Issue 226

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Special Black Friday discount today, 100% reduction in the usual cost of receiving your weekly set of links. You lucky people! 🎉 Happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrated it yesterday. Over here we just call it... Thursday.

News

Server-side Swift - Perfect

Perfect is a serious attempt at a server side Swift framework for writing back end services or web apps, something which has been discussed since the language was announced. Of course, language familiarity is going to be a win but I'm not sure I buy the argument of code reuse as server and client code differ in significantly more ways than just the language. Anyway, despite the fact that it uses the words "enterprise grade" 😁 in the opening paragraph of the web site, it's still worth taking a look.

Facebook SDK for tvOS Now Available

Without a web browser being available, this is going to be essential if you want to authenticate with Facebook in your tvOS app. It includes a simplified login workflow as well so it shouldn't introduce much hassle for your users if you integrate it.

Tools

Storyboard References

Splitting a UI into multiple storyboards isn't a new technique by any means, but with iOS 9 and Xcode 7 it's now something you'll not need to write any code to achieve. Caroline Begbie takes a look at how it works and how to easily split a large storyboard into smaller chunks.

Netfox

You're probably using something like Charles for debugging network requests, but what if you wanted the information right there inside your app? Netfox does exactly that, it exposes details of all network requests so you can investigate problems without additional configuration, or needing to be on the same network as your laptop running Charles.

LLDB-Is-It-Not

Wouldn't it be nice if LLDB, when launched from Xcode loaded an .lldbinit file from your project directory so you could share useful debugging shortcuts with your team? Eloy Durán has put together a small Xcode plugin which does exactly that.

Code

Presentation Controllers and Adaptive Presentations

Douglas Hill with everything you need to know (including all of the bugs) about presentation controllers in iOS 8+. This is going to save you hours if you haven't worked with this API before.

Split Views and Unexpected Keyboards

When considering iOS split-screen multitasking it's easy to forget some of the edge cases that your app will need to cope with. For example, what happens when the keyboard is presented from the other app when your app is in a state where you don't expect it to be shown? Keith Harrison has everything you need to know.

Optimizing Facebook for iOS start time

Fascinating story from Natansh Verma on reducing the time from a cold launch of the Facebook app to the feed being displayed. Of course, it comes down to the basics of measuring before optimising but there's a few unexpected tricks being used. There's also a good video on the same subject of Greg Moeck talking at the @Scale conference.

Format

I linked to Roy Marmelstein's PhoneNumberKit for formatting phone number data correctly a little while ago. Looks like he's been busy recently and he's now taken on formatting for numbers, addresses and colours. There's also a write up on the library if you want more information.

Design

How to fix a bad user interface

Really great post by Scott Hurff on the different "states" of a UI. Obviously you've got the Ideal State which is what you'll probably tend to spend the majority of your time designing. However, if you're not careful, the other states such as Empty, Error, Loading and Partially Loaded can get a little neglected during design.

Videos

#Pragma Conference 2015

This week's instalment of wonderful conference talks comes from the #Pragma conference from a few weeks ago in Florence. Enjoy!

And finally...

The worst app

In the immortal words of Stephanie, OHHH HELL NO.

At least the story has a happy(ish) ending!

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Issue 226 November 27th 2015