Issue 264

18^th August 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

All the betas again this week! We’re probably a month out from final releases which are usually mid September, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the next update we get is the GM. Are your apps ready for iOS 10?

Dave Verwer

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News

Xcode Beta 6 again includes significant changes to Swift 3 so get ready to fix a few hundred (small) issues after the upgrade! The most notable changes are to access control and how id types are now imported from Objective-C. Michał Wojtysiak has a good overview to get you up to date.

Hopefully these are the last of the syntax changes before Swift 3 ships!

Tools

Marcin Krzyżanowski with an article detailing all of the options available to the Package.swift file for the Swift Package Manager. Essential reading if you’re putting together a package definition. I wonder if this could be re-packaged (pun intended!) into a pull request for the SPM documentation?

This very useful secret keyboard shortcut was originally tweeted by Joar Wingfors, but I’m linking Michael Tsai’s post here as it also includes an example of the content that gets copied. Note: Even though this is pretty well hidden, you can see the menu option change if you open the edit menu, and then start to press the Shift, Ctrl and Alt keys.

There’s nothing specific for iOS developers in this font, but the ligatures certainly make it something out of the ordinary. I love the idea, but it did feel a little strange while testing it as some of the ligatures are quite visually different from the original characters used to create them. I’m giving it a try as my default for a while though!

Code

Kevin Ballard with a new networking library written in Swift but compatible with Objective-C, PMHTTP. It looks to be really well designed with async parsing handlers (that can be cancelled), thread safety and a focus on easy testing.

Are you using a NSPredicate to query data in your app? I like the look of this project from Arvindh Sukumar which provides pre-built UI for collecting parameters and constructing a predicate from them.

A new UI customisation library from Bernard Gatt. It uses a JSON file to configure not only controls that support UIAppearance, but also ones that don’t. I really like the hierarchical approach to defining styles.

Design

Khoi Vinh on learning by imitating a design that you love. Watch the video and you’ll get a sense of how this might help you, just don’t ship the copied work! 😇

Business and Marketing

Following up on last week’s advice on how to get featured, this week Dan Counsell has followed it up with another PDF on how to get press coverage.

Videos

Peter Livesey with a talk on RocketData which is an immutable, schemaless, concurrent persistence layer designed to replace Core Data. There’s more information in this blog post too.

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And finally...

Great story about the design of the sensors on the Apple Watch.