Issue 273

21^st October 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Is it finally time for new Macs next week? I really hope so.

Just a note that there’s a couple of GitHub links in today’s issue (as usual!) but GitHub is still having major problems right now due to a DNS outage, so come back later to read those if it’s down for you too!

Dave Verwer

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News

There was a new release of CocoaPods this week adding official support for Xcode 8. Things were working reasonably well with Xcode 8 even before this release but it adds some features that make it work better, along with improvements to extensions and framework support. 🎉

Tools

Arek Holko with a useful technique to speed up your simulator build times by conditionally disabling dSYM generation. As the simulator almost always has a debugger attached, I can’t really see a downside if you’re working on a large project.

After mentioning the demise of Xcode plugins again last week, I was told out about this tool which will remove the signing from Xcode and enable plugins again. You should be aware that the signing of Xcode is a good thing and I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless you simply can not live without your plugins. Oh, and if you do use this, don’t use the unsigned Xcode to compile App Store releases. ⚠️ Use at your own risk! ⚠️

This was new to me. Great tip.

Code

Sam Burnstone with a series of posts that have been in the works since just after WWDC! Ten features of iOS 10 and ten posts exploring them. They cover speech and SiriKit, Messages, Notifications, the thread sanitiser and much more. 👍

WebKit is updated all the time, but it’s rare that we get any changes to the interface between it and our apps. Peek and Pop was introduced into WKWebView with iOS 9 but these new APIs in iOS 10 allow much more customisation of what happens when you peek, or pop!

Super simple form validation based on regular expressions. Displaying the errors is still your responsibility (as it should be) but this looks like a great solution to a common problem from Shagun Madhikarmi and Aaron McTavish.

Timers are easy, but the API isn’t quite as smooth as it could be. I liked this small library from Luca D’Alberti which gives a much more usable interface on NSTimer.

Design

I really like these videos from Matthew Bischoff where he takes a few apps from various developers (at their request, of course!) and gives a 5-10 minute critique of his initial impressions. There’s some great advice here, and after you’ve watched them you should probably take a look at your own apps and see if they have any of the same problems.

Business and Marketing

Kishin Manglani with an article on implementing analytics inside your app. Of course getting the basics up and running with any of the analytics providers is a 5 minute job, but is that enough? I liked the approach here of using real world examples of where analytics can provide real value.

Videos

Danielle Tomlinson on thinking about performance when you write Swift code.

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And finally...

I’ve never seen a thumb look disappointed but this is a pretty good attempt by Leon Zandman. 😂