Issue 292

17^th March 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

CocoaDocs has been a fantastic resource for the ~4 years it’s been running and providing hosted documentation for documented pods. Unfortunately this week Orta Therox announced that it will cease to provide documentation as of the end of May due to difficulties maintaining it. READMEs, CHANGELOGs and the metadata calculations will continue to be generated and will continue to be hosted on the main CocoaPods site, but docs is going away.

It’s a sad day but all things must come to an end and I’d like to extend my thanks to Orta and the rest of the team for the time and effort put into what has been an invaluable tool. 🎉

Tools

Picking the right CI tool can be tricky so this write up and explanation of 3 of the best options by Ursu Dan might help you out if you haven’t yet set something up. It strikes me that there’s a huge opportunity for Apple here in making Xcode Server better, but we’ve not really seen any major improvements since it was first launched with Xcode 5 in 2013.

We know that Swift is intended to be usable as a scripting language, but there are some rough edges around actually using it as such. John Sundell has put together a new tool which helps you create and maintain Swift scripts. It’ll maintain an Xcode project for you and includes easy dependency management for your script.

Code

A new proposal is making its way into Swift evolution and it’s all about serialisation. Obviously all of the old Foundation favourites are still available in Swift, but they can be a little cumbersome to use in practice and this proposal aims to provide a native solution. It even aims “to provide a more type-safe solution for serializing to external formats, such as JSON” which means we won’t ever see another Swift JSON library again… right?? 😂

Ever wanted to build a messaging view, or anything else where content comes in from the bottom instead of the top? Just add this extension by Taiki Suzuki and you’re all set!

What do we want? Another iOS animation library! When do we want it? Well actually we have quite a lot of these already… What? I should look at one more? OK then. This one concentrates on the scheduling and choreography of views on the screen. Define a sort function defining the order of views and an animation function to define the entrance and off you go.

I linked to Eject a few weeks ago and if you took the plunge you might be interested in this series of posts by John Stricker. It’s just the basics in this post including getting up and running with a project, building some style helpers and getting started with a couple of components. I’m still happily using Storyboards, but if they’re not for you this might be useful.

Design

Rob Gill with a take on making our release notes better. There’s some great advice here like always including major version release notes as well if you push out a minor update, including a TL;DR (although, don’t call it a TL;DR unless you know your users will know what that means, “Summary” is great though), ensuring that you space things out and loads more.

Business and Marketing

I was happy to see this promotion for independent game developers on the App Store recently. I’d love them give the same privilege to independent apps next!

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And finally...

It’s important 🤣