Issue 324

27^th October 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Did you get one? As usual the chaos of caching meant that the store still appeared to be down for me in multiple browsers as well as the iOS app until well after 10 past the hour. By the time I got one in my basket it showed 2-3 weeks delivery time so I quickly checked in-store pickup and 🎉🎉🎉 3rd November at the Liverpool Apple Store! 👍

I must admit, I’m a little nervous about getting this phone in a way that I haven’t been since I decided to go for the Plus size iPhone 6 back in 2014.

Why? Well, it’s not what you might think. I expect Face ID to work perfectly and I actually like what the notch does to the screen in portrait mode (and who uses their phone in landscape? 🤷‍♀️). No, my doubts are focused on the bottom of the screen and the removal of the home button. That button has been such an integral part of the iOS experience since the very beginning and I’m not yet convinced that the operating system, and apps that I use every day are going to be better off without it.

Maybe I’m wrong to be nervous though, and instead maybe I should be excited? The iPhone and iOS have been a little safe in terms of design changes over the last few years and instead, maybe this is actually an interesting opportunity for some bolder design decisions in apps again? That can only be a good thing!

Dave Verwer

News

How we built the ARKit Sudoku Solver

Here’s a fantastic story to start us off this week by Brad Dwyer who talks through the development of Magic Sudoku which reads like a shopping list of iOS 11 technologies. From using the Vision framework to identify puzzle squares, through CoreML to OCR the images into the numbers and then finally using ARKit to overlay the solution on the real world puzzle. This is a really interesting story.

Developing For Apple Watch

After linking to Marco’s article a couple of weeks ago, I was interested to see Benjamin Mayo’s follow up which claims that there are only three system Apple Watch apps that can be recreated using public APIs. Will we see a big release with watchOS 5 next year to bring the SDK in line with the new hardware and system apps?

Tools

Developer Tools for UI Debugging

Dmytro Anokhin with a great round up of all the tools that we have for debugging our apps. Maybe there’s something in here that you didn’t even know existed? For me, that was Pixie which I had never even heard of!

Code

Modeling one-to-many in SQlite using the JSON1 extension

What if we made another database… inside our existing database! 🤑 Seriously though, this is a great article by Benjamin Encz that shows how storing JSON inside a database can actually simplify a data model.

How to Use iOS Data Protection

We should all probably know a little more about this topic, so why not get started with this article by Douglas Hill. Once you’re done with this, there’s more detail in Apple’s official iOS Security White Paper.

Cards

Do you like the “cards” used in the new Today view in the App Store? I like them too and I think Paolo Cuscela feels the same way as he’s created a library to make creating them trivial.

Difference

Krzysztof Zabłocki with a tiny little library that does just one thing, but does it well. It takes two instances of a class and identifies which properties are different between them. Simple and useful!

Design

11 Optical Illusions Found in Visual Design

Balraj Chana with an interesting article that might reveal some subtle things you’re doing wrong with your designs.

Business and Marketing

5 Reasons Going to a Conference will Help Your Business

I’ve always been a great believer in conferences as being a really important part of running a small software business and I think Dan Counsell sums up the reasons why in this post perfectly.