Issue 238

19^th February 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Obviously the big news this week is the Apple/FBI story. It’s a critically important issue, but not really related to development and I’m not sure I have much to say that hasn’t been said already. So, I’m not going to comment on it here more than saying thank you to Apple (and others) for taking a stand on it.

On with the links!

Dave Verwer

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News

I don’t tend to link to conferences here as there are so many that it’d be all I ever linked to! However, I do usually point you at some kind of round up of conferences in the new year (here’s 2015’s post). I must admit I’d forgotten to do it this year, but luckily Dan Counsell published a post today as a nice reminder that there’s plenty of great events already planned for 2016.

I think it’s fair to say that apps on the watch have not been the success that some people hoped they would be. As someone who has shipped 11 watch apps so far, David Smith is very qualified to take a look at the kind of apps that really benefit from being on the watch. It’d be a good idea to read this if you have an idea brewing for a watch app.

Tools

If you’re running unit and UI tests on multiple simulator versions then it’s likely that your test suite is taking a long time to run. Not a great situation. Johannes Plunien has a project here that uses simctl and xctool to run tests in parallel without needing to virtualise.

A couple of weeks ago I linked to Hirundo which is an OS X app for reading the Swift mailing lists in a clear and readable format. Well, this week it’s the turn of iOS with Charter from Matthew Palmer which solves the same problem for our smaller devices. It’s open source too if you fancy contributing.

Michael Tsai with a set of notes from his experiences using Xcode bots after a few months of having them running. Since being introduced with Xcode 5 back in 2013, bots have always been a bit of a challenge and from this post, it looks like you’ll certainly still come across some problems while getting everything set up. Hopefully this post will help you get past some of the issues, or at least let you know it’s not just you that’s struggling!

Code

I’ve not seen many people blog about this API in iOS 9 for checking the low power state of an iOS device, but Jake Marsh took up the challenge this week. It’s not a very complex API (in fact, it’s pretty trivial) but it’s possible you’ve overlooked it and it might be that your app could be doing less while it’s low power mode. Being respectful of battery life is going to make your users love your app even more.

Obviously its easy to share model and other non-UI code between iOS and tvOS, but what about view and view controller code? All while respecting the UI guidelines and device restrictions of the different devices. Manuel Marcos has a great post here on some exploration of how to make this work, along with a sample project for you to check out.

Logan Wright talking about getting up and running with Vapor, a new server side framework for building web apps in Swift. There’s still clearly a long way to go until I’d consider doing anything more than experimenting with these frameworks, but some are on their way to being interesting.

Design

Mathew Sanders with a great post on conversational UI, inspired by last week’s launch of the new Quartz app. It’s both a history lesson and a look into the future. Definitely worth a read.

Talking of Quartz, it has a fantastic first few minutes of onboarding that leads seamlessly into the app itself. As usual Samuel Hulick does a fantastic job of breaking it down. Brian Lovin also published an excellent Design Details post on Quartz this week. It’s like there’s nothing else to talk about in iOS design at the moment! 😊

Videos

Hector Zarate of Spotify from the MBLTDev conference last year talking about refactoring the old Spotify app to be much more driven by their JSON back end. Worth a watch.

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And finally...

Mark Bernstein explains how the invention of the railroad caused a date bug. Great story.