Issue 279

2^nd December 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

It’s almost that time of year again so here’s your reminder to think about any updates you’ll need to make before the holidays. As usual, the App Store will be completely closed between the 23rd and the 27th December. Also, it looks like review times are already spiking so bear that in mind when you make plans.

Loads of announcements from Amazon this week as they held their re-invent conference. Plenty of the news was interesting but this service for building conversation bots stood out to me. The AWS iOS SDK has already been updated with support for it so you should be able to give it a go if you sign up for early access.

Tools

It’s pretty clear that Apple don’t see refactoring support for Swift as any kind of priority in Xcode, it’s been more than two years and we don’t even have a rename tool. John Holdsworth does though and he’s wrapped up his Swift renaming plugin into a standalone app this week. Thanks John!

Cassie Wallace with a post about Yoshi, a tool for adding a secret debug menu to your app so that you or your clients are able to change settings/behaviour at runtime. It’s not a brand new concept, but it looks to be simple to configure and use.

Code

I think the chances of getting something like this in the short term are fairly slim as GCD just got a new API for Swift. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be nice though, async/await is something many people admire in C#.

Khoa Pham with a new SVG parsing and rendering library based on CALayers. It supports reading SVGs from a file of course, but you can also create individual elements and combine those as well. Because it’s all just layers at the end, you can animate and do everything else that a layer can do as well.

You’ve probably written this code hundreds of times. You have a table view/collection view but you also need to cope with an empty state, a loading state, an error state and of course the state that shows loaded data. It’s not hard code to write but it’s time consuming. Alexander Schuch has a solution for you of course, it’s not brand new but it’s been recently upgraded to Swift 3.

Need more customisability than the standard view controller transitions, but don’t want to dig in and write something custom? Jelly by Sebastian Boldt might be what you’re looking for. It focuses on just two transition types, sliding or fading in, but then gives you a huge amount of customisability of how they work.

Design

If you use Sketch and need to produce a user flow diagram, this might do the trick. Show links between elements of your design and new screens, include labels for conditional logic and export it all so it can be used by a developer. The plugin has been around for a while but this version 2 is brand new this week.

Business and Marketing

I find that the rule is that generally the larger the client, the harder it is to get paid. No matter who you’re trying to persuade to let go of their money though, Allen Pike has some great advice here on making sure you get paid.

Videos

Videos from the Mobile Era conference which happened last month in Norway. There’s a wide mix of subjects from a great set of speakers here.

And finally...

Because what we need right now is… a new Objective-C? 🤔