Issue 294

Comment

Hello everyone. You may remember a few weeks ago that I opened up a writing position here on iOS Dev Weekly. Well, after a fantastic initial response, I've narrowed the field down to 4 people, and they are each going to write a guest issue over the next few weeks.

First up is Evan Dekhayser who has been working with iOS since 2013 and has been writing about it for most of that time too! He's a writer for raywenderlich.com, co-author of two iOS books and also has his own blog.

I'll hand you over to Evan now!

WWDC lottery registration opened on Monday and will be closing in the next few hours. For those of you who threw your hats in the ring, all that's left is to hope for $1600 to disappear from your bank accounts. 💸 Even if you don't end up with a ticket, look at the list of other events that week before deciding to rule out a visit. There are many great ways to spend the week of WWDC in San Jose without an official badge.

Scholarship applicants still have until Sunday to submit their playground and essay. Some developers have reported problems using Playgrounds in Xcode 8.3, so if you run into trouble, check out this Apple-approved workaround. If you don't get in this year, my advice as a three-time applicant, two-time rejectee would be to use the rejection to drive you to do even more over the next year. That said, I hope to have the chance to meet as many of you in June as possible. 🤞

News

Developers can finally respond to App Store reviews

Developers can now respond to reviews on the App Store! 🎉 Before this new feature rolled out, Apple was vague regarding how responses would work. If you're interested in responding to user reviews, which I highly recommend you do, this comprehensive article includes just about everything you need to know. I already started replying to reviews, and it already makes me wonder, "how did we ever get by without this?"

Oh and if you're asking the obvious question... Of course you can!.

What’s New in Swift 3.1?

Swift 3.1 is now available in Xcode 8.3, and it comes with some pretty interesting improvements to the language and the Swift Package Manager. Cosmin Pupaza compiles a list of the most significant changes and includes sample code to illustrate how these changes can affect your projects. For full disclosure, I am also a contributor to raywenderlich.com but this article was not written by me.

Code

Avoiding primitive obsession in Swift

Alex Curran showing how domain modeling can help make your code self-documenting and more difficult to misuse. I actually found a bug in my code just this week that involved passing the wrong integer variable as a parameter. If my code was written the way this post suggests, this bug would have been caught immediately by the compiler.

Why You Shouldn’t Use Default Implementations in Protocols

When default implementations in protocols first came to Swift, I remember seeing nothing but a positive response from the community. Natasha Murashev, while working on the try! Swift conference app, found that default implementations are not always the answer. Her follow-up post discusses an alternative solution that better suited her app's needs.

You Probably Don't Want enumerated

enumerated seems like the perfect tool whenever you need to iterate through a sequence with indices. However, this handy function behaves differently depending on the type of sequence you are using. Soroush Khanlou discusses an alternative that is, in many cases, a better tool for the job: zip.

Design

The Details That Matter

I know I spend more time working on features than improving my apps' usability, and I don't think I'm alone. Based on the techniques mentioned in this article, there is no good reason not to think more about UX, because small design changes can make a huge difference. Nick Babich does a really nice job making design more approachable and explaining the merits of his suggestions.

Vector Emoji

Ever needed to blow up an Emoji past the limit of what's available in the system? You'll want these. It's not the full set, and it's Photoshop only right now (Sketch coming soon apparently) but still, this could be useful.

Videos

Scaling Open Source Communities

Felix Krause, the creator of fastlane, on what he has learned from working on a massively successful open source project. Nobody creates a new repository on Github expecting it to grow in the way Felix's has, but before you realize it, this talk may help you keep your project under control.

And finally...

How to Reward Your Developers

Some things are worth more than money.

Issue 294 March 31st 2017