Issue 309

14^th July 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

All the beta 3’s this week! 🎉It’s more and more tempting every day to put it on my main phone… Someone stop me!

Dave Verwer

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News

I love it when we get new APIs during the beta period and it looks like this year it’s happening again. Ricky Mondello (from the Safari team) tweeted about some interesting enhancements to authentication available to our apps from Safari in the latest beta!

With all the talk recently of oversized apps and massive amounts of app update data being downloaded every week, how do you keep your app svelte? Ben Sandofsky has some tips for you.

Tools

Michael Ochs with a great article on the combination of user breakpoints (which I hadn’t come across before!) along with the list of useful symbols to break on. This is going to be a nice improvement to your debugging environment.

The next step is to just insert a “Google” (or “Stack Overflow” 🙈) button next to each error message, right? Yes, the new editor is great for speed and reliability but smaller features like this that also make a massive difference to our days.

If you’ve ever wanted the iOS simulator to work in full screen mode, Marcin Krzyzanowski has some great news for you. Just make sure you already upgraded to Beta 3 of Xcode 9 though as it’s new there!

Code

Kuba Suder with a great article about the changes to location permissions coming in iOS 11. If your app currently asks for the “Always” permission without allowing “While using the app” then you’re in for some work. From a consumer perspective, these tweaks are really great though. Location data is sensitive and we should be forced to be conservative with how we gather it.

I’ve already linked to the panel discussion that this post references back in Issue 306 but if you didn’t get a chance to watch it, Ole Begemann’s post of Chris Lattner’s contributions on it is worth a read!

Did you know that you could insert a SpriteKit scene of any size into your regular UIKit view hierarchy? John Sundell shows us how if you need a little more power/flexibility for your animations.

Talking of animations, this looks very cool.

Design

These presentations from Samuel Hulick are always good but something stood out in this one which made me want to link it here. If you’re using any kind of stock photography in your app at all then take a look at slide 20. It reads “Remove all the words from your app and evaluate what remains” which is the best advice/idea I’ve heard for apps that have this kind of design.

Videos

It’s always a pleasure to watch Daniel Steinberg talk and this session on functional programming from AltConf 2017 is no exception!

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And finally...

OK so that’s the software development industry completed… What should we all do next? 😂