Issue 329

1^st December 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Friday everyone! It’s that time of the year again when things are beginning to wind down. If you’re planning on updating your app in time for the holidays, make sure to do that soon. According to Apple, the App Store review team will be taking a break from Dec 23 - Dec 27, as usual!

Looking forward to all the holiday-inspired easter eggs and winter-themed features in your apps! 😎☃️

<p>Vicc Alexander</p>

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News

It’s fascinating seeing how Apple has begun shifting its apps and frameworks over to Swift in iOS 11.1 in comparison to iOS 10.1 a year ago. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but let’s just say that the list has grown by a lot.

One of the biggest surprises for me is the absence of the mail app from the list. The only reason I can think of as to why it has yet to be rewritten could be that Apple has something bigger planned for it. Perhaps a mail app redesign/makeover? We’ll have to just wait and see. 🤔

Two ways to quickly lose a user’s trust is to 1) spam their contacts or 2) spam them with push notifications. As it turns out, the Apple News app seems to be doing a form of the latter. Although the app isn’t necessarily sending out useless spammy notifications, it appears to be doing something a lot worse, enabling notifications for channels without the user’s explicit permission. Yikes.

Tools

Let’s face it if you’ve ever designed UI interfaces or have delegated your gnarly animation ideas to other engineers, chances are your ideas won’t be replicated with 100% accuracy. Lona aims to change this. The plan is to develop a new design system specification that can encode all of the necessary details needed to make a perfect translation. Although it is currently only a developer preview, there’s a lot of potential here. As always, the Airbnb team never fails to deliver.

Code

As any software engineer will tell you, memory leaks aren’t a matter of “if,” they’re a matter of when. Whether you’re contributing to an open-sourced project, reviewing code, or working on the next big app, leaking memory is something that should generally be avoided. Here’s John with a few examples of how unit tests can be used to identify existing memory leaks and to prevent new ones in the future. I agree that it may be a bit overkill, but worth considering.

There are two things I actively tried to avoid showing inside my apps, loading states and network errors. Reducing the presence of loading states is a discussion for another time, however, Keith Harrison shows us how to tackle the latter quite easily. In iOS 11, you can now force your URLSession session to wait until network connectivity is available before trying to connect, all with only one additional line of code. This prevents unnecessary network errors that happen far too often, resulting in a better user experience.

If you’ve been holding off on syncing your Realm database with CloudKit thinking it requires a lot of work, well you’re in luck. IceCream aims to make this extremely easy. With support for manual syncing, user account status checks, and it’s star SyncEngine, it seems like a no-brainer. Worth a try. 😜

The String class and substring functionality have come a long way since Swift was first introduced in 2014. Greg Heo explains how substrings and strings work closely together and how they interface on their own. Always nice learning something new.

Design

Kauhi Hookano did a fabulous job drafting up an iOS notification redesign concept that is truly something different. More than just a UI concept, Hookano took additional steps including in-person user testing to address and iterate on some of the biggest notification banner pain points plaguing users.

Although this concept was done back in August, I recommend checking out the full walkthrough. As for whether Apple should steal this iOS notification design, I say “give this man a job.” My favorite part is the “Siri Notification Catch Up” concept feature. What I’d give to have that. 🙌

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And finally...

Stephen King would be proud. 😏