Issue 256

24^th June 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I’m finally back home and struggling with jet lag which means that WWDC must be over for another year! Thanks so much to everyone who said hello and introduced themselves, it was great to meet old friends and make plenty of new ones too. I also think I was part of more selfies last week than in the rest of my life combined! 😄

It’ll take several more weeks/months for all of the announcements and updated SDKs to be properly analysed and discussed but there’s plenty of posts already being written, so let’s get on with it! This is going to be a bumper issue.

Dave Verwer

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News

Olivier Halligon with a round up of some of the more subtle news from last week. One that I had missed is that App Transport Security will become mandatory at the end of this year. From the wording in the session it sounds like Apple will be granting exceptions to this for certain apps, but you’ll need stronger justification than “because it’s easier without it”. 😬

I really liked this article by Taylan Pince on Swift Playgrounds and whether the Apple provided lesson content is a good idea. He makes some great points, but I don’t think that providing only the blank canvas (which Playgrounds on iOS does have) is necessarily the best direction to take. Maybe what we need is a better bridge for the gap between the end of the pre-canned tutorials and the full blank slate? Something less structured than the Apple lessons that act more as interactive documentation than full on lessons perhaps? It’s certainly possible with the tools we have.

If you’re planning to stick with Swift 2.x for the time being, you’ll still need to make some small updates to your code to get it compiling with the new SDKs. There’s some basic details in this post, but you should also read Daniel Jalkut’s advice on how to keep compatibility with Swift 2.2.1 and 2.3 at the same time.

Tools

This is the first real Xcode 8 plugin I’ve seen and it’s off to a great start! It includes in-place encoding/decoding/hashing of text as well as hex, binary, octal and decimal conversion. There’s also a JSON prettifier as well as the most important tool of all, a Stack Overflow search from directly inside Xcode. 🙈

Code

Did you notice that the notification API got a complete overhaul in iOS 10? Both local and remote notifications have been extracted from UIKit and moved into a new framework, and there are also plenty of changes to get to grips with. Filip Radelic has a good summary.

This two part series of posts (1, 2) by Kristina Thai gives a great overview of what’s new in watchOS for developers. I must admit, I still can’t get very excited about the watch as a app platform it but there’s definitely some huge improvements here if you can! 🚀

Ash Furrow with a post on why collection views should get more love than they do! I’m not sure I agree that they are unloved, certainly they are one of my favourite classes and something I use whenever I can. However, if you’ve been neglecting them here’s some inspiration to get back into them.

Want a practical example of using the new UIViewPropertyAnimator API in iOS 10? Jake Lin has you covered with this small game based on it. 👾

Let’s finish with a quick Objective-C change from Andrew Madsen which I also missed last week. Useful!

Design

There’s a new version of the Human Interface Guidelines covering all of the UI updates accompanying iOS 10. Go read it! While we’re on the subject of documentation, have you noticed that the whole docs site also got a redesign last week? I really like the new look.

Talking of updating look and feel for iOS 10. If you’re looking to mock up some screens with the new UI elements then Carlos Melegrito and Ramon Gilbert have got you covered with this Sketch template.

Videos

I mentioned the live Talk Show last week but the video wasn’t quite ready, it is now though! If you haven’t watched it yet then you certainly should. It’s basically a recap on the keynote, but with more detail and a much more relaxed style and there’s some interesting extra information that wasn’t mentioned on stage.

Realm did some great coverage of WWDC last week and it’s all summarised on this page. There’s interviews with various members of the community, the panel discussion which I linked to last week as well as various other photos and tweets from around WWDC.

New site from Chris Eidhof and Florian Kugler with videos on various Swift topics. I really like the conversational style of the videos, definitely worth a watch.

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And finally...

So great.