Issue 222

30^th October 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So today’s the day that people start receiving their Apple TV devices! The App Store launched yesterday and if you have a Developer Kit version of the device, it can be updated to get the final release by performing a restore with iTunes.

Good luck if you’ve shipped a tvOS app! Although as James Thomson points out, discovery is going to be even more challenging than on iOS. You’re going to be relying on either being featured, or App Store search. 😁

Dave Verwer

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News

Following last week’s fastlane announcement, this week brings more open source news with Capital One stepping up to sponsor development work on CocoaPods. Even better, the fact that it’s a simple sponsorship leaves me with no worries at all about implications for the future. Fantastic news, well done Capital One!

Adam Fish with a run down on some of the limitations of the tvOS SDK. Some have been well publicised and won’t come as any shock, like no access to WebKit and only 200MB storage. However there are still some surprises here, like no easy customisation of the video player and no built in picture in picture functionality. Keep in mind that even though tvOS is built on iOS 9, this is still a version 1 and there’s plenty of time for improvement.

Tools

Great tip by Serenity Caldwell on capturing both screenshots and video from the Apple TV. Turns out it’s exactly the same technique as it is on the iPhone but I’m pleased to see this made it in from the beginning. Super easy to take those promotional screenshots and videos. 👍

Generate Swift enums to remove your stringly typed code. I’ve linked to something like this before but this tool produces enums not only for storyboards and segues, but for images from asset catalogues, colours and localisable strings. Looks good.

Code

Localising by adding new languages is all well and good, but for a really polished experience you’ll want to consider more than just the words. With this in mind, I really liked Roy Marmelstein’s article (and the associated library PhoneNumberKit) about parsing international phone numbers.

It’s not brand new but I came across this implementation of Reachability in Swift this week via Little Bites of Cocoa, which remains a fantastic resource. Anyway, if you’re looking for a modern way to keep up to date on the network status, this library by Ashley Mills looks good.

There has been plenty written on this subject, but this week Andrew Bancroft summed up some of the pros and cons of bringing that shiny new library into your app. Mentioned in the article, but also deserving of a special mention, the CocoaPods quality index is a really quick way to see roughly what kind of shape a library is in before even considering it.

Design

I missed Part 1 of this article by Nick Keppol when it was published but this is certainly worth your time if you want the low down on the San Francisco font. So much thought went into how this font was going to be used, it’s amazing to look at the details.

Business and Marketing

Great article with lots of useful information. I found the stats on how shorter on boarding screens increased sign up especially interesting as it goes against what you might have thought. As developers, we do have a tendency to over explain when people just want to get into the app. There’s also some good advice here about how to aim for steady growth, rather than a big spike. Worth a read.

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And finally...

Forget the bugs in iOS, this is what needs fixing! Also, this reply is priceless.