Issue 269

23^rd September 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So did everyone enjoy their week without (at least) two versions of Xcode installed? It feels quicker than usual but all of the .1 betas are now out with a new version of Xcode to accompany them.

There’s not many changes (Welcome back Steve! 👋) to speak about, so this seems to be more about adding features like portrait photo mode for the new phones rather than being a developer focused release.

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News

If you’re using auto renewing subscriptions, iTunes connect just got an update to give you access to revenue and other statistics for them. You can see trial conversions, cancellations, refunds, retention rates and there’s a promise that more stats will be coming over time. If you’re trying out subscriptions for an app, this’ll be welcome news!

I had completely missed this, but I checked and it was announced at WWDC and now it’s available. Basically, this allows you to completely remove certificates from your APNS authentication process. This makes the implementation of push much simpler, and of course there are no more certificate renewals! There’s some documentation available if you want to get started with it.

Tools

Brent Simmons on the new memory graph debugger in Xcode 8. This isn’t a guide, but instead a set of tips and gotchas from the experiences he’s had so far. Worth a read, even if you’re already using it.

Code

News about server side Swift has been fairly slow over the last few months, but last week Vapor reached a 1.0 release. From the documentation it looks to be significantly more feature complete than last time I looked at it, and some people are starting to use it for small projects. I’d still be very cautious about starting major development in any server side Swift right now though!

Curtis Herbert with a cautionary tale of API deprecation with openURL:. Keith Harrison also wrote a post covering the same API this week. I’d still recommend Deploymate as a solution to this problem, but really I’d love to see Xcode tackle this problem natively.

How much should you care about Swift access modifiers, especially if you’re not writing framework code? Is there any benefit to using them on a small project? Jeremy Sherman has some advice.

Design

This expansion to the OpenType specification is really interesting. Fonts can now have unlimited weights included in a single file, without gaining significant file size. Obviously this is super important for web fonts where download size is paramount. However, since Apple was directly involved with this process I really hope we’ll see support for these in iOS 11 as well.

Business and Marketing

An interesting, and very personal post from Gabriel Hauber about his journey as an independent developer. It’s an interesting story of course but also includes some good data about experimenting with revenue models and pricing.

Videos

I linked to one of these talks as last week’s And Finally… and managed to completely miss that it was part of a whole conference of videos. Here’s the rest of the content from /dev/world/2016 last month.

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And finally...

Well played Quinn (and friend!) 😂