Issue 270

30^th September 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

iOS 10 adoption continues to rise and it looks like we might even cross the half way line this weekend! As of first thing this morning iOS 10 was showing 47% and iOS 9 48%. Technically it’s actually slightly slower than iOS 9 adoption which was above 50% by this point last year but it’s very comparable and it’s certainly progressing fast enough to keep me happy.

Dave Verwer

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News

Search ads are live. They’re iPhone and US store only right now but there’s $100 free credit for everyone to give them a go. I’m still not feeling great about them, but we’ll have to wait and see over the long term whether they turn out to be a good idea. Lukas Petr has a write up of his experience setting them up and testing them if you want more details.

Until now, Realm has been an offline only data store but this week they announced plans for their server and syncing components. You’ll need to host the server, but it supports full synchronisation with a local Realm database, along with conflict resolution and even support for pulling data from CloudKit. It’s been a while since there was any movement in this area after the Parse shut down, so it’s nice to see a new promising option for solving the problem.

Tools

I think we’re all prone to write ourselves little tools to make our lives easier. In fact, the app I work on these days was a command line Ruby script for many years before it became a web app! I even considered writing it in Objective-C but decided against it, which I think was a good move. How about Swift though? Ever had a desire to use it as a scripting language? If so, Russ Bishop has some tips.

Code

I find a common problem with theming and styling frameworks is that they try to do too much. If you agree, you might find CostumeKit by Jake Marsh interesting. Instead of trying to cope with everything, it’s little more than a set of protocols which make defining, and applying themes easy.

I love a good post about API naming and this is a great example from Soroush Khanlou. He talks about delegate methods and proposes a different approach in Swift than we have in Objective-C. I like the idea.

Ariel Elkin on the pros and cons of React Native, JavaScript and cross platform development in general. It’s a fantastically detailed look at all of the issues and is really well written. You should probably read this if you even have a passing interest in the subject.

Talking of component based UI frameworks, this is brand new from Spotify. The framework itself is written in Objective-C but it supports Swift (the demo app is Swift, for example). I haven’t had a chance to give it more than a glance yet as I only found it about 20 minutes before sending this, but it’s probably worth a look!

Design

Who wants shiny new iPhone and Apple Watch product photography to go along with their shiny new phones and watches? You do? Here you go.

Business and Marketing

Randy Nelson with some stats from the iMessage store. I’m not too surprised to the influx of sticker packs as they were always going to be an easy way in, but 400+ apps that support iMessage is a very promising start.

Great advice from this year’s RWDevCon by Jeremy Olson on marketing your app. There’s some good advice in here from someone who has been consistently successful at it.

Videos

Marc Brown on SiriKit and the Speech framework in iOS 10. It’s amazing to me that there’s a speech recognition engine, supporting over 50 languages, that does not need training and supports very natural speech running on our pocket computers. Its even more amazing that we have access to it in the apps that we write.

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And finally...

I know we’ve had a few spaces or tabs jokes over the past few weeks… If you stop making them, I’ll stop linking them! 😇