Issue 248

29^th April 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Congratulations to everyone who got a WWDC ticket this year! If you didn’t get one then fake Siri has some suggestions for alternative conferences 😄. I’ll not be there this time but I’ll be following along from home.

There’s still plenty to talk about in the next few weeks leading up to the conference itself though, so let’s get on with the links!

Dave Verwer

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News

This week saw the release of CareKit, the partner to ResearchKit. While ResearchKit helps researchers gather data and manage content, CareKit is designed more to help patients with active management of their conditions. It’s available on GitHub right now and again, is already getting contributions. What a fantastic initiative by Apple.

After Xamarin’s acquisition it was announced that it would be released as open source, and here it is! I know most people reading this are using Objective-C or Swift, but this is interesting news nonetheless.

If you’re still shipping a WatchKit 1 app you’ll need to convert it to be native before June 1st. The conversion shouldn’t be a huge job but you’ll want to get started on this sooner rather than later.

UPDATE: Apologies, this only affects NEW apps, not existing apps. Panic over! 😌

Tools

Peter Steinberger talks about speeding up UI tests in PSPDFKit. The issue with animations here is really interesting and I completely agree that disabling animations altogether for testing is not the right thing to do. The trick of speeding them up is a clever one though. On a similar subject Alan Fineberg also wrote about speeding up the test suite in Square Register.

Nice tip from Daniel Galasko for working with staging/production API endpoints in your app. This is a common problem and avoids the #ifdef dance that you might be doing right now.

Searching in Xcode is very powerful, but the UI for accessing that power can sometimes feel a little hidden. Arkadiusz Holko gives us a thorough walk through of all the options available.

Code

NSHipster gets back to the truly obscure iOS APIs this week with a look at autocorrect and how to bend it to your will inside your apps.

Background fetch is a hugely useful feature of iOS, but it’s a little tricky to get working. Nicholas Solter has a great article here with all of the details of getting it up and running.

Last week I linked to this article on a possible replacement for the hamburger menu, and this week Winslow DiBona has put together an implementation of it. I’m still not convinced that it’s a perfect replacement given that it changes the standard tab bar interaction quite significantly, but if you’re interested in giving it a go then here’s an implementation!

Design

So let’s say that bots are the future of apps. How would they look inside iOS if they were blessed by Apple? J.B. Chaykowsky takes a look at a possible future where AgentKit is a thing. Or, if you’re not convinced, you might agree more with Dan Grover or Thomas Baekdal who both take the opposite stance.

Debugging is a very familiar concept for developers, but not so much for designers. Marc Edwards gives us some insight into the techniques he’s come up with for debugging his designs. Really interesting.

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