Issue 261

29^th July 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Jesse Squires with some advice on how to approach converting your code, or in this case open source libraries, to Swift 3. There was also an interesting post on swift-dev this week by Ted Kremenek outlining the approach to source compatibility as we move towards Swift 4. The compiler is going to be able to handle all forthcoming versions, so the migration process should be much easier in the future.

After a brief period where apps built with Xcode 8 beta 3 could not be uploaded to TestFlight, we’re back on track now. You can also submit iMessage apps for testing! 🎉

Tools

Radek Pietruszewski with a comprehensive guide to configuring your project to work with both Xcode 7 and 8 at the same time. Everything is covered here from the basics of Swift 2.2/2.3 and making sure Interface Builder doesn’t write incompatible XML right through to how to configure iOS 10 specific targets for the new extension types without upsetting Xcode 7.

Keith Harrison with a good walkthrough of how to get started finding your retain cycles with the visual memory debugger in Xcode 8. I used to draw almost exactly the same diagrams as this tool produces on the whiteboard when teaching memory management, and now Xcode does it for us! 🎉

If you work on a team, you’ll probably have some kind of etiquette around how to create pull requests, even if it isn’t formalised. With Danger, you can document your rules and have them applied automatically. I really love this idea, so much that I linked to it way before it was really finished, but it’s ready now! 😬

Code

This is such a great method for simplifying tricky autorotation animations with UIStackView. The code is based on Tom Harrington’s recent presentation at iOSDevCamp DC which you should also read, but I really love this specific technique that Natasha highlights.

Ole Begemann with an in depth article on the new units of measurement APIs. Even though what we have is already impressive, he wanted to expand the API capabilities and so followed up by writing a second article on extending them for multiplication and division.

I hadn’t come across this document before this week and while it’s targeted mainly at developers working on the Swift compiler and standard library, there’s some good advice in here for everyone trying to squeeze that last bit of performance out of their Swift code.

Design

Minimal app design is here (mostly) to stay, and in this article Nick Babich digs into some core concepts. There’s nothing revolutionary in this article but it’s a great set of principles to guide you.

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And finally...

More detail on how the wall was built. I should have known it’d be a “lazy” implementation which avoided typing them all in! 😀