Issue 330

8^th December 2017

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It was this tweet a few weeks ago that set me thinking about the iOS 11 App Store redesign and whether I thought it had been a success after a few months in the wild. To cut a long story short, I think it has!

I’m not at the point where I think of the App Store as a destination when I want to read something, but I do browse the Today tab almost every time I end up in the app for some other reason. The interviews are good, the curated app lists are usually solid and most times I visit there’s something of interest to look at. That’s amazing for what was nothing more than a dumb storefront for 9 years and it’s certainly increased the amount of money I spend there again. I’d love to see Apple’s numbers on total App Store revenue as a result of the redesign.

I was brought back to thinking about it again this week by the announcement and expansion of the Best of 2017 awards that were published not only in the App Store but also on the web. Is this “Best of …” now the new Apple Design Awards? Certainly it’s going to result in more exposure than the design awards, and I think the prestige is there too.

I’m not saying there’s no problems with the App Store anymore by any stretch, but I think Apple have done a great job of turning this aspect of the App Store around and that the redesign ahs been a success. Now, let’s talk about the Mac App Store? 😂

Dave Verwer

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News

It’s been a challenging few weeks for Apple… 😬 I’m not going to weigh in with my opinion on the events as more than enough has been written about that already. I am however going to highlight Patrick Wardle’s predictably thorough and well investigated article on the blank root bug. Fascinating.

Despite all of the other posts on analytics this week 😀 this is the one that you should read. Differential privacy is a fascinating subject and like with any posts on Apple’s machine learning blog, while I don’t understand most of it, the results are really interesting.

Tools

This may not be ready for prime time based on how you enable it, but it was mentioned in the Xcode 9.2 release notes so I’d give it a go if you’re struggling with long Swift build times. Just be sure to note the strange way to enable it and set it to NO instead of using logic. 🤷‍♂️

Hands up who didn’t know about e in LLDB before reading this Tweet by Carola Nitz. 🙌 This book is also recommended in the replies to that tweet. There’s probably a huge amount in there that we all don’t know! 💥

Every time I need to use sudo, I’m surprised Terminal doesn’t let me use my MacBook’s Touch ID to authorise it. Cabel Sasser found a way to make it possible though! 👌

Code

This is interesting, it’s a design review library to expose various bits of information in a running app like being able to measure and inspect views, slow down animations etc… but it’s also got a plugin model so you can build your own app specific extensions to it. I can see this being really useful.

Dependency injection and storyboards just don’t go together, everyone knows that by now! Well, maybe Arek Holko found a way with a little Sourcery.

In an ideal world, would we ever have to decode JSON data that included dates in two different date formats? No we would not. Do we live in an ideal world? No, no we definitely do not! Keith Harrison shows us how we’d manage this using Swift 4 coding.

Jared Sinclair on building the data structures for syncing drawing data across the network to build the collaborative sketching app Pixelboard. This kind of problem is always fun to solve, for some definition of fun at least! 😂

Design

It may sound obvious that if you’re looking to make a glanceable UI you need to make your typography large and clear, but did you know that 40% of all phone sessions are nothing more than a glance lasting less than 15 seconds? This matters.

Videos

This has been in production for more than 3 years but finally saw a public release last week. The initial reviews are good and while I haven’t seen it yet I’m really looking forward to watching it.

Now, why isn’t it available on iTunes? 📱

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And finally...

In the future, only happy people get to use their phones 😸