Issue 274

Comment

We finally have new MacBook Pro's! 💻 The rumours over the last few weeks turned out to be correct and we've got a tiny new screen to experiment with. Even better, there's APIs for controlling it and from a quick look they seem to be really comprehensive and flexible.

I know it's not really related to iOS development, but we all want to have a quick play right? There's a simulator included with Xcode 8.1 (Where has the direct download gone?), full documentation, updates to the HIG and even sample code. Off you go!

News

Swift Server APIs Project

As soon as Apple made Swift support for Linux official people started talking about whether it would make a good server side language. Well, with this post Apple have announced official support for server side development with Swift. 🎉

The truth is that there's no major change here, but that's fine! This is much more about Apple blessing server APIs as something they're going to support and pay attention to, giving developers the confidence to put significant effort into web frameworks using Swift.

There's a steering committee made up of people inside Apple, and from projects like Vapor and Zewo as well as IBM and even more people announced as stakeholders. There's also a new mailing list for discussion of the project. This is really great news for the language.

Tools

Origami Studio

Origami has been around for a long time now! But where it was once built on top of Quartz Composer, Origami Studio is a standalone app, and it's great. Your workflow stays mainly the same as the old version, but it now has a modern, fast UI which is a huge boost to productivity. The integration with Sketch for asset importing is also very slick.

Code

Macaw

This looks great. Macaw is a new graphics library with a nice simple API, support for grouping shapes and elements together, animations, easy gradients and SVG support. It also has basic event support (taps, rotations, scales, etc...) based on RxSwift. The documentation still needs a bit of work but it looks pretty good.

Whole-Module Optimization in Swift 3

More from the Swift blog, this time on whole-module optimisation which has been around for a while but was changed to be default for new projects in Xcode 8. The post has some good information on how it all works if you've previously been unaware of the feature.

Structs and NSCoding

I do love NSCoding, but of course there's no support for Swift structs. Soroush Khanlou takes a look at creating classes that exist purely to encode and decode your structs. It's not an ideal approach, but does work and also separates that responsibility out a little (we're clutching at straws for advantages though!). He finishes up by adding a couple of convenience protocols to make things a little clearer. Encode away!

Tips for Backwards Compatibility with iOS 10 Today Widgets

Are you shipping a widget across both iOS 9 and 10? Kristina Thai has some good advice for making sure it looks good on both operating systems and continues to be able to take advantage of the new features in iOS 10.

Design

Effective Writing For Your UI: Things to Avoid

The copy in your app is so important, and it's so easy to not give it enough attention or to think "Oh, I'll put this in for now and rewrite it later". The words you write are easily as important as the rest of your design, if not more so. Nick Babich has some great advice.

Business and Marketing

28 Metrics That Matter for Your App

More talk on Analytics, this week from Whitney Rhodes with a very comprehensive list of what can be monitored, and what tools can be used to keep track of progress. You probably won't implement all of these of course, unless you're working on a huge app, but this is a good way to know what's possible.

And finally...

Retain cycles

This raises the question, "Is it better not to know?" 🙈

Issue 274 October 28th 2016