Issue 284

20^th January 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I only have one thing that you must start with this week. You need to listen to the first minute of this for the best podcast introduction ever. 👍

Dave Verwer

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News

I’m not sure how I feel about this, but I’m going to try not to judge it before Google get a chance to show what they do with it. Yes, there’s a risk that some of these tools will be integrated so tightly with Firebase that they become less useful for those who don’t use it, but equally maybe they won’t. The Fabric tools never felt like a 100% natural fit at Twitter either, and would they survive the heavily rumoured acquisition by Disney? Who knows. Anyway, I think we have to wait and see what this means for the future of Fabric.

Even if you’re not based in the UK, this affects you as you’re (probably) selling here and it’s a significant market. Yes, this has been caused by Brexit currency fluctuations but the “why” really doesn’t matter. 25% is a huge increase and I’d expect this to have a noticeable effect on sales. 🙁

Tools

As developers, we hate manual work and most (if not all?) of the current tools for building screencasts or video demos are not able to be automated. Castaway by Jamis Buck is a new tool for building screencasts in code. Yes, you’ll still have to produce your images images manually but this is a huge step forward for this kind of content. Is it good enough for your homepage product demo? Probably not yet, but it’s a very intriguing start!

The text editing features of Xcode sometimes leave you wanting more compared to some of the standalone editors like Atom or Sublime Text. Of course, if you switch to one of those editors you’re losing autocorrect and autocompletion, which is a huge disadvantage. What if you could get Swift completion and correction inside Sublime Text? Daniel Inkpen has put something together. Looks like there’s also something similar for Atom from about a year ago, but I missed that!

Code

Should UITableView be deprecated? Peter Steinberger and Michael Ochs take a look at the history of the class and go into detail on several reasons why it might be good to think about deprecation. I think their reasons are sound, and there’s hints in some iOS 10 private APIs which indicate that Apple may also be considering this. Just one note before you panic! Remember that deprecated does not mean removed from the SDK, and there are hundreds of deprecated APIs in older apps which are still working well.

This document appeared last night in the Swift repository and it contains a huge amount of information about the plans for strings in Swift 4. The goal to “be better at string processing than Perl!” from the list of goals has been public for a while, but this document details how the team plan to meet that challenge.

Ash Furrow with a great article on the flexibility Swift has around naming. He talks about the API guidelines that we have from Apple but then goes further and talks through his own philosophy and guidelines. Interesting read.

Design

I don’t know how many iOS UI templates have been produced over the years by the community, but I know it’s a lot. This week, Apple joined the party with their own set, and they are very comprehensive. I wonder if they’ll expand this to tvOS and watchOS (and macOS? Don’t be silly 😪) too?

Scott Hurff investigates how big tap targets should be. I don’t want to spoil the article as it’s really good, but if you’re thinking “I don’t need to read this, I know it’s 44pts” then you should definitely click through!

What should apps look like in 2017? Let’s start with looking at what happened in 2016 with Marina Yalanska.

Business and Marketing

Competition is always tricky to deal with, but what if your competition might turn out to be Apple? David Smith talks about how he deals with the possibility of Apple sherlocking his Sleep++ app.

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And finally...

😂