Issue 286

3^rd February 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Last week’s beta of 10.3 also included a new warning when running 32 bit apps. Now they show “will not work with future versions of iOS” rather than “may slow down your iPhone” as displayed on 10.2. Every new iOS device since 2013 has been 64 bit and so I’m not too surprised by this, especially when 32 bit apps are also being removed from the store as part of the cleanup.

One to watch if you hard coded this certificate into your Game Centre apps. Luckily the solution is fairly simple and doing it the right way will also future proof your app against any other updates.

Tools

Zero warnings and zero errors so everything is fine, right? So you Build and Run and 💥 with a key value coding error. These errors are easy to fix but wouldn’t it be better if you were warned about them before running? This is what IBAnalyzer does and while it’s a little awkward to run at the moment, I can see this becoming a useful part of the build process in the future.

Code

Brandon Withrow (and others from the AirBnB team) with an ambitious library to take After Effects animations exported with bodymovin to play directly inside a UIView in your app. The API is ridiculously easy and it even supports custom view controller transitions. This looks amazing.

Swift is a great language for building command line tools, but there’s more to a command line tool than just the ability to run from Terminal. What about commands, and arguments? Or flags that only apply to certain commands? It can be tough to make the “UI” for a command line tool follow conventions and make sense to users. Guaka should come in handy if you’re building anything more than the most trivial tool.

This quick tip by Erica Sadun is worth knowing. Not something you’ll need every day but better than having to tag every value in your enum.

However, remember that just because you can, doesn’t always mean that you should! 😀

macOS Development

This is an unbelievable story and just shows how top heavy the MAS has become. Is it time to call it a failure yet? I think it might be. Such a shame.

Design

Oisín Prendiville on the new review prompt UI in the beta of 10.3. He argues that instead of a modal, it should be a notification. My worry with this is that notifications that appear when you’re actively using an app are super easy to just dismiss, and by definition this is how these would appear. I think it’s better than a forced, unprompted modal for sure, but I’m not sure it’s perfect.

Marc Edwards with a detailed look at the process he uses for developing icons. I’m always a big fan of learning about other people’s workflow so I really enjoyed this.

Videos

Michael May talks at the Cmd+U conference about adding tests to an already written, but untested app.

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And finally...

“Good news for developers”