Issue 302

26^th May 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Of course, right after last week’s issue was posted, Federico Viticci and Sam Beckett at MacStories released their iOS 11 concept video. If you haven’t watched the video yet, I highly recommend checking it out.

I really love so many of the ideas introduced here. My favorite concept from the video is the Shelf which is almost like a combination of the macOS Dock, the Desktop, and a clipboard manager. I highly doubt we will see a shelf in the WWDC keynote in less than two weeks (10 days! 🎉), but I would be really excited to see it in a future release.

Ultimately, this video is a call for more features to make the iPad more suitable to pro users. With no iPad-specific features introduced since iOS 9, it’s time for the iPad to get more attention if Apple wants it to be considered a “Super. Computer.”

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News

This week, Apple released a new resource to get more people started with iOS development. This seems to cover a lot of the basics, so it looks like a good resource for first-time programmers. For more seasoned developers, I would still recommend Apple’s official Swift book and Stanford’s iOS course.

If you think back to October, Dash was removed due to alleged violations of the developer license agreement by an associated account. Apple did not change their decision, but the developer at Kapeli brought Dash back to the App Store using a personal account after several developers tried releasing the app themselves. The app’s source code is still open-sourced.

Tools

Google Analytics is a very useful tool, but is it worth the risk of including an embedded binary in your app? As Kristian Andersen points out, you can still benefit from Google Analytics using purely open-source libraries that do not put your app’s security and users’ privacy at risk. This seems like the best way to use this tool without handing over too much information to Google. 💯

Code

For those of you looking to add a transition like Apple Music’s or Overcast’s Now Playing, here you go! 🙌 Harshil Shah’s implementation includes an embedded scroll view and allows swiping down to dismiss, and adding it to a project looks straightforward.

Richard Turton discusses everything you need to know about laying out collection view cells using custom layouts. Seeing the flexibility of collection views, I wonder why I don’t use them more often. 🤔

This project makes displaying markdown on iOS extremely simple. While there are several Swift markdown parsers, I like how this project takes the markdown text and shows it on screen without requiring any work in between.

I love posts that introduce useful, somewhat obscure bits of the iOS SDK. Jordan Morgan enumerated the global functions included in UIKit, including ones useful for debugging and for detecting device settings.

Design

Adam Silver’s post is making me rethink my decision to add a floating label CocoaPod to my project this week. 😬 Although floating labels in text fields look nice, there are several problems with their design that impact usability. Sometimes, the simple solution is the right solution.

Business and Marketing

This new blog started off with two great posts, one about App Store screenshots and another about the actual release of an app. The goal of this site is to help developers successfully release apps, so I will keep an eye on it to help me with my own future endeavors. 🤠

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And finally...

Great tip to keep in mind 🤣