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News
Changes to the App Store review guidelines for CareKit and Apple Music
This week saw some small changes to the App Store review guidelines go live. Nothing hugely significant but it's always good to keep up to date to avoid nasty surprises. The main changes are that CareKit now gets some mentions where HealthKit was previously referenced, and there's new rules around what you can do with the Apple Music API.
appstorereviewguidelineshistory.com
Making Great Apps for the App Store
The Apple site also got a new page this week with some high level promotion of the App Store as a developer platform. There's some case studies that are worth reading and some discussion of other topics like choosing a business model. It's all fairly lightweight, but good to see anyway.
apple.com
Tools
Swift Modules
Cory Alder with a new site listing libraries which are compatible with the Swift package manager. There's around 300 modules already in the database, but you can add any compatible GitHub project yourself. It's early days for the site but a database of compatible libraries is going to be essential at some point.
swiftmodules.com
Peek 2.0
It's all very well checking layouts in Interface Builder but until the app is actually running it's hard to tell whether everything is in the right place. Peek allows you to toggle your debug build into a UI inspection mode where you can see some summary information. Then if you need more detail, double tapping will open up detailed properties for the view.
shaps.me
How to show the duration of builds in Xcode
How long do your builds take? Wonder no more with this quick tip from Tony Arnold on a hidden option for Xcode to show you after every build.
tonyarnold.com
Code
Presenting unanticipated errors to users
Presenting errors to users is one of the trickiest things to get right in any app. Matt Gallagher follows up his previous article and this time takes a look at what to do when the user needs to be notified.
cocoawithlove.com
Readable Content Guides
It's well known that long lines of text can present problems with readability and while the phone is unlikely to have this problem, when you get to the iPad you'll almost certainly have to consider it. I had no idea that Auto Layout included a solution for this. Keith Harrison explains.
useyourloaf.com
Shaving Our Image Size
I've been aware of the WebP image file format for a long time but as UIKit doesn't have a way of parsing or rendering them, I'd never considered using it in an iOS app. However, if you're dealing with photographic images (rather than icons, or anything that can be compressed efficiently as PNG) and still need an alpha channel, WebP can give some amazing file size savings. Dalton Cherry talks about the problem and the library they created, ImageButter.
dollarshaveclub.com
The Trouble with Manager Objects
I'm definitely guilty of naming some of my classes with the word manager. Ben Sandofsky gives some advice here on refactoring your manager classes into something more specific.
sandofsky.com
Design
Designing an Alternative to the Hamburger Menu
It's always good to take a really different approach to a commonly used UI element, especially one with problems like the hamburger menu. Scott Jensen has done exactly that and come up with a tab bar which slides up, exposing actions below it. Of course, it feels a little strange being so different from what we're used to but it's an interesting idea.
scottjensen.design
Business and Marketing
On paid App Store search results
Marco Arment takes quite a different stance on the rumour of paid App Store search results to most people's dismissive attitude (including mine!) from last week. This is such a great article, not only about this potential change but about the App Store in general, you should all read it.
marco.org
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iOS & OS X Developer at Ulysses - Leipzig, Germany
Take on the challenge of building Dave’s favourite writing app!
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Director of iOS & Mac Engineering, Big Nerd Ranch, Atlanta, GA
Lead a stellar dev team at this amazing company.
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Who's ready for WWDC? Siri is! Was this an intentional move or a premature deploy to the Siri servers? My guess is that it was intentional, and a fun way to get everyone talking for a few hours before the official announcement. Thanks Siri!
Anyway, there's a few changes this year with Monday's keynotes and the design awards being based in a different location. There's been some talk that with the increased seating capacity in the auditorium (~7,000 instead of ~5,000) that this is to increase the capacity for the conference as a whole, but again no one really knows. A change of scenery will be nice though!
If you're on the fence about whether to attend, you've still got about an hour to get your name in the hat for the lottery. If you need a little advice on the decision, why not take the next 30 minutes and listen to the latest episode of Under the Radar with Marco Arment and David Smith which takes a pretty balanced look at the pros and cons.
See you there, hopefully!
Dave Verwer