Issue 287

13^th February 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Monday 🎉 and sorry for the break in the regular schedule! Everything will be back to normal this Friday.

Dave Verwer

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News

With Swift 2.x only being available in Xcode for a short while longer, how about revisiting the conversion topic again? 😀 This article by Chengyin Liu details the work to get AirBnB converted from Swift 2.x to 3, and also covers some of the loose ends that they haven’t quite wrapped up yet. The article mentions that they had a 5½ week schedule for the work but don’t mention how long it actually took. I’d be interested to know.

Update: I had a message from Paul @ AirBnB who clarified and said that the work completed on schedule in 5½ weeks. Thanks for the update!

Then there’s the case of Artsy who adopted Swift super early and then decided it wasn’t right for their app. They started conversion from Swift to React a year ago and this article gives a great summary of the process and tradeoffs.

One thing strikes me about both these stories… We knew it would happen but the introduction of Swift back in 2014 has put a huge burden on those people/companies who adopted it early. So much lost time!

Tools

Matt Gallagher with a post that starts off about the Swift Package Manager, but that ends up being significantly more about build systems. 😀 Of course, since Xcode doesn’t support the Swift PM yet this is a lot more complex than it will be in the future, but it’s still worth a read.

Code

Daniele Margutti with another Promises library for Swift. It’s comprehensive and seems to have good documentation. Worth a look if you’re interested in a NSOperationQueue/GCD replacement.

Matt Reagan with a really effective text disintegration effect built with SpriteKit. You’re not going to need this one every day of course, but the post will certainly teach you some things about putting together effects of this type.

There are plenty of libraries for iOS that add syntactic sugar to Auto Layout, so why link to this one? Well it concentrates on making the API as brief as possible, and isn’t that all trendy and Swift 3’y these days! 😀 In all seriousness though, this looks pretty good.

macOS Development

There have been a few Interesting posts this week on making money without the MAS. First up is Paul Kafasis talking about sales figures after removing Piezo from the App Store. He also references Bogdan Popescu’s post on sales of Dash after it also left the store and who saw similar results. The numbers back up the theory that the MAS isn’t providing significant marketing, just distribution. Finally, there’s Dan Counsell’s post on the new Mac App Store subscription service, SetApp which I remain fairly skeptical about but went down very well with Dan.

Design

Max Rudberg with a fantastic article about the neglect that touch down has suffered since the introduction of iOS 7. He uses some examples from watchOS, Android, Apple Music and some third party apps to show where we might be heading with iOS 11.

Videos

Videos from the Swift Summit back in November last year. There’s some great talks here but get to them fast as the only link I could make was one directly to the home page and so the videos will be pushed off this page as more posts get made.

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And finally...

Great story 🚀