Issue 263

11^th August 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

What’s that? It’s Thursday? Yes. After five years I’ve decided to try a change to when I publish. What will I think of next! 😆

Happy Thursday! 🎉

Dave Verwer

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News

This is unexpected! No more creating hundreds of screenshots, unless you want to. You can now specify one set of device images & preview video and have them displayed for all devices and localisations. However just because you can doesn’t mean you necessarily should and I’d still strongly recommend localising screenshots if your app is also localised.

Let’s ignore for a moment the “much less likely” wording in this 😄 and take a second to celebrate this change in Xcode 8 beta 5! I have a special commit message for those spurious changes to XIB/storyboard files, it is simply “Oh Xcode…” and I hope I never have to type it again.

Code

Kersten Broich & Justus Kandzi with an interesting article on using a single table view controller to manage the UI for three states of a signup/register/login view. This might seem like a dubious idea at first but their method makes it pretty simple, and the resulting transitions between states are beautiful.

It’s table view week this week! This article by Tom Harrington covers using a stack view inside a table view cell to expand/collapse when tapped. I think you need to be careful with usability when using expanding cells, but there’s certainly a case for them and stack views with this method make them much easier to code.

Tomasz Szulc on building network architecture that isn’t dependent on any third party libraries, or any Apple provided libraries like Core Data and which is easily extensible and testable. There’s also a reference implementation on GitHub too. I like the design.

Whether you like the idea of splash screens or not, there’s no denying that the animation in the new (ish) uber redesign is beautiful. Derek Selander breaks the animation down into its component parts and then rebuilds them from scratch.

macOS Development

Interesting survey on the business of the Mac App Store, based on a sample of around 700 Mac developers. I’ve no reason to doubt any of the results here, but do bear in mind that this research was done by a company that runs an alternative Mac app distribution service.

Design

It’s true that you need to consider each mobile platform’s conventions and design guidelines when building your apps, but how much variation is actually necessary? Nicolas Duval argues against platform specific designs and advocates for a common set of UI components that look slightly different on each platform, but are essentially the same. He even goes as far as to say “No exceptions”, arguing that they will ultimately lead to disaster through inconsistency.

Business and Marketing

Dan Counsell with an updated version of his excellent guide to increasing your chances of getting featured on the App Store. The book contains a solid set of steps to give you the best chance of seeing your app on that top banner. 💸

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And finally...

git commit -m “Honestly this is a tremendous commit message. I’ve been tremendously successful when committing code with this message.”