Issue 228

11^th December 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Quick reminder before we get started this week, as usual the App Store will be closing its doors between the 22nd and the 29th December. Plan ahead! 🎅

Now, on with the links!

Dave Verwer

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News

Jesse Squires is starting a weekly round up of what’s been happening with the Swift open source project. Looking at things like notable pull requests, proposals and other updates from the repositories and mailing lists. There’s so much activity at the moment that this is certainly needed.

Chris Lattner highlights something that didn’t get a lot of attention last week. The Swift Programming Language book was also licensed with a Creative Commons attribution license which is great news. I know it’s harder to accept contributions for a book than it is for code due to the document format, however it’d be great if they were able to find a way.

Tools

Why isn’t all of our apps’ network traffic using HTTPS? With ATS in iOS 9 that’s certainly the aim, but traditionally getting certificates has been a fairly expensive and complex process. Let’s Encrypt aims to solve that problem with free certificates and tools to make managing and keeping them up to date easier. This has been in private beta for a while now, but recently opened up to the public. There’s really no excuse not to serve HTTPS from your server now.

Yet another new fastlane tool arrived this week. Match proposes that you store all of the code signing assets you need in a separate (private) repository. It then automates the installation and configuration for your whole team. Is this the end of code signing problems? (Probably not 🙄, but it’s an interesting approach.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could click on a log statement in the Xcode debug window and jump directly to the line that generated that output? Krzysztof Zabłocki has a plugin to do exactly that. There’s also an accompanying blog post which describes the process of creating it.

Code

The most popular networking library for iOS got a major update this week. It now supports tvOS and watchOS, deprecates the old NSURLConnection APIs, supports Carthage and has many other changes as well. If you were already using the NSURLSession AFNetworking APIs then the migration shouldn’t be too onerous, and there’s a Migration Guide which will help.

Not related directly to iOS, but usable from it! This is Google’s image content analysis library available via a REST API. Offering basic object detection, inappropriate content detection and plenty more. There’s plenty of apps that could be built on top of this technology.

Mike Ash with an in depth investigation of how Swift implements weak pointers. For bonus points, he also discovered a bug in Swift while researching this.

Business and Marketing

Great tip from Brenden Mulligan on not neglecting the review notes field when submitting an app. This is your chance to provide information which might help your reviewer understand what’s going on inside your app and reduce your chances of rejection.

It’s been just over a month since the Apple TV App Store launched. How’s it going? Ariel Michaeli has put together some interesting stats and summarised progress so far. 2,000+ apps, with ~500 being added per week is a good start, but it’s disappointing to see the average pricing already sitting firmly in Tier 1 (did anyone expect any different?)

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And finally...

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