Issue 300

12^th May 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Issue 300? That’s incredible! 🎉 It feels like I just started writing this newsletter last week… 😄 When Dave started this site, I hadn’t even typed my first line of code – which makes me wonder, what will the next 300 issues bring?

Dave was really looking forward to writing this 300th issue but unfortunately he’s ended up unavailable today! Everything is fine and he’ll be back up and running in a couple of days though, so don’t worry!

<p>Evan Dekhayser</p>

Sponsored Link

Welcome to Kobiton, a new mobile device cloud platform that gives you access to test on the iOS devices you need, when you need them. Sign up for a free trial and start testing in minutes!

News

This new publication looks like it has some potential. The goal is to have technical, community-driven monthly issues including 4 or 5 posts related to iOS or Swift. Although I disagree with some of the assumptions made in the project’s manifesto, I’ll be keeping an eye out for interesting articles that come out of this.

Code

I’ve read a dozen articles about the MVVM pattern, and they seem to just go over my head. What I need is a simple article that shows what this architecture looks like in an iOS app that doesn’t overcomplicate it. Here comes Thomas Gegry to the rescue with this straightforward explanation of MVVM and how Swift makes it easy to implement.

Most of us use open-source libraries, and most OSS asks that a license be included in apps that use them. LicensePlist is a script that automatically generates a Plist of all your dependencies, including files added manually or using Carthage or CocoaPods. All these licenses then show up in the Settings app.

Krzysztof Siejkowski in his try! Swift Tokyo talk said that code is “written for people to read & only incidentally for machines to execute.” 🤔 While I think this goes a little too far, the point still stands that code needs to be readable. That’s the idea behind syntactic sugar, bits of languages that make programming a bit easier. Vincent Esche explores different types of syntactic sugar in Swift and how it can actually make your code less straightforward.

iOS includes an official UIImagePickerViewController class, but like many of its siblings, this view controller is not very customizable. This project provides an alternative image picker, modeled after the Facebook app, to make importing assets simple from a visual and technical point of view.

Design

What is UI and UX? How are they different? How does each impact the user? This articles helps clear up some misconceptions and discusses different aspects of both UI and UX on the Icons8 website.

Apple Music’s design was revamped at WWDC 2016, but in my opinion the new look has much to be desired. 😕 In this blog post, Jason Yuan lays out several ways to improve upon the app’s current design by changing font styles, refocussing on important content, and making hidden features more accessible. I hope to see improvements like these in iOS 11.

Nick Babich discussing the floating circle buttons that Google popularized on Android before bringing them to its iOS apps. I’ve never been a huge fan of these buttons, but this article makes several good points about the merits of this type of interface.

Business and Marketing

App Store upgrade pricing has been on iOS developers’ wish-lists for a while, and it’s great to hear Schiller’s take on it. His arguments against it do make a lot of sense, especially now that subscription pricing is an option (it is worth noting that not many apps have taken advantage of this pricing model yet).

Ultimately, I don’t think upgrade pricing would significantly help indie developers earn more from their apps. If anything, users may become less willing to pay for apps if they know they might have to pay again in the future.

Sponsored Jobs

As a talented iOS developer, shouldn’t companies apply to you? Hired empowers you in your job search by having companies apply to you, and with transparency into job offers. 👨‍🎤

And finally...

Moral of the story: just write Bug fixes and improvements. 😝