Issue 231

1^st January 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy New Year! 🎉

2015 has been a big year for iOS development. We’ve seen the release of two brand new platforms, watchOS and tvOS, as well as a really solid release in iOS 9. Swift continues to mature, and now that it’s open source we’re also going to benefit from community contributions, both with committed code but also in terms of helping to guide the direction of the language. It’s a good time to be an iOS developer!

I wonder what 2016 will bring. I can’t imagine we’ll see any brand new classes of device this year, but I do think the iPad Pro will be something to keep a close eye on. The hardware, and pen accessory are fantastic and while the OS could suit it better, some of the iOS 9 features were clearly developed with the Pro in mind. I’d bet we’ll see much more focus on the Pro in iOS 10.

Dave Verwer

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News

Got an idea that you’re thinking about turning into a proposal for Swift? The team have put together a handy document with ideas that have been frequently suggested and rejected, along with a brief description of why. This is a great idea to reduce noise on the Swift Evolution list.

The launch of Apple News has been a bit underwhelming. It’s still only available in three regions and the richer Apple News JSON format is still being restricted to selected partners. It could have been much more than it is by now. However, if your blog is publishing an RSS or Atom feed, you can still get it listed, and you should. Tim Oliver has written up a guide on how to do it, and includes some tips for making it look good.

Tools

Let’s start 2016 with a collection of small tips that are going to make your year that bit easier. Krzysztof Zabłocki has put together a collection of Xcode plugins, tips and hidden user preferences that’ll take Xcode to 11. 🚀

Curtis Herbert writes about a slightly hidden feature of Interface Builder, the ability to “attach” views to a view controller without them being in the view hierarchy. I must admit I don’t really use this, and either fallback to a XIB, or make a new view controller and present it in the current context but this can be a useful technique for smaller views.

This Core Image browser lists all available filters along with sliders to adjust their parameters. If you’re looking for that perfect Core Image effect, this is going to save you loads of time.

Code

Ben Sandofsky noticed this in the release notes for iOS 9. I’d also completely missed this important change and by the number of retweets, so did plenty of others. Never worry about unregistering for notifications again.

While we’re on the subject about not worrying about deallocated objects, this framework from Kevin Ballard gives a safer and more elegant syntax for KVO in both Swift and Objective-C. It has automatic unregistering and is thread safe. It’s early days, but looks like it’s worth checking out.

How would you make Target/Action feel more at home in Swift? Mike Ash has had a go. I wonder if we’ll ever see a layer on top of UIKit from Apple which adds these kind of conveniences.

There’s been plenty written about guard since it was added to Swift, but in this article Alexei Kzznetsov argues that if your functions are small enough, it shouldn’t be needed at all. He takes some example code from the Apple Swift book and refactors it, removing the need for the guard statements along the way.

Business and Marketing

Jeremiah Gage with a guide to making sure you’re doing everything right to get your apps showing up as best they can in search results.

Videos

New site dedicated to indexing conference talks and other videos from around the iOS and OS X development community. There’s already ~500 videos there, and you can contribute more to help build it into something even better.

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And finally...

Great story!