Issue 296

14^th April 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

This week’s guest writer is Vicc Alexander, co-founder of Whale. He’s been working with iOS for 7 years and amongst other things wrote Chameleon which you might remember from Issue 217.

So without further ado, here’s Vicc!

Dave Verwer

Hope everyone’s having a productive week so far! At least, it appears to be the case for Apple, who has been busy pushing out new products and updates these past couple of days. Not only did we manage to see Apple’s take on Snapchat, with the release of its all-new Clips app, but we also saw quite a few beta releases for the macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and iOS platforms. TestFlight also seemed to receive a nice update in iTunes Connect (more on that later).

Speaking of iTunes Connect, it’s also worth mentioning the iTunes Connect downtime email we received yesterday. 🤔 It’s rare for iTC to require downtime for updates, so it could be that there are some larger changes coming with this. We’ll just have to wait and see. 😆

<p>Vicc Alexander</p>

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News

There have been clear signs that 32 bit support is going to be removed from iOS in a future version. I think we all assumed that this would happen in iOS 11, however 10.3.2 beta 1 arrived and 32 bit support was gone. It was a little surprising to think that such a significant change could arrive in a x.x.1 release! Anyway, 32 bit support is back in 10.3.2 beta 2 so it appears like we have some time yet.

Although I find Fabric to be a bit less cumbersome to use, I’m really excited about this week’s TestFlight update. It seems like Apple has been paying close attention to its developer community with the release of multiple build support, enhanced group capabilities, and improved tester management! Definitely recommend giving the release notes a quick peek. 🙃

Tools

In this short but insightful piece, Ben Brooks takes us through all the popular and not-so-popular reasons why people use / avoid third party software. His approach to making the final decision is definitely worth checking out. Just remember… there’s no such thing as a free lunch. 🍱

Code

Truth be told, I’m a huge fan of protocols. And if you’re anything like me, I’m happy to say that you’re in for a nice surprise. Bob Lee does a great job explaining how to override associatedtype, while also showing us how to combine protocols with generics. If you find the content to be a bit intermediate, you can freshen up your skills by checking out his Intro to Generics & Intro to Protocol Oriented Programming articles as well. 😉

Ivan Rublev with a swift library that makes it easy to automatically serialize user preferences with UserDefaults or a Plist. Happy to see it using Swift 3.1. Worth checking out. ⚙️

Choppy scrolling is something we’ve all struggled with occasionally, I know I have! It’s the worst. Not only does it get in the way of the user experience, but it can really make or break your app. The good news is that Andrea Prearo seems to have found a nice solution to a not-so-nice problem. Excited to try this out myself! 😎

Design

Pitching a redesign to a group of people, or worse, a huge organization can be quite daunting (trust me I’ve been there). However, with the right approach and right temperament, even a small set of people can influence big changes.

Ever wonder why we become glued to the screen when consuming content, specifically from news sites, blogs and social media? Well wonder no more. Nick Babich has the answer. He covers the mysterious F-pattern layout, and why you’re missing out if you’re not using it. 💡

Another great piece by Nick. According to him, default values are incredibly powerful tools for guiding users, speeding up system usage, and influencing responses with the power of suggestion. Being well-versed in UI / UX myself, it kills me to see apps using forms with tons of blank input fields, or no way of changing the default value. Learned a lot from this!

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And finally...

App review extortion is now a thing. 😱