Issue 253

3^rd June 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Just over a week until WWDC! With the Swift roadmap and 3.0 features already out in the open, I’m not expecting too many announcements on that front. However, I’m really looking forward to the changes that we’ll see in the iOS/tvOS/watchOS and OS X SDKs.

Now that we can talk freely about beta SDKs thanks to the relaxed NDA, this next few months is always my favourite part of the year. I enjoy linking to articles on Swift, but what really excites me about iOS development is the apps we can build with it and that’s more about UIKit and friends. We’re about to get a whole new set of toys to play with and I can’t wait to see what Apple have been working on… 👍

Dave Verwer

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News

Swift 3.0 Preview 1: Now you see it, now you don’t

At the start of this week the official Swift site posted a release of Swift 3.0 Preview 1, and just a few days later it was taken down. The reason is very sensible though. This was a snapshot of the current progress towards the preview, rather than being the actual preview itself. Yes, it’s a little confusing and so keeping the official site for actual releases, with GitHub being the place to get the in-progress versions seems sensible to me.

It’s been a while since Parse shutdown was announced and things have quietened down but theres plenty of apps still dealing with the migration process. If you’re in that boat, Michał Wojtysiak has put together a detailed run down of where everything stands, and he covers much more than just the migration.

WWDC

Are you heading to San Francisco soon? 😄 If you feel like broadcasting your location so you can meet some new folks, there’s already quite a few people signed up for this group on Line.

Looking for other events in and around San Francisco during WWDC? They’re probably listed in this app. It feels like there isn’t quite as many things going on compared to last year, but there’s still more than you could ever hope to attend. 🎉

Tools

If you’re getting started with React Native and looking for something more than just a standard text editor to assist you, this is worth a look. It’s early days and it’s a little buggy, but there’s a component library which will save you looking up the syntax for every control you want to insert and an easy build and run cycle. It’s also open source if you fancy getting involved.

Code

The little details are important and iOS is generally very good at getting them right, especially for the stock UI components. Zev Eisenberg talks here about cell deselection during a navigation controller dismiss, isn’t happy with the default behaviour and then fixes it!

Peter Steinberger, Michael Ochs, and Matej Bukovinski with a great set of techniques for bringing some of the goodness of Swift to Objective-C. How? well… wait for it… Objective-C++. Don’t stop reading though! If you’re not able to start using Swift yet, there’s some good stuff in here.

This is really, really pretty. Often when a component like this is released, if it’s this beautiful then it falls down on things like customisability and documentation. There’s plenty of both of those here though, great job!

There’s been plenty written about NSNotificationCenter and its API. There’s also been plenty of attempts to wrap it in a cleaner API and this time, it’s the turn of Andyy Hope to have a go. All I could think about while I was reading this is what Apple’s new version of this API might look like. An official, more Swift friendly approach to UIKit might not see the light of day for a while, but I’d love to know how they are approaching the problem.

Design

Nick Babich talks about the technique of gradually revealing more UI as your user increases in competency with your software. I’ve definitely seem this technique used extensively in games but I’d never really considered it for apps before. Does that disabled, dimmed button really need to be there on first launch if the user can’t even use it? Maybe not. The only caution I’d advise here is that once a UI element has been displayed once make sure it’s never hidden again, even if it’s disabled.

Business and Marketing

It makes sense to do this kind of testing on the tvOS App Store as right now it’s smaller, and frankly less important than the main store. This seems like a very sensible change though. Along with the app review time changes, it’s possible that Apple are gearing up for some App Store related announcements at WWDC. However, the other possibility is that there’s no big changes coming and they just wanted to clear out a few smaller changes before the conference. I’m hoping it’s the former!

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And finally...

I hadn’t spotted this either. 😱