Issue 286

News

Future iOS update will shut the door on apps from the dawn of the smartphone

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.

Updated Certificate for Game Center Authentication

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

Introducing IBAnalyzer

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

Lottie

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.

Guaka

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.

Non-contiguous raw value enumerations

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.

Build iOS apps with Elm

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

macOS Development

70 Cents Put Me on the Mac App Store Charts

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

Notifications Are Better Than Alerts

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.

My Mac app icon design workflow

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

Testing an Untested App

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

And finally...

WWDC 1997

"Good news for developers"

Issue 286 February 3rd 2017

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Free video: Natural Swift