Issue 301

Comment

WWDC is only three weeks away! I can't wait to see what new APIs will be revealed. Although I won't be attending this year, I'll definitely have my list of new features that I hope to see ready. 📋

Speaking of lists, the WWDC 2017 attendee list is finally out. If you were lucky enough to purchase a ticket you can go ahead and join as an attendee. Otherwise, you can follow the list, or connect with fellow developers in the WWDC Slack chat.

News

App Currency Changes

It's worth mentioning the iTunes Connect email we received yesterday. It looks like Apple will be converting pricing to local currencies for apps in more countries (they did a few back in December). While auto-renewable subscriptions won't be affected in these countries, Apple is recommending not scheduling or updating any price changes during the week of May 22nd. The logic here is that customers feel more comfortable purchasing goods in the currency that they recognize and understand. This could mean an increase in revenue for third-party developers and Apple. Curious to see what happens. 🙃

JSON Feeds

Earlier this week Brent Simmons published his JSON feed spec. Although it was met with mixed reactions, his hope is that developers will be more attracted to developing for the open web. I'm quite excited. Back when I was using XML I would always run into some sort of issue when pulling in data to display within my apps 😭. I actually hope this becomes a thing.

Tools

AppSight.io

I’ve been looking for a tool/service like this for a long time! If you’ve developed a framework and are wondering which apps are using it, you’re in luck. Not only can you search for an app's stack, but you can also discover all the apps using a specific library. Mindblowing right? Personally, I can’t stop scrolling through it. 😅

Pastel 🎨

Seeing how flat colors have become quite popular over the years, I’m willing to bet that gradients will be the next big thing in iOS design. 😜 Pastel's popularity further proves this by making it easy to implement gradient animations similar to those found on Instagram’s login screen. Definitely worth checking out.

Better GitHub Searching 🔎

IndieStack with some useful tips on searching for code on Github. You'll find a nice list of search constraints and qualifiers plus a few considerations worth thinking about. Having experienced a few issues with code search myself, I'm excited to take these babies out for a spin. 👨🏻‍💻

Code

A Simple Undo/Redo Implementation in Swift

Although I'm a huge fan of NSUndoManager, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more and more alternatives to Cocoa APIs. Benjamin comes through by demonstrating a better way to handle undo/redo functionality better suited for Swift code. 😃

Express Yourself Swift Style

As developers, we should strive for improved code readability and organization. One solution is to initialize a type within a literal through the "ExpressibleBy..." class of protocols. Zach goes a step further by presenting a good use case for the protocol ExpressibleByArrayLiteral. I definitely recommend digging in.

Design

Improving Your Share Extension

Installing extensions on an iOS device can be quite daunting. However, with a bit of inspiration from the community, existing products, and a few iterations, Buffer saw a steady improvement in extension usage (up by 19%) by modifying their instructional guide. Although I haven’t given extensions a shot, I can see myself applying these learnings in future products. 😆

Business and Marketing

How Much I’ve Earned on the App Store 🤑

Stephen Coyle reflects on his experience launching and running his first app Tapt, released almost a year ago. Having been in the same boat myself in 2010, it was nice to read about his journey and methods. I found it pretty crazy that Admob interstitials made roughly 1000x more money than other competitors. Insane if you ask me (in a good way). Definitely worth the read. 😎

And finally...

The Average Mac Developer 👨🏻‍💻

I'll let you be the judge. 😂

Issue 301 May 19th 2017