Issue 282

6^th January 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all found time for a break over the holidays, I certainly did! But it’s also nice to be back and fresh for the new year and we’re getting started with a bumper issue made up of links from the past few weeks.

Looking forward, it won’t be that long until the cycle begins again and we’re talking about Swift 4 , iOS 11, Xcode 9 and the rewrite of Hypercard that’s going to be announced this month. 😁 Can’t wait!

Dave Verwer

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News

I didn’t see this one coming. The deadline for enforcement of ATS has been postponed, and no new date has been set. The wording of the announcement does make it sound like they still plan to bring this in at some point, and I personally hope they do. It’s an important issue which will be really good for the platform in the long term. I wonder why they delayed? I guess they just took a look at the sheer number of apps that would be unable to submit new versions and were a little shocked. 😁 I’d expect more guidance over the coming months and then an an announcement of a new deadline.

Incredible numbers from Apple on revenue over the holidays. With 2016 revenue across the whole store being up 40% over 2015, people are definitely spending money on the App Store. Obviously F2P games still dominate the revenue charts but that kind of increase is still very impressive.

Tools

Remember Injection for Xcode? An Xcode plugin which allowed you to inject new code into an already running application. Well Xcode 8 and the demise of plugins put an end to it, but fear not as John Holdsworth has been hard at work and now has it available as a standalone app!

We all know not to access the UI from a background thread, but how do you know when you’re doing it? Wouldn’t it be nice to immediately be told that you’re doing it wrong? ODUIThreadGuard will automatically notify you and provide a call stack of where it occurred. Very handy.

Can you tell the difference between 45fps animation in your app and 60fps? Well, yes, you probably can 😀 but wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure that your performance is suffering? Gavrilov Daniil has put together this handy status bar overlay that gives a constant FPS and CPU reading while you run your app.

Code

Luke Zhao with a new view controller transitioning library that looks very impressive. Based around the Keynote concept of “Magic Move” this library makes it easy to animate element(s) of one view controller on to another. This is a simple solution to a problem that’s tricky to do with the standard APIs.

I first posted about IGListKit a few weeks ago in Issue #272 and maybe you tried it out already? Or maybe, you took a look at it and moved on. I think articles like this one by Rodrigo Cavalcante are really valuable as they show the actual steps that are needed to get started without the transition feeling impossible.

A new library from Krzysztof Zabłocki for dynamically modifying your app at runtime, even supporting Injection (mentioned earlier in this issue). He’s also put together a blog post with some thoughts on the why and how of how this came to be developed.

Jordan Morgan on writing code that fits both the Objective-C and Swift naming conventions at the same time. I hadn’t come across NS_SWIFT_NAME before but I love the idea that naming of your library code doesn’t need to suffer in either language.

Design

Nick Babich with various approaches to educate users on gestures you use in your apps. Of course, he covers the standard “walkthrough” when your app launches but the meat of the article is more about educating in the context of the app itself.

Business and Marketing

The App Store may be breaking sales records, but where is all the money going? Quincy Larson with some analysis of the App Stores and what apps were most popular in 2016. The results are kinda shocking and while he stops short of declaring the App Stores dead, he comes close.

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And finally...

“When the world comes to an end, you still want your computers to work”