Issue 281

16^th December 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

We’re getting close to the end of the year and for once I’m actually going to take a proper break and wind down a week earlier than usual! I usually take one week off each new year but I’m going to extend that this year and take next week off as well.

So enjoy the links this week, have happy holidays and I’ll see you bright and fresh in 2017! I’ll be back in your inboxes on the 6th January. ❄️

Dave Verwer

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News

Interesting news from the team at Kickstarter as they open sourced their mobile clients this week. There’s some information and history behind the decision in the post linked here, then plenty to learn from in the iOS and Android repositories.

There’s been quite a bit written about Swift on the server this year and I liked this article to wrap up the subject for 2016. Stephan Knitelius looks at Swift and compares performance and memory usage to several other popular server side languages. I can see this becoming a really important topic in 2017.

Tools

Guilherme Rambo with a new Xcode extension. Simply select a few lines of code in your project and immediately extract them into a playground. It’s not going to save you tons of time but it might come in handy.

Code

Krzysztof Zabłocki with an interesting code generation tool for Swift files which allows reflection over all of your types, and code generation from there. Obviously you wouldn’t write your whole app using this, but you might want to save yourself some repetitive work by building some stuff this way. I’m personally not a big fan of code generation, but this does provide a workaround for some limitations we have in Swift at the moment.

NSNotification code can be a little messy which is a problem that this library by J. G. Pusey hopes to solve. It provides wrappers around many of the standard UIKit notifications so you can respond to them cleanly and easily. There’s also support for things like SCReachability and even your own notifications. Looks interesting.

A new library from Ennio Masi for managing iOS permissions, performing priming and giving assistance with re-enabling disabled permissions. Just be careful not to annoy the user with constant permission requests unless your app literally can’t work without them!

This isn’t the first article on fixing DI for View Controllers by a long shot, and we all know that the only people who can really solve it are Apple. Until then, here’s more thoughts from Arek Holko on the subject.

macOS Development

With all the talk about laptop batteries this week, this article on keeping GPU usage under control in your app so you don’t use unnecessary battery is very timely. Chris Liscio explains how to avoid activating the discrete GPU to keep your app using only the integrated chip.

Videos

I linked to LayoutKit in Issue 258 but if you prefer your information in video form then here’s Nick Snyder talking about it at the SLUG recently.

And finally...

It’s got to be easier just to switch off the preference to launch iTunes when you plug your phone in, but if you really need the nuclear option here it is! 🙄