Issue 290

3^rd March 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Thanks so much for the applications to write for iOS Dev Weekly, there were some great responses in there (and some less than great ones too! 😂). The form is now closed and I’ll be going through the responses this weekend and will be in touch next week!

Dave Verwer

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News

Adam Howell with a look at the state of the iMessage store 6 months in. He highlights problems with the UI which have been there from the beginning and make the whole process of finding, installing and using add ons much more confusing than it needs to be. He also includes some ideas for a redesign, but if improvements have to wait for iOS 11, will it be too late?

I hadn’t come across this page before. I think it’s new, but at the very least it’s new to me! Anyway it’s a searchable nicely formatted look at all of the swift-evolution proposals, including rejected ones. Think of it like an index to the proposal process.

Tools

So you want to benchmark some code you’ve written, pop a couple of log statement in and output the time. Done, right? But what if you want to actually visualise the results? This tool will allow you to produce beautiful charts from your results. The tool isn’t really meant for external use right now so the process of adding new benchmarks is a bit long winded, but there’s great documentation to get you started.

Code

There have been many attempts to solve the problem of downloading, caching and displaying remote images in iOS apps over the years. This week, Twitter open sourced their solution with the Twitter Image Pipeline. As you’d expect, this looks to be very comprehensive and if you’re doing lots of image fetching, it’s certainly worth a look.

If you’ve ever done any macOS development you’ll be familiar with nextKeyView which lets the app define the “tab order” of fields in a view. This library aims to do something similar, but for iOS and with a UI that lives on the input accessory view. Probably best explained with this GIF from the readme. Could be really useful if you have a lot of form/data entry in your app.

Ever found the String class … lacking? Arthur Sabintsev has put together an extension library which already includes several useful utilities, with more planned for the future. Oh and it’s all pure Swift with no dependence on Foundation so it’ll all work server side too. 🚀

Ever wanted to use Nimble unit tests inside a Playground? Then Spry will be what you’re looking for. It has the same syntax as Nimble so you can simply move your tests across to your main project once you’re done experimenting.

Design

Igor Zapletnev with a great post on reproducing some of the key animations and interactions from apps that have previously won Apple Design Awards using the Macaw library which I linked to in Issue 274. Of course, there’s much more to getting an ADA, but this is still an interesting post.

Business and Marketing

Even if you don’t work with a big team and won’t be presenting to anyone, building a presentation deck like this is a great idea. Khoi Vinh tells us how to tell the story of your product not by focusing on the product features, but on the users and the problems they need to solve.

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And finally...

At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.

Read this next time you think you’re having a bad day 😱