Issue 335

19^th January 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I read Chris Adamson’s article on iOS developer conferences in 2018 yesterday and it was a good reminder that in previous years I’ve always linked to a round up of conferences in January. So, let’s start this week with his big list of 2018 iOS conferences. 🙌

But Chris is actually making a different point in his article, that there are significantly less iOS conferences these days than there used to be, and that conferences are expensive, hard to get to, and rarely run at anything more than a break even. He even suggests that virtual conferences might be the answer.

But Marco Arment nailed it in his follow up post:

I don’t know how to fix conferences, but the first place I’d start on that whiteboard is by getting rid of all of the talks, then trying to find different ways to bring people together — and far more of them than before.

That has always been the value of conferences for me, even WWDC. It’s not about what’s being shown in the session rooms, it’s the “hallway track” that has always provided the best experience, and the most value for me from that $1,600 WWDC ticket.

So, where should we all get together? I’m in. 😀

Dave Verwer

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News

What a fantastic article on the App Store economy from Horace Dediu. You should absolutely read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

• Developer payouts of $25B/yr is higher than the revenue of McDonald’s.
• App Store revenue is on track to overtake global box office revenues in 2018.
• The iOS App Store still counts for 50-60% of mobile economic activity.

There’s definitely money to be made here, and it’s not all in selling gems and Poké Balls.

So BuddyBuild is gone in terms of new customers, and Android support is not long for this world. Given that, and before we know more from Apple, you may find yourself in the situation of needing an alternative CI solution. Geoff Pado runs down your options, including this week’s sponsor, just below. 👍

Tools

Yes, you could write a command line tool in Swift or yes, you could write a script, but now there’s a 3rd option! Beak analyses a Swift file, finds public functions and lets you run them from the terminal. Looks pretty cool.

Think of this like SwiftLint for your XIB/storyboard files. I ran it past a couple of projects of mine and while it didn’t find any serious problems, that in itself is comforting! 👍 The included checks are fairly basic but I’m sure more will be added in the future.

Code

So planning for Swift 4.1 is well underway now and this post by Ben Cohen brings us up to speed on some of the changes around conditional conformance. There’s plenty of detail in the post, and more in the original evolution proposal if that’s not enough!

So what actually is the iPhone X home button control? Sash Zats digs in and finds that of course it’s more complicated and subtle than it first appears. Of course it is! ❤️

No, RSS is definitely not dead 🙌 but consuming it in an app is a much harder problem than you might first think! Whether it’s RSS, Atom, JSON Feed or even RSS-In-JSON which I had never even heard of, the one and only master of RSS Brent Simmons has the solution in this open source library from his in-progress open source RSS reader, Evergreen.

This isn’t going to be something you need to do very often, if ever! However, that doesn’t make the implementation any less interesting. Dave DeLong shows us how to read the entitlements out of your app binary at runtime.

Business and Marketing

I really like this idea. It’s like the best of a subscription and paid upgrade model and it works well for both the developers and the customer. If you are getting lots of use out of the app, you pay for the extra features. If you wane a bit and don’t find yourself using it for a while, skip a year but still retain access to the app and its data. It’s good. The name ‘Cash Cow’ though? No, it needs a new name. 🤔

I’ve also been helping to beta test Agenda and the app itself is great. It’s become part of my daily workflow which is always a good sign! It’s also a sign that I have to attend too many meetings… 😬 I must fix that!

Non standard business models, as far as the eye can see. This time it’s Jacob Eiting talking about patronage. I almost dismissed this article as I skimmed it because of the stock photograph of a smiling woman, but I promise it’s worth a read! 👍

So many week’s without much of interest popping up in the Business & Marketing section and then this week I was absolutely spoiled for choice. The iA Writer team take a fascinating peek into the black box of the App Store.

Videos

Ten videos from the wonderful #Pragma conference from October last year. There’s some great talks here, as usual.

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And finally...

Great story from Angela Guzman. 🎁