Issue 220

16^th October 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Ryan Olson did a quick check recently to determine what libraries are in use across the most popular apps on the store. I wasn’t surprised to see the Facebook SDK and AFNetworking high on the list and of course it’s full of analytics and advertising frameworks but there are still some surprises in there. I know the CocoaPods team are working on collating their stats too but it’s not quite ready. Orta was kind enough to give us a sneak sneak preview of the current set of data though.

Can you run Swift on an Android device? Romain Goyet gives it a go. 😬

Tools

Instruments has always been weak when it comes to documentation and so posts like this one by Pouria Almassi really help. He takes a look at the Cocoa Layout tool and shows how it can help if you’re trying to track down a tricky layout issue.

Useful set of Xcode snippets from Abizer Nasir for when you just can’t be bothered to do all that typing for a Core Data fetch request. 😁 It’s based on this set of Objective-C snippets by Mattt Thompson and there’s even a handy tool for importing them. I’m sure Abizer would welcome pull requests to build a more comprehensive library too.

Code

This looks to be an extremely comprehensive library if you want to implement a complex settings screen, or collect any data through a form. There’s a huge amount of built in cells available but it’s also easily extensible if you need something that doesn’t exist. Great documentation too.

Every time I need to do any kind of IAP stuff I end up recapping on a whole load of documentation to get it all set up right. Andrew Bancroft had the same issue and has put together a handy guide so that all the steps are in one place. Isn’t that nice of him! 😀

The long winter of our discontent over Tweetbot’s implementation of Safari view controller ended this week and we can once again use a swipe gesture to dismiss it. Of course, this means that we lose the internal implementation back/forward, but it feels much more natural this way. Anyway, if you were wondering how to do this, here’s an implementation for you!

Locally cache a web page in order to make it available even while the device is offline. Unfortunately since WKWebView is out of process, it has its own set of caches and cannot make use of this. 😢 If you’re still using UIWebView though, knock yourself out. Given that this is by Buzzfeed, I half expected the repository to be titled “25 incredible ways to cache a full web page offline!”, but instead they went with “mattress”. 😎

Business and Marketing

José González Gómez with some good tips on how to make sure your push notifications are being as effective as you’d like them to be. From the beginning I’ve always taken the position that an app gets to send me pushes until the first time it abuses them. Unfortunately, recently my stance has changed and now only apps where I can either see some obvious potential value or where they properly explain why they are asking for permission, get that privilege.

Nothing else to say here other than that this is great news.

Videos

Richard Fox shows how to use protocol extensions to solve the problem of excessive casting when working with Swift number types. The operator overloading still makes me wince though, it’s so easy not to know what’s happening with your code once something like this is added. There’s also a blog post covering the same subject if you prefer to read rather than watch.

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And finally...

For when those CI tests absolutely, positively must pass. So great. 😍