Issue 242

News

Apple News native publishing format is open to all

We've been able to add content to Apple News for a while now but unless you were blessed as a partner, your only option was via an RSS feed. This week, they opened up the native publishing kit to everyone. There's a new version of News Publisher in iCloud and after a review process, you're in and can start publishing with the native format. What'll be interesting is to watch if anyone builds tools around this publishing process. The last thing you're going to want to do is to format content twice. Nick Heer has some thoughts on that too which are worth reading.

Swift Weekly Brief

As you're probably aware, I'm not trying to cover everything that's going on in terms of Swift language development here on iOS Dev Weekly. Of course, I still post stuff that interests me but if you're looking for detailed coverage of all the changes, this is your occasional reminder that Jesse Squires is still doing a great job with his Swift Weekly Brief. You should be subscribed.

Tools

Buglife

New service from Dave Schukin for embedding quick bug reporting into your app. It can hook into a few different triggers, including popping up when the user takes a screenshot. The shots can then be annotated and the user can add feedback. It has integrations with bug trackers and services like Slack for reporting. Reminds me a lot of Pinpoint but with a server component.

Customisable Layout Margins

Ole Begemann with a great tip for setting custom layout margins. I had no idea this was in Interface Builder either!

Code

Bringing Peek and Pop to all iOS users

Do we really need 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s to get peek and pop? Roy Marmelstein thinks not and has implemented it for all devices with his new PeekPop library. How does it work? Well it uses the majorRadius property of UITouch to sense the size of a touch, which gets bigger when you press harder. Clever idea and it works pretty well!

Scrolling Stack Views

At the point of scrolling a stack view, it might be worth considering a table view/collection view. However, if you're wanting to do it Keith Harrison has some useful tips for making it work.

Testing NSURLSession with Swift

Joe Masilotti with a series of three posts on testing your networking code in Swift. It's a comprehensive guide to testing NSURLSession and also comes with a GitHub repository as well. Worth reading.

Design

Interaction density

Marc Edwards on the challenges of multitouch for "Pro" apps.

Multitouch will always be constrained by the size of our fat human fingers. If multitouch is the future of computing, we’re going to need bigger screens.

Great Watch Apps are Great Complications

Conrad Stoll with an increasingly popular view that complications make the best kind of watch apps. The hassle of launching and using regular apps on the watch is significant, but if you can get your app's data onto the watch face, it can be genuinely useful.

Business and Marketing

An Indie's Guide to the Press

Curtis Herbert with a response to Rene Ritchie's piece last week. He has some great advice here on how to pitch your app to the press. The key piece of advice is that "I done wrote an app" simply isn't good enough and instead your app needs to be part of a story. It's not particularly new advice, but it's definitely the right way to go.

How to Really Port Your Mac App to iPhone

I linked to the parody post a couple of weeks ago as an "And Finally...", but this post is the real thing with a look at some of the challenges faced by Ulysses as they created their new mobile app for everything from an iPhone 4s right through to an iPad Pro without cutting down on features. I use Ulysses for everything I write which is longer than a couple of paragraphs and it's fantastic to see an iOS app with so few compromises.

And finally...

Bug reports

They're not just for software. 🤕

Issue 242 March 18th 2016

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