round and our developer kit arrived yesterday. Happy days! Thanks Apple.

Dave Verwer

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News

Denys Zhadanov on the iFixit tear down post which covered the Apple TV developer kit. More shocking to me than the iFixit article (which I think John Gruber summed up beautifully by referring to the fable of the scorpion and the frog 🐸) were the listings that appeared on eBay attempting to sell them. Apple offering dev hardware like this is unheard of (in recent years) and I really hope that the actions of a few don’t stop them doing similar things in the future.

I’m getting deja vu here! Seriously though, this is great. The content in the WWDC videos is invaluable but video is a tough format to index and search. Even if ASCIIwwdc did it first, the extra visibility it will get from being integrated into the official WWDC videos pages is fantastic. It also has a great feature where clicking anywhere in the transcript while a video is playing will skip you right to that moment. Really nicely done.

Code

Curtis Herbert on using universal links to have a completely native password reset inside an app, while at the same time not breaking the web password reset experience if the app wasn’t being used. This simply makes a better user experience for everyone. Universal links really are a great feature.

Mike Swanson on the possibility of enabling drag and drop between split screen apps on an iPad. I think copy and paste with UIMenuController is probably going to be the preferred way to implement this as drag and drop on an iPad can be slightly awkward. However, I really liked that he was able to get this up and running as a proof of concept.

Alright so quick actions with 3D touch are super easy. How about peek and pop? Not quite as simple but if you’re looking for a guide on how to get started with it then Hector Matos has a great walkthrough for you.

There are two other posts on 3D touch which were published this week and are worth checking out. First up is Ryan Nystrom talking about 3D touch inside Instagram. Then there’s some code by Instapaper covering how to override the default actions presented by a peek gesture in SFSafariViewController.

Paulo Faria with a pure Swift implementation of some of Go’s concurrency features, based on libmill. The syntax is very simple and the concept of channels is interesting too. I’d not pay much attention to the performance claims though. Unless you’re doing an enormous amount of concurrency I’d be surprised if GCD is your bottleneck.

While we’re on the subject of Swift wrappers of C libraries, Colin Drake has written up an article this week on the process of getting it done.

Design

Like Dan Provost, the first time I had come across SFSafariViewController in a shipping app was with Tweetbot 4 and while I agree it’s the right solution, it’s simply not as usable as the old web view presentation. I understand why the SFSafariViewController can only be presented modally, it’s just less usable with that Done button top right now that we have huge phones. Dan has a suggestion of a potential solution though.

A reminder to exercise constraint with your animations from Sophie Paxton. There were a few articles last year which linked to this video. While it’s a beautiful video, and there’s some great information in it (some of it relevant to iOS UI design), it did feel like it might be taken too literally. Sophie has more thoughts and some great examples in this article.

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And finally...

How many people can say they turned Steve Jobs down this many times?