Issue 260

22^nd July 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I’d like to start this week with an apology for my comments on the possible increase in Swift adoption from last week. As many people pointed out, the data is not accurate. If I had applied a little more critical thinking before drawing the conclusion I did, I would have realised it was unlikely to have been correct.

I did update the web version within a few minutes of publishing, but the problem with email is that whatever you’ve have at point of sending is what most people are going to read. Sorry!

Anyway, let’s get on with this week’s issue.

Dave Verwer

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News

There’s been plenty of discussion this week about this proposal to make Swift classes final by default. Michael Tsai has a comprehensive collection of all of the commentary here, as usual. Go and read it!

My gut reaction to this was that it was a terrible idea, but the more I read and think about it I’m not sure it’s as big an issue as it might first appear to be. I also trust the Swift team to make the right decision for the future of the platform, even if it doesn’t feel quite right immediately.

Anyway, the proposal is back in review at the moment, so the decision isn’t yet… final. 😆 (Sorry… I couldn’t resist!)

The development of Swift 3 is coming to an end! As of next Wednesday, no more breaking changes will be accepted for this release. There will then be a little downtime to let the final scope settle and discussions on Swift 4 will start on August 1st. Things move fast!

Tools

Matt Gallagher takes a look at why you might see the Swift compiler telling you that your “expression was too complex to be solved in reasonable time” when working with some mathematical expressions in code. He explains why the error is occurring, some of the things you can do to avoid it and why they help and finally discusses some ideas around a possible solution.

Erica Sadun with an article on some of the problems you might run into when going past the basics with Xcode source extensions. Obviously this is still beta software and I’m sure most of these issues will be fixed before the final release, but there’s some good information about what to expect right now in this post.

Code

Roy Marmelstein on the changes to GCD in Swift 3. He covers both the new Swift friendly API as well as the new features like dispatch preconditions for checking you’re on the right queue before executing your code.

I hadn’t come across Flux before reading this detailed article from Benjamin Encz on how they have been adopting it. What I really like is that it’s all explained using a real world app to describe the problems they are trying to fix.

Did you like the idea of tapping words and replacing them with emojis in iOS 10? Want it in your text fields in iOS 9? Arkadiusz Holko has been kind enough to put it together for us all! 👍 There are a few limitations, but it’s something!

Despite the inaccuracy of last week’s data on framework usage, I’m still pretty confident that the Facebook SDK is the most used framework across the App Store. Here’s a beta of a Swift version for you!

Michał Wojtysiak on hacking around with the limited set of Siri intents to try and trick it into returning search data from inside an app. You can either read this to learn a little more about what’s possible with the Siri API, or simply as an entertaining experiment. 🔬

Design

Despite the voices saying “if your app needs a walkthrough, it’s not easy enough to use!”, introductory sequences remain very popular in non trivial apps. If you’ve decided you need one, then this article by Anthony Tseng has some good tips for ensuring that the important content gets noticed.

Business and Marketing

This is great analysis of the top grossing App Store charts by Graham Spencer. If you have ever doubted that freemium apps won the battle for the App Store, reading this will set you straight. There’s only 3 paid up front apps in the whole top 200. 😬

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And finally...

I can’t even imagine reading all of these, let alone writing them down again! Martin Conte Mac Donell (check the source), I salute you for making this bit of WWDC history a little more permanent than the banner on the wall of Moscone was!

I think my favourite might be - “Hello middle-out compression.” 😀