Issue 276

11^th November 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It’s felt like a fairly quiet week in iOS due to you know what… Or, maybe my ability to read and filter Twitter just completely broke down amongst the noise! 🙉 Either way, I hope you still enjoy this slightly shorter than usual issue!

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News

We’re one big step closer to app discovery on tvOS being fixed! 🎉 Using iTunes Connect link maker you can now link directly to any tvOS app. This, along with the auto-install of apps that have a tvOS version available means we’re almost there. The only apps left out in the cold now are ones are written only for tvOS, where you still need to go to the store and search.

Tools

I never, ever have to write AppleScript again? Count me in! AppleScript may not be as important today as it once was but there’s still a huge number of apps that support it, and to be able to control them via Swift is great.

Useful tips here on making your Run Script build phases easier to understand, easier to debug and easier to view.

Chris Schools and Gabriel Peart with a small library that adds a PlaygroundTestObserver to easily run your tests directly within a playground. I can’t see this being used to test playground code so much, but it’d make a simple way to start teaching unit testing and TDD.

Code

No, not how we all sometimes feel inside, but what if arrays in Swift couldn’t be empty? After reading it, I think I’m still on the side of allowing empty arrays to exist still being my preference, but it’s an interesting exploration of the alternative by Soroush Khanlou.

Following on from last week’s news that Swift 2.x will only be supported in Xcode for a short while longer, let’s look at one last migration story. This time from Francesco Frison describing the migration of the Yammer app from 2.3 to 3. We should all hope that the Swift team never ask us to do a migration as significant as this again.

macOS Development

Want to develop for the touch bar on-device, but don’t have a shiny new MacBook? Andreas Verhoeven and Robbert Klarenbeek have just the thing for you. I haven’t tested this myself as I still haven’t upgraded to Sierra but it looks good from the demo video.

Design

A million times this. This is one of the reasons that CloudKit is so great as there’s no need for a separate user account. However, even if you must have the user sign up, try and think of ways for people to get a sense of your app without instantly being blocked by a login/signup screen. Oh and if you don’t believe it’s hurting your user adoption, I’d encourage some measurement.

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And finally...

I’m pretty sure everyone has seen this as it came out a few minutes after last week’s issue, but just in case… 😀