News
A Smarter Search Engine for the App Store
Looks like big changes to the App Store search algorithm went live late last week. Doing a bit of experimentation, results do seem to be significantly improved but there's definitely still more room for improvement. For example, quite a few searches still had top results for apps that had not been updated in years, or didn't support new screen sizes. Still, this seems like a good step in the right direction!
techcrunch.com
Tools
Git Diff for Binary Property List Files
Do you have binary plists in your source code? Christopher Bowns has a handy tip here for configuring git to know how to create a text equivalent for them. Obviously this won't affect the actual commit data, but at least you'll be able to review a diff of what's changed.
confusatory.org
Silver
There's a million different prototyping tools out there, but this one is a little different. Most tools revolve around exporting artwork from Photoshop or Sketch, bringing those files in and then hooking it up with interactivity. Silver gets rid of the exporting step and adds prototyping directly into Sketch via a plugin. Very impressive. It's not available quite yet but you can also read more details here while you wait.
silverflows.com
Code
UITouchType.Stylus
More brand new hardware to play with! 🎉 You may not have been able to get hold of one of the pencils yet but it's still worth learning about how we interact with them from our code. Russ Bishop starts to dig into the changes in iOS 9.1 which brought support for the stylus.
russbishop.net
NSSecureCoding
If you think about it, it's obvious that anything you store with NSCoding is inherently insecure. It's right there on the file system and gets read into your app with the assumption that it contains what you wrote out to it. What if that data had been modified though? Would that be bad? Maybe. Luckily we also have NSSecureCoding to make sure we're only reading data that we're expecting.
noodlesoft.com
Focus Guides
Guy Shaviv with an article on navigation for tvOS where your content or UI doesn't fit into a neat grid or horizontal/vertical stack. If you haven't looked into UIFocusGuide yet, here's a great explanation of how it works along with some code to get you started.
houzz.com
macOS Development
A Tale of Two Certs
I didn't link to the MAS certificate problems last week as I was pretty sure everyone was aware of it (mainly through experiencing it!) and at the time there wasn't much more information available. This write up by Rainer Brockerhoff is definitely worth a read if you want to understand more about what happened though.
brockerhoff.net
Design
How Waze Onboards New Users
I love these, I don't link to them all of course but this one struck me particularly as an example of an app which has been under active development for a significant period of time. It's all too easy for consistent design to be a focus on for an initial version, but it's harder to keep the consistency going as you add new features and reengineer things.
useronboard.com
Business and Marketing
Crafting and Launching Successful Beacon Apps
iBeacons were going to be huge! I know I was very excited about the possibilities when iOS 7 arrived. They didn't really end up being used very widely though, but they are far from dead! Kurt McIntire has written up some excellent points here for making sure you get the most out of beacons (on Android and Windows, as well as iOS).
vektordigital.com
Videos
NSSpain 2015 Videos
Wonderful set of videos from this year's NSSpain conference. Plenty of material here to keep you busy over the weekend. 🎉
vimeo.com
Sponsored Jobs
iOS Developer @ Blinker, Denver, CO
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Mobile App Developer (iOS) - COBI, Germany (Frankfurt am Main)
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cobi.bike
There's been lots of talk since the release of the iPad Pro about whether the iPad needs its own version of "padOS" instead of just being bundled together with iOS which started out as phone only.
Mark D. Miller gives a good recap on the history of the situation where everything has its own "abcOS" apart from the iPad and iPhone which share the standard "iOS". Jared Sinclair also put together some suggestions on possible ways forward for the iPad.
I have to say I'm not sure I agree that padOS needs to exist. We've just gone through a couple of years of extensive work both by Apple and by us as developers to bring iPhone and iPad apps much closer together using adaptive layout and size classes. These enhancements aren't just academic either as apps on iPad are basically running as "phone" apps, on the smaller part of the split screen. In my opinion, the platforms and devices are similar enough (in terms of input, display, etc...) to justify being one and the same.
Could iOS on an iPad do more to facilitate "Pro" apps? Absolutely. Should it have been pitched differently at the launch? Maybe. Would iPad even benefit from a different metaphor for the home screen/Springboard? It's possible. However like I mentioned, this process is already starting to happen over the past few versions of iOS and I'm certain that Apple are not done with it yet. The mere fact that they introduced a "Pro" iPad means it's definitely something they are working towards.
The App Store plays a critical part in this discussion as well. The current restrictions are certainly causing problems when considering how to sell "Pro" software at higher prices. Jared proposes a "Gatekeeper" style solution for this, but honestly I think that ship has already sailed.
What's the solution? I'm certain I don't know! Maybe it's simply a more separated store experience, removing iPhone apps from the iPad store completely and cracking the door slightly with something like trials/upgrades/subscription based software on the iPad only? However, even as I'm writing that, I know deep down that the chances of it happening are somewhere between slim and none. The discussion of where things go is always valuable though and you should certainly read the posts I linked above.
Anyway, enough from me. Let's get on with the links!
Dave Verwer