Issue 311

28^th July 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

We’re probably about two months away from the public release of iOS 11 and while the beta is already available to the public, the number of people installing that is only going to be a fraction of the tens of millions of upgrading to the final release. Of course, you need to be ready for this!

The obvious way you need to be ready is to ensure your app works and that your Core ML & ARKit features both work well 😎 but something a little easier to ignore is the new App Store. So here’s your reminder. If you’ve installed the beta somewhere to test your app, take another look at your store pages. Right now you still have plenty of time to get those extra fields perfect and produce some more video trailers, but these months are going to fly by and you don’t want to miss out.

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News

The ripple of changes from being able to respond to reviews continues and we now have the ability to add iTunes Connect users that only have the permission to manage review data. It’s only a small change, but it’s an important one for bigger companies! 🎉

Remember the announcement of the Swift source compatibility test suite? Well here’s a happy story from Jesse Squires about why it’s valuable and how he added his project to it!

Tools

For as long as I can remember, it has been possible to customise the new file templates in Xcode but it has always been an awkward and undocumented process. No more, as Xcode 9 has new plist files for template customisation. There’s documentation and you have the ability to customise per project, per user, and in many other ways! Ole Begemann has all the details.

The iOS simulator has received a lot of love in Xcode 9! We’ve linked to various new tips and tricks over the last few weeks but as we head towards the release, let’s get a good round up of everything that’s new from Ahmed Sulaiman.

Code

Did you know that the Vision framework could also do word and letter detection in text that it sees? Sai Kambampati has a great tutorial here for putting that feature through its paces.

Like Federico Zanetello, I also hope that this trend of adding Codable to all the things continues! 🙌

You’ve almost certainly read everything you need to know about Codable in Swift already, right? What about how it works behind the scenes? Who better to do it justice than Mike Ash with a Friday Q&A on the subject.

You very probably know this already, but just in case you don’t Keith Harrison reminds us about another opportunity to replace some vars with lets which can only be a good thing.

Design

We all know the answer to this, right? NEVER! Wait, what? There’s a case where you still advocate it Nick Babich? Oh OK then, tell us more…

I know this isn’t anything to do with iOS, but I bet you still enjoy it 🤠 Joe Cieplinski takes us through some of the better examples of apps using the Touch Bar on modern MacBook Pro models to great effect.

Videos

A wonderful set of videos from the ADD conference which was held last month in the beautiful city of Barcelona.

And finally...

Great sleuthing 🕵️‍♀️