Issue 308

7^th July 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

How could anyone remember everything Apple announced at WWDC? Luckily, we don’t have to, because Kuba Suder composed this detailed list of all the important announcements. He starts with the user-facing features but quickly moves on to developer and framework changes. He also has lists from the last two years to look at if you want to compare.

Education has always been a top priority for Apple and of course it continues today with iPad and the Swift Playgrounds app. Alex Repty takes a look at the current state, and the future of Swift on the iPad and shows what a promising future it has. On the same subject, I also enjoyed Fraser Speirs’ recently published article on his experiences teaching Swift over the last year too.

Code

iOS 11’s Safe Area is a significant change to how we declare out user interfaces with Auto Layout. This article helps clarify what these changes will look like whether you use storyboards or code, and how to what extent you need to worry about backwards compatibility.

One of the biggest features in Swift 4 that hasn’t gotten a whole lot of attention is support for strongly-typed KVO. Skye Freeman points out a few interesting and important changes that come along with this change.

LGButton takes away many of the pains in customizing button controls. Instead of playing around with layout constraints, custom views and CGLayers, drop this IBDesignable, fully-customizable control into Interface Builder and design it as you wish.

Managing ZIP files has never been a breeze for iOS users or developers. This Swift wrapper around Apple’s libcompression makes compressing and decompressing ZIPs easier than ever, and can even be used on Linux.

Design

Forms are pretty ubiquitous, but there are dozens of ways to mess them up. Andrew Coyle provides a list of common design flaws in forms and simple ways to correct them and improve user experience.

Nick Babich with eight rules to follow when it comes to picking color schemes in user interface design. These tips are easy to follow, but they can come a long way in improving how your users interact with your apps.

Business and Marketing

This blog post is more than just an introduction to the Bluejay framework. It discusses how you should be willing to try different things and take on challenges you are not entirely comfortable with. For Allen Pike’s company, working on a Bluetooth app taught them niche skills that have opened up many more doors to them.

Stuart Hall with an interesting analysis of app update frequency from the top-charting apps. The paid apps may be more worthwhile to look at if you work independently or with a small team, because the top free apps are predominantly made up of big corporations. Unfortunately, based on the numbers there doesn’t appear to be a single “right” approach to releasing app updates.

Videos

Greg Heo discussing different approaches to asynchronous behavior in Swift. An interesting point he brings up is that asynchronous tasks often have interrelated code that’s written in different places, much like delegate methods or selectors. The methods he discusses keep all the code in a single place to make it easier to write and maintain.

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And finally...

So relatable 😂