Issue 321

Comment

Good news to start this week! It looks like iOS 11 adoption rates are back on track, and are even maybe a little ahead of the curve compared to last year. We're 2 weeks into the release and whether to drop support for iOS 10 is already a question you should at least be asking yourself... amazing. 🚀

So, with that happy little nugget of news I'll wish you a Happy Friday and get on with the rest of the links!

News

What we need from Apple to make standalone Apple Watch podcast apps

If you're a listener of Under the Radar this won't be a surprising article for you to read as Marco and David have discussed this issue in depth over the last few weeks (especially in this episode). I'm still not super optimistic about watchOS as an app platform but even if I was, it's not being helped by the fact that the SDK is definitely lagging behind the capability of the new hardware. It's a really tough position to be in as a developer.

Introducing Cloud Firestore

Since Parse died (or did it?) the market for cloud hosted data store services has still been evolving, but at a much slower pace than before. There's Realm and of course there are the big players like Azure and Firebase. So what is Cloud Firestore from Google then? Well... it's kinda like the Firebase Realtime Database, but different... Here's a detailed comparison between the two. Interesting!

Tools

Listen for the pops

Great tip from Cédric Luthi. I've put logs in there before but this is the kind of breakpoint you can just leave on permanently!

Code

Dictionary and Set Improvements in Swift 4.0

Yes, we've talked about the headline features of Swift 4 here previously but what about the smaller unsung heroes of the release? Nate Cook takes us through the enhancements to collections in Swift 4 over at the official Swift blog. There are some useful enhancements here and most of them even work in Swift 3.2 as well!

BulletinBoard: Generate and Display Bottom Card Interfaces on iOS

I'm always a bit hesitant to link to many custom UI controls because the design of the control can easily make it unsuitable for most apps but I'm going to make an exception for this library. In my opinion, these cards fit iOS 11 perfectly and remind me of the kind of UI used for the popup AirPods battery status. Worth a look!

A Simple Approach to Thread-Safe Networking

Most apps do some kind of network communication, and all of that communication should be concurrent. Adam Sharp gives us some tips and tricks for making sure we stay safe while writing multithreaded networking code.

When JSONDecoder meets the real world

Dave Lyon on dealing with an imperfect world when parsing JSON in Swift 4.

Design

UI Design for iPhone X: Top Elements and the Notch

Last week, Max Rudberg talked about bottom elements on the iPhone X and how we need to tackle app design when there's no longer a nice neat square edge to the screen. This week it's the turn of the top elements and the notch. These two articles are hands down the best articles on design for the iPhone X that you could hope to read. Excellent work!

How Designers Can Support Automatic Cognitive Processing

Yes, this is about web pages and yes, your app is very likely to be simpler and less cluttered than the examples in this post, but there's still some great points made by Therese Fessenden on first impressions.

Business and Marketing

Marketing for Engineers

What a fantastic resource from Lisa Dziuba with links to everything you could possibly need to help you market your app. It's more than a simple list too (which with this many links would be overwhelming), it's guided and commentated. What a valuable resource!

From tiny side project to official festival app with 10k users

A great story from Andy Yates on how a little side project can explode and grow beyond anything you ever thought it could.

And finally...

Let's start on the REAL app next week

This tweet resonated with me so much. 😀 The most successful things I've done never started as "the big idea". This newsletter, for example! 📰

Issue 321 October 6th 2017