Issue 240

Comment

Feels like we're getting very close to a release of iOS 9.3, tvOS 9.2 and watchOS 2.2 with all of the betas getting their 5th trip out into the world this week. One notable feature in this beta is that playgrounds are now able to have embedded videos which rounds out a fantastic set of enhancements to them. Xcode has also had a whole set of other enhancements through this beta cycle and along with the updated SDKs and Swift 2.2, this is going to be a great release.

Oh and don't forget to celebrate the 8th birthday of the iOS SDK this week. Happy Birthday UIKit and friends! 🍰

News

Apple’s App Review Needs Big Improvements

I touched on some of the problems with app review last week, but Graham Spencer published a much more comprehensive article a few days ago. Apparently the number one complaint was the speed of review, which I'm a little surprised about as it's been quite stable for a long time now and there's no sign of the huge spikes and delays of a few years ago. There's much to discuss here, but he does finish off with some of the positive aspects of the process just in case you were thinking it's all bad!

WWDC Wish List

I can't believe it's only a few months until we'll all be making our annual pilgrimage to San Francisco for WWDC. What should we expect? Well, Steven Troughton-Smith has been giving it some deep thought and has come up with an amazing set of (ambitious!) suggestions. I did have to raise a smile when halfway down the article, I saw "Now that the easy stuff is out of the way". You have to have lofty goals right? 😄

Tools

NSDateFormatter.com

Ever struggled to find the correct sequence of characters to get your dates formatted just as you need them? Ben Scheirman has put together this fantastic tool for quickly previewing the results of a date formatter based on an input date and a format string.

xcbuild

Another build tool from Facebook this week with the introduction of xcbuild. You might be asking what this tool has over xctool, also from Facebook and also able to build. Well, it looks like they are re-focusing xctool on the testing process, and introducing xcbuild for everything build related. Sounds good to me.

Code

Open sourcing the Storehouse animation engine

Storehouse is still one of the most beautiful apps on the App Store when it comes to animations and this week they have open sourced their animation engine. Built on top of CADisplayLink, they recommend this mainly if you're looking to do physics based animations that interact with gestures.

WatchdogInspector

Great little library from Christian Menschel which lets you easily keep track of your app's frame rate while in development. It colours the status bar and gives you an FPS counter so you can always be aware of when you're dropping below 60 FPS.

Swift Asserts

Assertions, preconditions, preconditionFailures and fatalErrors. Swift brought with it much finer grained control of how you handle your assumptions. Even if you think you know everything about them though, Mike Ash digs deeper than you probably will have done so you should still give it a read.

Being Lazy

Olivier Halligon explains a whole load of useful techniques for using lazy initialisations in your Swift projects.

Design

tvOS Design

I probably don't need to say much more here other than this is pttrns for tvOS. As you might expect, it's not got a huge amount of data in yet but what's there is worth a look.

Videos

dotSwift 2016

If you didn't get a chance to make it over to dotSwift earlier this year, they've been kind enough to publish all of the videos from the conference. How nice of them!

And finally...

Port Your Mac App to iPhone in Three Easy Steps

I've been doing it all wrong! 🤕

Issue 240 March 4th 2016