Issue 221

23^rd October 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It’s been a big week! Xcode 7.1, iOS 9.1, OS X 10.11.1 and watchOS 2.0.1 were released. tvOS also went into GM and apps can now be submitted to the store. Good luck if you’re planning something for the launch! 🎉

But the biggest news of the week is Apple’s new strategy to make sure everyone is running the latest release of iOS. 🌮

Dave Verwer

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News

The wonderful fastlane project had a big announcement this week, it’s now part of Twitter’s Fabric suite. The great news is that this means it will get plenty of dedicated development time which it will continue to need to keep up with a constantly moving target. The bad news? … well, 😁. Hopefully it will remain a standalone tool. Oh, and alongside the move to Twitter, it also added Android support and a new tool for running tests!

Erk… Turns out that an advertising SDK that had been integrated in to a couple of hundred apps was able to grab all sorts of data that it shouldn’t have had access to, including the user’s Apple ID. Apple quickly removed the apps from the store but it does back up the fact that the review process really isn’t doing what it was supposed to do right now.

Tools

Not directly related to iOS development but as developers we use the command line every day. This collection of hints and tips will surely provide at least one thing that’ll save you some time during your day.

Code

To celebrate this week’s big announcement Artem Sydorenko has put together this little project showing various methods for producing a “shatter” type view controller transition. You should definitely check out the GitHub project as well, it’s a masterclass in transition delegates.

I like MVVM, it’s a very practical way to add a little more separation and cleanliness to your code. Ash Furrow gives us an in-depth look at how they have been implementing MVVM in Swift at Artsy. Oh and if you’re in the mood for more Ash, I also really enjoyed his recent talk from the GOTO conference in Copenhagen.

Remember Horizon? It had a noble goal of eliminating vertical video syndrome. Great news is that now your app can also do the same as they’ve released their technology as an SDK. Of course it can record always horizontal video but also includes support for processing either through CI filters or with access to the video buffer directly.

Simon Gladman is back again this week with more 3D Touch experiments. This time it’s an experimental UI for retouching photos using pressure to vary the intensity of whatever retouch effect you’re currently applying. Of course, full source code is included in the GitHub project.

Design

I linked to the first part of this article in Issue 213 but this week Paul Taykalo followed it up with an excellent second look at the problem. This time he digs into handling multiple operations, still without a spinner in sight.

Business and Marketing

I’ve deliberately stayed away from linking to any of the discussion around Overcast’s new pricing model because it’s not been very constructive (to put it mildly). However, this is a great story by Manton Reece, you should read it.

Videos

GameplayKit was new in iOS 9, but can it be used outside of an actual game? Of course it can! Sash Zats digs into state machines and some potentially interesting uses for a framework you may have skipped past if you don’t write games.

Books

Erica Sadun with a short but sweet book covering everything you need to know about the playground documentation format. I think this is still my favourite feature of Xcode 7 but if the documentation isn’t quite enough then this book should definitely fill in the gaps.

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