Issue 280

9^th December 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

It’s worth looking through this comprehensive list of Apple’s choices of the best apps this year. Whether it’s just to see the type of app that’s being featured, to gain some inspiration by downloading a few of them or to get a sense of what works in which countries, there’s something to be learned here.

Tools

Ever wanted to see console output directly inside your app? At first I thought this might be a little gimmicky but I can actually see real world uses for apps that need to be tested in the field, or even in a field. 😁

The Swift compiler is still prone to long compilations in certain situations, but where? Soroush Khanlou highlights a useful compiler switch that can be used to highlight any function where the compilation takes longer than a limit you specify. This is the kind of switch that you can just leave on so that you get notified as these problems crop up rather than when your app is taking 10 mins to build.

Bob Lee with a three part series (Part 2, Part 3) listing a huge amount of Xcode keyboard shortcuts along with animations showing what they do. There’s some here (especially in Part 3) that were new to me, and I’m sure some will be new to you as well.

Code

Aditya Krishnadevan with a fantastic article on excluding actions defined inside your app from showing up while using that app. The implementation is a little fragile/strange but I’m glad this feature exists, I had no idea it was even possible.

Big changes if you’re using AsyncDisplayKit, and from the stats in this post it appears that many people are as it’s apparently in use by over 10,000 apps! Even if only a fraction of those are shipping, that’s really impressive. There’s some breaking changes of course, but there’s also a migration guide to assist you.

Matt Gallagher with his recently released library CwlSignal for reactive programming. It’s also worth reading the accompanying introductory post which goes along with it. I especially enjoyed the section on the history.

Ole Begemann on the new warning in new Swift builds when interpolating optionals into a string. He goes through the options for working around the warning and then comes up with a much simpler version by defining a new version of the nil-coalescing operator.

Design

What’s the best kind of spinner or progress meter? That’s right, it’s no spinner or progress meter! Igor Mandrigin shows us some good examples of apps that implement optimistic interfaces well and digs into some of the trickier aspects to get right like how to display errors.

Videos

Videos from the #Pragma conference earlier this year in Verona. There’s still a couple of private videos listed in this playlist so I think there may some more sessions still to be published, but there’s already plenty of great content here.

With the Friday Q&A on a hiatus at the moment, it’s nice to get a chance to hear from Mike Ash. This is his talk from GOTO Copenhagen on the internals of Swift memory layout.

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