Issue 254

10^th June 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

What a week! Anyone would think this was WWDC week, not the week before which is usually pretty quiet.

My plans have changed a little over the last few weeks and in the end I am going to be in San Francisco for WWDC this year! In fact, as this email is being sent I’m on my way. I hope to meet plenty of you out there, as usual. Please do say hi if you see me!

I’m not going to make a list of what we may or may not see announced next week, but I am going to make one prediction which is outside of the obvious things like new versions of iOS, OS X/macOS and Xcode. I think there’s a good chance that we’ll see Apple announce a Swift Playgrounds app for iOS which will ship alongside 3.0 later this year. This won’t be a full blown Xcode by any stretch of the imagination, but it will be a step towards it.

There’s several good reasons that Apple might do this, and why it might be this year:

It’d make a great app that would fit well on iOS as it stands right now. By keeping the feature set to just playgrounds, there’s none of the complex problems that something like Xcode for iOS would bring. No interface builder, no code signing, no hassle with installing or debugging between Xcode and your app. It’s clean, simple and would be a great first step for development software on iOS.
It would make a great education tool. Apple have a very strong history with education and they continue to promote their developer tools to the education market. iPads are a popular choice in schools and it’d give people a reason to promote Swift into that space.
It supports the iPad Pro beautifully. The Pro has had a good launch and now is a great time build on that success with more serious apps. Playgrounds on iOS would do that.

It may not happen, but it feels like the time might be about right. So, maybe!

Whatever happens, and whether you’re in San Francisco for the main conference, AltConf or Layers or at home, enjoy WWDC! I can’t wait.

Dave Verwer

News

The New App Store

John Gruber with the best round up of the huge App Store changes which were announced on Wednesday. Subscription pricing is now available in all categories (although not for all apps). Faster app review is not a coincidence, and most apps will now be reviewed in 24-48 hours. Then the controversial one, paid search results, which I hope is coming alongside better organic search as well.

We’ve repeatedly asked Apple for major changes to the App Store, and here they are. They may not all be what you were individually looking for but this is evidence that big changes can happen, and that can only be a good thing.

How iOS Apps on the Mac Could Work

Ben Sandofsky with a fantastic article on the challenges and possible solutions around bringing UIKit to the Mac. I agree that this could be the year when we start to see this happen.

The sky isn’t falling, AppKit isn’t going anywhere and OS X isn’t going to become iOS just yet, but this would be a way to start bringing the platforms closer together. If it happens, it’ll be the start of a painful transition. But if you look 5+ years down the line, can you really see the Mac and iOS devices still running two operating systems that differ as much as they do now?

Tools

The Clean Screen Habit

I’m very much with Brent Simmons on this one. There should be 0 Errors, 0 Warnings, always. The visual difference in Xcode between 0 and 1 warnings is significant. The visual difference between 12 and 13 is very subtle, and you won’t notice the number gradually creep up until it’s too late.

Minimizing your app’s Memory Footprint

This is a newly published tech note from Apple on how to use Intruments to optimise your app for memory usage. It uses a practical example and walks you through the steps to find and fix a problem. Instruments is one of those tools that really benefits from walkthrough style documentation so this is a great resource.

Code

Transitions with IBAnimatable

I first mentioned IBAnimatable a few months ago in Issue 233. Well, work has been continuing and this week they added the ability to do interactive gesture based transitions using the library. This is turning into a very capable library for removing a whole load of animation code from your app.

Nullable Edge Cases

If you’ve been listening to Core Intuition recently you’ll be familiar with Daniel Jalkut’s efforts to introduce Swift into MarsEdit, which is a large existing Objective-C codebase. Recently the topic of nullability in Objective-C has come up and triggered this blog post. Definitely worth a read if you’re in the same situation.

Swifty Responder Chain

Following up on all the talk recently about dynamic language features and Swift, this post by Roopesh Chander explores how to implement a responder chain using Swift protocols. He’s come up with an interesting implementation, and has a couple of suggestions at the end for tweaks to Swift that would make things easier.

Design

User Errors

Nick Babich, who is quickly becoming my favourite blogger on mobile design, tackles errors this week. There’s some great advice in here but to do it right you need to start implementing a lot of custom UI code. It feels like this is a place where some modifications to the frameworks and the standard iOS UI could be helpful.

Business and Marketing

How we made an App Store subscription success

Hot on the heels of the subscription pricing announcement, Adrian Hon on how it has been working for Zombies, Run! since they switched over to experiment with it last year.

“Where’s the App for That?” – Fixing App Store Discovery

I meant to link to this article by John Voorhees last week, but it got lost in the mix. However it’s still interesting even after the announcements this week, especially the sections on organic search and app ratings.

Videos

UIKonf 2016 Videos

UIKonf was only a couple of weeks ago and already all of the videos are up! There’s some fantastic talks in here (one of them even became the “And Finally…” for this week 😀). Enjoy!

And finally...

A Time Lapse look at Swift

An amusing look at the first two years of Swift from Daniel Steinberg.