Issue 306

23^rd June 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Right on time, here’s all the beta 2 downloads! I’d still advise caution installing this version on your main phone but I’ve been playing with beta 1 on a couple of spare devices and it’s looking really good, and is surprisingly stable too.

In terms of Xcode, there’s plenty of nice fixes/changes to refactoring, Core NFC can now be enabled and keyboard shortcuts now pass through to the iOS Simulator! 🎉

Dave Verwer

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News

This is great news! The fewer restrictions on an app transfer the better in my opinion. I think this only leaves apps that use iCloud or Passbook as ineligible for transfer now.

Randy Nelson with some fairly shocking stats on how average app size on the store is growing out of control. This chart shows that it’s not a gradual increase either and that the last year has seen a huge spike. Given the type of apps in the top chart, it does make me wonder whether all of this newly needed space is more to do with analytics and tracking than adding useful features. 🤷‍♀️

Tools

I love this new Xcode feature of defining colours in an asset catalog. I know we’re still dealing with string identifiers but at least this solution to the perpetual problem of defining a set of colours for your app is blessed by Apple and therefore supported in IB documents too.

I feel a bit bad for linking to this since we just got a whole new editor in Xcode 9! However, if you’re still looking for more of a pure editor and less of an IDE than Xcode, David Owens has released a beta of this Swift plugin for VS Code. I think it is pretty clearly targeted at people who are working either on Swift itself, or with Swift outside of the iOS environment so if that’s you, check it out!

I saw this announcement of how BuildSettingExtractor worked with Xcode 9’s new build system this week. Turns out I had missed the original announcement back in 2015, and should have linked to it then. Let’s set that right now by saying you should check this out if you’re still not using xcconfig files!

Code

Is this the last time I need to write about encoding/decoding JSON in Swift? I think it might be! 🙌 Ben Scheirman talks us through basics of the new Codable protocol before digging into everything from handling the tricker data types to custom encoding and decoding! Fantastic article.

Jeffrey Bergier with a great post on some initial experiments with the new Vision API. He talks about the capabilities of the framework and then sets up an example using object tracking. It’s amazing how easy the code is to get this all working. I can’t wait to see what we all do with this library. 🚀

Toine Heuvelmans with a library for simplifying geometric calculations in Swift. Want to know the distance between two points? The area of a CGSize? This library has you covered. It also contains custom types for representing many geometric shapes such as triangles, circles, lines, etc… Looks good.

It’s the little features that sometimes make all the difference. I love this!

Design

If design is all about understanding humans, then understanding how our memory works is going to play a vital part. I really enjoyed this post by Marina Yalanska.

Business and Marketing

Jason Snell talking about the biggest App Store news of the conference, the addition of editorial in the new design. This is by far the biggest change of the new redesign and I can’t wait to see what Apple choose to do with it.

Yuval Kaminka on some fantastic new features around cancellations and refunds of app subscriptions coming with (or close to) iOS 11. There’s more information in the Advanced StoreKit session from the conference too.

Videos

Last week was the best of the official videos, but this week we can get started with an initial collection of content from AltConf and other interviews by the Realm team. I started with the Swift panel discussion and I’d suggest it’s as good a place as any to kick off from!

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And finally...

Amazing stories from this week’s interview at the Computer History Museum.

(Apologies for the Facebook link 🙈)