Issue 257

1^st July 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Over the last couple of years I’ve speculated several times on whether Apple would make a more Swift friendly replacement for UIKit. I think WWDC this year showed us the last piece of the puzzle that’s been creeping up on us for a while now. Why re-engineer UIKit when Swift 3 (and beyond) can make interacting with it so much more pleasant? See also Ole Begemann’s comments on naming in Swift 3.

Michael Tsai writing about iCloud Core Data and the fact that it seems to have been quietly deprecated at WWDC this year. It’s a little disappointing that it didn’t even get a mention at the conference but I’m not at all surprised that it’s finally dead. I don’t think I heard of anyone with a completely successful implementation.

Tools

Of the changes to code signing that were announced at WWDC, the automatic provisioning feature certainly got the most attention. There is plenty more to the changes than just that though! In this article Jay Graves digs into the details and gives a big Thank You to Apple for making our lives a little easier!

fastlane does a lot of things out of the box, but what if you want to post to Snapchat every time you upload a build to iTunes Connect? It’s unlikely that fastlane will add that any time soon… Actually, knowing Felix I’m not sure that’s true now I’ve written it! Anyway, you can now let your wildest deployment dreams run wild with fastlane plugins. 😬

Code

Icon fonts have been around for a long time and of course they have been available to iOS apps ever since support for custom fonts was introduced. However, being able to use something and having it available in a usable wrapper are two different things. This library from Ignacio Romero Zurbuchen looks like it should make working with these fonts a pleasure. With the ability to automatically generate enums, produce images from the glyphs and some helpful UIKit extensions, it looks great.

Filip Radelic with a look at the slightly hidden API for animating UIVisualEffectView from blurred to clear. One that mystery is solved, he then hooks it up to UIViewPropertyAnimator and it all works as expected. Amazing to think that in iOS 7 we didn’t even have access to the blur API at all.

What do you do when find a bug in UIKit? You file a radar of course! But then what? Maybe you find a workaround and fix it yourself. Things get annoying when the bug gets fixed in a new iOS release though and suddenly your code includes fixes that are only sometimes needed. This library encapsulates fixes for some UIKit bugs which have been fixed in iOS 10 and nothing gets executed if it’s not needed. 👍

Bolot Kerimbaev on the neural networking APIs in Accelerate and Metal. There’s some good background information here followed by an example of BNNS and a comparison of the APIs. Interesting stuff.

macOS Development

Really interesting change to OS X macOS coming in Sierra. There’s some great discussion in the comments too.

Design

Kamil Kołodziejczyk on the variety of different interactions that users can have with our apps on iOS 10. It’s happened fairly slowly, but think how we interacted with apps on iOS 2. Back then, the only interaction was with a full screen and active app. Now? Let us count the ways!

Videos

Great set of videos from the Release Notes conference. Focused on the business side of the App Store rather than the technical, you’ll certainly find something to educate or inspire you here.

More conference videos! This time from mDevCamp in Prague recently. There’s a huge number of topics here covering iOS, Android, Design, Marketing, development practices and even robot building if you’re lucky enough to speak Czech. 🇨🇿

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And finally...

35… million… commits… 😬