Issue 305

16^th June 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

The purpose of the App Store Review Guidelines has always been to make the App Store a safe and trustworthy place to download software. Unfortunately, this is a tricky thing to enforce and it won’t come as a surprise to most of you that this week we saw yet another failure with a scam virus checker app make it through to the store.

In the article, Johnny Lin spotlights the misleading and fraudulent tactics used by these apps to scam users, like offering $100/week subscriptions as “free trials”. I’m stunned these apps pass review and trick enough users to get into the Top Grossing Apps chart without raising any red flags.

It does appear that the app from the article has been removed from sale, but I really hope more changes are made internally to prevent scams like this from getting through like this. These types of apps hurt the reputation of the store as a whole as well as developers who are trying to run honest businesses.

<p>Evan Dekhayser</p>

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News

We all knew it was going to happen, but it’s official now. 32 bit apps are dead on iOS 11. If you still have any 32-bit apps, now is the time to get them 64-bit compatible.

Ted Kremenek lays out Apple’s plans to open-source parts of the Swift toolchain, including the new refactoring engine. I’m excited to see what the Swift open-source community does with this to make Xcode even more powerful. 💪

It’s a bit of a shame that we didn’t see any other extension points for Xcode this year, or did I miss something?

Want to get a handle on everything that changed in the iOS 11 APIs? This view makes that possible. It’s a great resource to look at when Xcode spits out deprecation warnings or if you’re trying to get a handle on new technologies.

Tools

In the past, Xcode PDF image support was limited to generating 1x, 2x and 3x PNG assets at build time. This meant that scaling your image at runtime was not possible, without the help of third party libraries. As Erica Sadun demonstrates, a new setting in Xcode 9 keeps PDF assets as PDF assets, so you can now scale them at runtime to whatever size you need. 🎉

If you work in an environment where you’re handed UI mockups to code it can be hard to tell if all the details are exactly the way your designer wanted them to be. Flawless overlays a mockup onto your app running in the iOS simulator so you can notice the subtle differences and make the necessary changes to your code. For those of us without the ability to differentiate between fonts of size 12 and 13, this app could come in handy. 🤓

Code

I love the dark theme transitions in Tweetbot and Castro, and until now those animations were difficult to recreate. This great library makes it easy to add this type of animation to your own app. Although Gagat does not specify how to write your styling logic, the sample project demonstrates a good way to approach this problem.

The announcement of the new CoreML and Vision frameworks sounded really interesting, but I assumed they would be too specialized to be accessible to the average developer. This article by Matthijs Hollemans breaks down these frameworks and includes a sample project to show how simple CoreML actually is. I also recommend reading Otto Schnurr’s short blog post which explains why CoreML is such a big deal.

UIFontMetrics, a new type in iOS 11, gives developers several new tools to adapt user interfaces and custom fonts to the user’s Dynamic Type settings. In the past, there was no simple way to make these changes to an app’s appearance. This is a nice change that will simplify code and improve the user experience in apps.

Business and Marketing

James Ruston summarizes everything you need to know about the new phased release feature of iTunes Connect. This is a huge feature for larger companies and apps with millions of users.

Videos

With so many WWDC videos worth watching, where do you even begin? 😵 Keith Harrison gives us a guide on how to start consuming them. I find his short blurbs more informative than those Apple provides alongside each video.

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And finally...

Time to use an unsigned integer? 🙃