Issue 295

7^th April 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

This week’s guest author is Ritesh Gupta who joins us from New Delhi! He does a variety of writing on various blogs and also writes and contributes to several open source projects.

Over to you, Ritesh! 🎉

Dave Verwer

🎉 Congratulations to everyone who was lucky enough to get a WWDC ticket this year! Don’t be sad if you didn’t though as there are plenty of events going on that week in San Jose which you can also enjoy. 😄 I’ll not be there this time but I’ll be following it from 🇮🇳 Have a great trip guys!

Talking of India, I’m pleased to report that Apple recently opened an App Accelerator in Bangalore. There will be regular events held there as well as some permanent services. All the workshops sold out in just couple of hours and I was lucky enough to get a ticket so I’ll see you there if you’re around too! 👋

<p>Ritesh Gupta</p>

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News

You may have seen this radar going around recently about binaries being 3x larger when produced by Xcode 8.3 over 8.2. The good news is that it’s been fixed in Xcode 8.3.1 and it’s ready for download. To know more about it, you can find the release notes here.

Tools

Wei Wang with a command line tool for cleaning up unused resources in an Xcode project. In a large app, where design requirement keeps on changing we often end up having old or test images, fonts and other resources stick around longer than they need to. It can be hard to track these down and manually delete them but this command line tool takes care of all that.

Code

There has been lots of talk about access control in Swift recently and it’s a complex subject. If the discussion has been leaving you behind then you should read this great post by Jesse Squires with an overview of the whole subject.

We can all agree that safety is good, right? But what is safety? Soroush Khanlou looks at the stated goals of Swift (Safe, Fast and Expressive) and talks about how “safe” might be better written as “memory safe” given the choices that are being made.

UICollectionView has always been a powerhouse for supporting rich UI. Custom layouts are pretty well understood by this point, but what about animating cells as they appear? Jake Marsh gives us a handy guide to make sure that our cells look amazing as they make an entrance.

Swift is cross-platform, but it behaves differently on Apple platforms vs other operating systems. In this article Ole Begemann explains that when you write a library that doesnʼt depend on any Apple-specific functionality, itʼs a good idea to test your code on Linux as well!

Design

Carmel DeAmicis talks with a panel of other designers about Snapchat’s “weird” UI and why it works. They talk about tribal knowledge, shareable UI, buried features but mostly about breaking rules. It’s a fantastic article.

Videos

Ever wondered what are UnsafePointer<T> or UnsafeRawPointer? Nate Cook from NSHipster explores the ins and outs of Swift’s take on pointers - typed and raw pointers and buffers, implicit bridging and casting, and some tips on how to stay safe while using unsafe APIs.

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And finally...

Otherwise known as the return of the flashlight app! 🔦