Issue 246

15^th April 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

After talking about the Swift pull request which added Android support last week, this week saw it get merged. As I mentioned though, while this is certainly a moment for 🎉, there’s a huge amount of work both technically and politically before building for Android will be anything more than an experiment. You have to start somewhere though!

Dave Verwer

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News

I don’t particularly buy this story, and agree with John Gruber that better organic search and a multitude of other changes should be top of the priority list before paid search is even considered. From talking to several App Store employees over the years, Apple have always prided themselves on the fact that it’s a (relatively) level playing field for everyone and I don’t think they’re going to compromise on that.

There’s been some interesting experiments with chat UI recently, and this week Facebook jumped in with much more than an experiment. They’re rolling out bots in Facebook Messenger to hundreds of millions of users! Is this the future of apps on your phone? Or is it just a red herring?

Tools

Very cool set of libraries from Facebook for automatically (and manually) detecting retain cycles and other memory issues in your app. The most compelling piece of this is the retain cycle detector which can run constantly in your debug builds and monitor for issues. It’s not clear whether it supports Swift yet but this is going to be an instantly useful addition to your toolkit for your Objective-C projects.

Aleksandar Vacić with a great post arguing for us all to make a fresh start with our provisioning setup. He’s right that things have changed so many times over the years that sometimes making a clean start is the right thing to do. So, maybe it’s time for a spring clean in your developer portal?

Code

I’m personally a storyboards person, but if you prefer your Auto Layout hand crafted in code then you might want to have a look at this new library by Carlos Vidal. There’s plenty of libraries that give a new syntax to NSLayoutConstraints, but I really liked the look of this one. Yes, it overloads an operator, but it’s not an existing one so we’ll let it go. 😄

Talking of easier syntax for creating complex objects, how about NSAttributedString? Damien has put together a library which provides a new syntax for creating the dictionaries needed to create attributed strings. So much easier!

This site documents the process of building the Facebook F8 conference app for multiple platforms using React Native. The source code is available on GitHub and the articles go through the whole process in detail. Planning, building and testing. It’s really well put together and worth a read.

Design

Richard Turton takes his turn at defining what makes a good watch app. There’s been a few of these posts now and there’s definitely a consensus in the conclusions and yet still my watch remains virtually unused for anything other than the core functionality. I remain quite skeptical about the platform unfortunately.

Business and Marketing

10,000 reviews for an app in 4 weeks is a remarkable achievement. Ryan McLeod talks about his wonderful Blackbox game and the very interesting approach he took to encourage reviews. Of course, it wouldn’t have had this effect without the app also being very good, so make sure you don’t skimp on that bit if you take some inspiration from this! 😎

Videos

Daniel Steinberg from the try! Swift conference recommending that we take the best of all of the different programming approaches that are available to us.

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And finally...

Some great advice from Arkadiusz Holko to finish us off this week.