Issue 312

4^th August 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

What an amazing week for Apple. Not only did their stock climb more than 4%, but even more exciting is that the iPad and Apple Watch are selling a lot better than they have in previous years. Great news for developers!

We also finally saw the retirement of two old classic iPod models, the nano and shuffle. A few days ago, Apple removed them from their site, and issued a statement that they were simplifying their iPod lineup down to just two models of iPod touch. Of course, this won’t affect developers but I’m wondering if the days of the iPod touch are also numbered? 😦

Oh, and yes we’ve seen the likely design and UI implications of the next phone from the HomePod leak, but you all know we don’t really do that kind of stuff here, no matter how exciting it is! 🙈

<p>Vicc Alexander</p>

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News

You’ll all know Realm from the almost weekly links we post here to the amazing work they do capturing, transcribing and publishing videos from all sorts of conferences across the iOS community. They’ve been doing this for years now and I’m extremely grateful to them for taking on that responsibility. So I was really happy to see this week that they’ve taken this to the next level and organised all of that amazing content, and more into a new education site called Realm Academy. All for free too. Bravo!

Earlier this week Apple announced that an expansion to the number of testers allowed in TestFlight. We can now invite up to 10,000 users to beta test apps! This is a 5x increase over the previous limit, which I recommend developers take advantage of. Remember when you were limited to a total of 100 UDIDs? 😱

Tools

In part two of his two-part series, Cory Bohon covers in detail the process of creating and assigning certificates and signing an app. If you’re new to iOS development or want a recap of the basics, also check out part one! 😃

Code

ArcKit is a framework that makes it easy to visualize activity at specific locations. Aside from providing smoothing samples, it also can detect whether someone is stationary or actually moving. I’m particularly intrigued by the upcoming roadmap which includes machine learning and more activity types. Worth a look!

Andrew Hart has put together quite an ambitious library. ARKit + CoreLocation combines the high accuracy of AR with the scale of GPS data. The best part about this is the ability to place items within the AR world using real-world coordinates. Looking forward to all the wonderful creations that will stem from this.

If you’re a fan of collection views and beautiful scrolling animations this here is for you. The sheer number of available animations is amazing. With method chaining, support for vertical and horizontal flow layouts, and the ability to create your own custom animations, Gemini is a great way to differentiate your product from other standard-looking apps. As an added bonus, you can also demo the animations right from within your browser.

Built on top of OperationQueue and GCD, Queuer is a queue manager that makes it easy to create synchronous and asynchronous tasks with just a few lines of code. Queuer also provides a nice set of features including Linux-compatibility and chained operations. Overall, I found the documentation to be well-written and quite detailed 👏. Bonus points for also providing a branch with Swift 4 support. 🤘

John Sundell with a 2-part (1, 2) approach to making animation-related code easier to read and reason about. I myself hate nesting my animations, but until now, I was under the impression that finding a better way would require far more work than I was willing to put in. Nice to know that this isn’t the case.

Design

Nick Babich on why a certain color has been the go-to color for most designers and tech companies for the past few years. While his findings may be correct, I personally wouldn’t call it the most important color. With that said, I do agree with Nick that there’s no universal color. At the end of the day, one should choose a color that resonates with the end user’s personality, and vibe.

And finally...

🤷🏽‍♀️