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Issue 309

14th 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

Embed in-app support with the Zendesk kit on Fabric

Get started with in-app support by using the new Zendesk kit on Fabric. With Zendesk’s Mobile SDK, you can join Rovio Games and Swiftkey in bringing rich, native, in-app support to your app quickly and easily. Try it out.

News

SFAuthenticationSession

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!


One Weird Trick to Lose Size

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

User Breakpoints in Xcode

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.


Copy your error messages with Xcode 9

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.


Xcode over here, Simulator over there

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

Changes to location tracking in iOS 11

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.


Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift panel

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!


Using SpriteKit to create animations in Swift

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.


YapAnimator

Talking of animations, this looks very cool.

Design

Remove all the words

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

Why the Func

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

Sponsored Jobs

Senior iOS Developer @ Trainline in London

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And finally...

import app

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