Issue 237

12^th February 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

OK so I think it’s worth writing just a little more about the Parse shutdown. It appears that the decision to shut it down was secret until the last minute (which isn’t surprising). But the Parse Server project was already implemented and actually was even planned for release on the day of the announcement! This all comes from an article written by Fosco Mariotto which gives some background to the shutdown. What a sad situation for everyone involved.

In related news, CloudKit released server to server web service requests this week which might come in handy if you’ve chosen to replace your Parse implementation with CloudKit. Great news.

Anyway, I’m going to stop writing about Parse here now (well, that’s the plan!) as I think it’s well and truly covered. Good luck with your migrations, if you’re in that boat.

Dave Verwer

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News

It’s coming up on a year since Apple first open sourced ResearchKit, and while it doesn’t make the news much anymore, this post by Vincent Tourraine made me take another look at how it’s doing. The good news is that it’s going great! Here’s a list of more than 20 apps which now ship with ResearchKit, and I’m sure there are even more not listed. There’s also an official blog which is being posted to regularly and also a good community on GitHub, with plenty of work getting done. For what was always going to be a fairly niche framework, I think we can definitely call this a success!

Jason Brennan makes a good point here about the Swift mailing lists. Obviously, the fact that these mailing lists even exist is just incredible compared to what we’ve had before, but Jason’s point is still worth thinking about. Give it a read.

Tools

So it’s official. Xcode 7.3 will include interactive playgrounds! This is a great step forward for teaching and experimentation with UI code.

Daniel Jalkut with a great tip on how to hack better search scopes into Xcode by manually editing the predicates in a configuration file called SearchScopes.xcsclist. The caveat here is that once you’ve edited it manually, it’ll crash Xcode if you then try and use the search scope UI. However as long as you stay away from that, this will give you plenty of extra power when searching your code.

This is fantastic! Boris Bügling with a tool that adds a pod playgrounds command to CocoaPods. It lets you grab a pod and import it instantly into a playground. This has to be the best way to quickly experiment with some 3rd party code you’re thinking about using.

Code

Gergely Orosz describing how they have taken their 60,000+ line Objective-C app and transitioned their development so that all new code is now written in Swift, without rewriting large parts of their existing code. The article covers how they made their Objective-C code more Swift friendly and also some changes to their testing process.

The top shelf is where they keep the good stuff right? Well, on tvOS it’s the area of content right at the top of the screen if your app is on the top shelf of icons. Jake Marsh gives us the basics of how to get up and running with a top shelf extension.

Plenty of apps have used invitation systems to limit how quickly users can gain access to them. This is sometimes done to limit load on a back end server, sometimes just to build demand and sometimes both. 😄 Ruslan Shevchuk looks at how to implement something like this, but without invitation codes, just links.

Design

There’s been lots of talk about messaging focused UIs in mobile apps recently, and right on schedule here’s a very interesting implementation in the new Quartz app. After you read the article, make sure to download the app and test it out for yourself. It’s a fascinating way to tempt people into reading more in this age of microscopic attention spans.

Business and Marketing

Have you considered whether there’s something that another company could do to limit the success of your app/service? In Stuart Hall’s case, it wasn’t the end of the world as this app isn’t at the core of his business, but it’s worth thinking about your own apps in this way.

Looking for device images for your marketing materials? Of course, if you only care about iOS devices you’ve got the marketing resources from Apple, but what if you want an Android device, or a laptop, or a Nokia C300? Facebook have a great set of imagery here. Just read the disclaimer before you jump in.

Note: I believe these have been available for a while but they got an update this week with more devices.

Videos

CocoaLove describes itself as a conference which “focuses on talks that aren’t deprecated at the next WWDC”. This means you’re not going to find much, if any code here but what you will find is a great set of inspirational and interesting presentations.

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