Issue 266

2^nd September 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Many many people have argued that the App Store needs cleaning up, and yesterday Apple announced their plans to do exactly that. 🎉

We are implementing an ongoing process of evaluating apps for these issues, notifying their developers, and removing problematic and abandoned apps from the App Store.

I was surprised to see the announcement, but I couldn’t be happier that they are going to make a start on this increasingly important problem. Every time someone downloads an app which no longer works or only supports old screen resolutions, confidence in every other app on the store is decreased which ultimately leads to people just not bothering to download apps anymore.

There’s a detailed breakdown on the implementation, including timelines and the process you’ll go through if one of your apps is found to have an issue. There’s also a new version of the App Store Review Guidelines to go along with it.

Bravo Apple, this is a great move.

Dave Verwer

News

Getting Ready for ATS Enforcement in 2017

Alban Diquet with a reminder about the upcoming changes to enforcement of ATS starting early next year. He also covers your options in terms of dealing with the edge cases like allowing arbitrary web content and how to deal with servers you’re not in control of.

A (mostly) comprehensive list of Swift 3.0 and 2.3 changes

With the imminent arrival of Swift 3, Hesham Salman has put together this summary of all the major changes along with links for further reading on each one. If you’ve been only picking and choosing which changes you’ve been following along with, this will get you right up to date.

Tools

Replaceable tokens in Xcode snippets

I’ve been using this for a while now but it’s a pretty hidden feature. You can have as many tokens as you like and of course, tab around them once they are back in your document. Another small benefit is that the tokens make the snippets much easier to drag when you’re adding them to Xcode.

Building Swift Playground Books

With the introduction of Swift Playgrounds for iPad at WWDC this year we got a glimpse at the new playground book format, and we’re free to create them too! Ash Furrow gives us a guide on how to get started writing one.

xcenv/xcenv

Building from the command line with projects that require different versions of Xcode to compile is a little painful. Mark Schall’s xcenv project should make things much easier by allowing a Xcode version to be defined per project.

Code

Immutable models and data consistency in our iOS App

Wendy Lu with a great article on why you should consider immutable models and then an exploration of how they made the switch with the Pinterest app. I really liked that the explanation of why it was better was so clearly made, something which is often missed when talking on this subject.

Swift API Design Guidelines: Highlights

Andy Obusek on the Swift API Design Guidelines and associated WWDC video and how useful they are, even if you’re not writing framework or library code. I couldn’t agree more!

React Native at Artsy

Eloy Durán on React Native after spending the last six months implementing it into an app. It’s an interesting look at the pros and cons after putting a significant amount of time using the technology.

Design

Little Big Details For Your Mobile App

Nick Babich on getting the details right in your app covering things like splash screens (yes, really!), empty and error states, skeleton screens and animated feedback and as usual, it’s essential reading. I also hope the title of this article is inspired by Little Big Details, which I still love even after all this time.

Typography is impossible

Measuring and resizing UI containing text has always been tricky, Marcin Wichary explains why.

Business and Marketing

What I Learned From 10 Years of Doing PR for Apple

This article by Cameron Craig may not be directly about app marketing, but still contains great advice we can all learn from.

And finally...

Hamburger menu?

🍔