Issue 342

Comment

Last year was the 10 year anniversary of the iPhone, and this year it's been 10 years since our world as developers changed with the release of the iPhone SDK. I'm sure you've read Craig Hockenberry's article by now as it's been widely shared, but it's a great look back at the really early days of development on the iPhone. It also seemed to trigger something and quickly Twitter was filled with great stories of everyone reminiscing on those days, so let me go next with that. 😀

I clearly remember the announcement of the SDK, I was working on a Mac app at the time and it took everything I had not to immediately abandon it and get started on an iOS app. I managed to resist, but as soon as it was done I immediately dived right in and shipped my first app to the store a few months after the launch and I was hooked.

In the years following, I wrote (and helped to write) apps both for my own company and for others. I also trained hundreds of developers on Objective-C and iOS development. I spoke at conferences everywhere from the USA, to Russia and all over Europe. I also started a newsletter! 😀I can honestly say that in my whole career I have never been so passionate for so long about any technology as I continue to be with iOS. It really did change my life.

The last few years have taken me away from primarily doing iOS work, and while I had an amazing time working on Curated, and other email related things this anniversary couldn't come at a better time because I have a little announcement to make. As of this week, I am now again an independent developer working for myself and so, iOS is back to being 100% of what I do! 🎉🎉🎉

So what are my exact plans? I don't want to make too many firm promises as I'd rather let things happen naturally and be able to say yes to things as they appear, which is something I haven't been able to do in quite a while. However, I do have some plans in progress, and there will even be a (very) small announcement of something right here, next week, so keep an eye out for that!

As part of this change, I'll also be going back to being the sole author of iOS Dev Weekly. I'd really like to say a huge thank you to both Evan and Vicc. They have been an enormous help over this last year and both brought fresh new perspectives on the iOS world. Thank you both, it's been wonderful working with you.

Sorry this turned out to be so long! Let's get on with the important stuff... The links!

News

Apple Networking Feedback Survey

This is interesting, Quinn “The Eskimo!” (who you may have met if you've ever found yourself in the labs at WWDC) is asking for feedback on real world usage of the official network APIs. There's questions on everything here from whether you still use FTP, to whether you're interested in adopting the QUIC protocol. It's fantastic to see Apple listening and I do hope we see more like this. You know what will make that more likely to happen? 👉 Go and respond to it! 👈

Dave DeLong has published his responses to these questions publicly, but there's an email address in the post if you'd prefer to keep them just between you and Apple.

Tools

Solving a Mysterious Heap Corruption Crash

I've said it many times before, but I love a good debugging story... They give you the same good feeling of finding a bug, without the days/weeks of pain and torment. 😂 This one is a good example of the genre from Agnes Vasarhelyi.

Sophie - Carthage GUI Client

Do you crave a GUI to manage Carthage? If you do, you'll be happy to hear that Marco Santarossa has put together this tool for managing and updating your dependencies.

Code

Vapor and Fluent on SwiftNIO

So it was pretty obvious with last week's announcement of SwiftNIO that it was a great fit for server side code and sure enough, this tweet says that Vapor has already started to integrate it into their project.

Will we ever see Apple do a server side web framework? Or maybe even just officially adopt and work on something like Vapor? I think a more likely first step would be for them to add a server side code execution component to iCloud/CloudKit but I'd always err on the side of caution with predictions like that! It's vaguely possible that it will happen one day though, there's certainly a lot of suitable foundations being put in place.

Better configuration testing in Swift

Erica Sadun writes about a couple of changes that she originally proposed that just appeared in the latest Xcode 9.3 beta. Instead of needing to check architectures and specific operating systems with your #if conditionals, you can now simply say something like #if canImport(UIKit). Much better!

The power of sets in Swift

Do you, like most people (including me!), always reach for an Array as your first choice when you need any kind of collection? John Sundell tells us why we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the humble Set instead.

Design

FlippingNotch 🤙

I'm not sure how this would work in an app that supports more phones than just the X (i.e. every app!) but it's a cute idea in the spirit of embracing the notch.

Good to great UI animation tips

i don't agree with everything in this article from Pablo Stanley, for example I find cascading content in and and overly dramatic fades a little annoying. That said, there's still some great advice on using animations to give context to interactions here.

Books

Continuous Delivery for Mobile with Fastlane

I'd imagine you all love fastlane, right? The documentation is great, but what if you want something a little more in depth then you'll want to consider this new book from Doron Katz. I haven't read it yet but it looks good.

And finally...

The importance of kerning

The dashboard shows the sign of a person sitting on the toilet

😂

Issue 342 March 9th 2018