Issue 233

Comment

So the iOS 9.3 beta was made available earlier this week, and it includes a few fairly big features which is unusual for an x.1 release. The f.lux style "Night Shift" functionality is a welcome addition but what's really interesting here is that they're opening the door to multi user iOS. I'm not holding my breath for anything like this this arriving in vanilla iOS any time soon, but this is great news for iPads in education and it'll be fascinating to see how they've implemented it.

Xcode also received some love in the 7.3 beta. It's now trivial to switch between Swift toolchains and it finally gets fuzzy autocomplete 🎉. It looks like it almost got interactivity in playgrounds too! It's still possible that we'll see that in the final 7.3 release though.

Finally, iTunes Connect also got some updates this week with analytics now being supported for tvOS apps.

News

Are the Top Apps Using Swift?

So how is Objective-C doing in this new world of Swift? It's easy to think that everyone is shipping Swift code by now, but is that the case? Ryan Olson has analysed the top 100 apps and found only 11% (which I guess is just 11 rather than 11% 😆) with Swift code. Now, I don't think these numbers are all that surprising. The top 100 apps all started out in in Objective-C and it seems sensible that companies with well established apps like these are being cautious in adopting Swift.

Swift Weekly Brief

I linked to this weekly round up of what's been happening in the Swift open source project a few weeks ago when it first launched and Jesse Squires has been continuing to do a fantastic job of summarising the progress each week. This week he launched a new, dedicated site to post these updates on. You should go and subscribe! 🚀

Tools

Creating your first iOS Framework

Reading this post by Jake Craige, the main thought that was going through my mind was that it really should be easier to create an iOS framework. 🙈

Code

Introducing CoreDragon: cross-application drag’n’drop for iPad

Nevyn Bengtsson with a video and introductory post on his CoreDragon library. It really feels like this is something that might be introduced to the iOS 10 API as split screen multitasking matures, but why wait until (if!) that happens when you can implement it right now. There's also a couple of demo apps here if you want to test it out.

IBAnimatable

Ambitious project from Jake Lin which aims to allow much more customisation of views, and animations on those views directly inside Interface Builder. The best thing about this is that it has been entirely built on top of @IBDesignable and @IBInspectable so there's no plugins or other tools needed. It's also worth noting that this isn't the first time something like this has been done. I thought I had linked to Spring and CanvasPod before but searching through the archives it seems I didn't! Apologies for that.

Changeset

Fun little library from Joachim Bondo for calculating a list of edits to transform one set of data into another. It was originally intended to help with performing non trivial changes of state in a table/collection view, but I can see this could have other uses as well.

Swift's mysterious Builtin module

I'm really enjoying this series of posts by Ankit Agarwal digging into the depths of Swift. Last week was Arrays and this week its the turn of the Builtin module.

macOS Development

AgileCloudKit: iCloud Sync Gets Its Wings

Up until recently, iCloud sync in Mac apps has always been dependent on the app being available in the MAS. This is a pain for developers, and potentially confusing for users if you sell both a MAS and a non-MAS version of your app. However, this summer Apple announced CloudKit web services which allow web apps to access CloudKit data. So, how about using CloudKit web services to simulate the CloudKit framework in a non-MAS app? That's exactly what AgileBits have done here. Fingers crossed this'll be open sourced soon.

Design

How Peach Onboards New Users

Yay, a new social network! 😬 I signed up because I'm easily led and while I'm really not sure about the app, I did think that the on boarding and initial guided tour of features and post types was great. As usual, Samuel Hulick does a great job of analysing those first few minutes with the app.

Business and Marketing

Generating Ideas at Apple

Alan Cannistraro talks ideas and inspiration. I like his advice of not waiting for the "Eureka!" moment but instead to make sure you iterate, experiment and refine your ideas.

Videos

Unidirectional Data Flow in Swift

What did MVC ever do to hurt us!? Benjamin Encz talks massive view controllers and introduces Swift-Flow.

And finally...

Microsoft Solitaire

I love behind the scenes stories like this. 🃏

Issue 233 January 15th 2016