Issue 350

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What's that? Only 4 weeks left until WWDC? How did that happen? Can't wait 🎉

News

Overcast: The privacy update

There are two ways to deal with GDPR compliance. You could either do just enough to get in line with the new regulations, or you could embrace privacy at the heart of your app. Marco Arment is certainly taking the second approach with this update to Overcast. I'm not making judgement on which approach you choose, it's a decision that needs to be taken for every app individually, but there are some points in this article that are definitely worth thinking about.

Lobe - Deep Learning Made Simple

This is a truly great demo. If the product is half as good as it looks here then they've got something really special. Why am I linking it here? Well it outputs CoreML and TensorFlow models which you can bring into your iOS app. Amazing. Swift does seem to be gaining serious momentum in machine learning these days.

Tools

Multiple cursor support in Xcode

Obviously this is all undocumented at the moment and so could break at any time but I'm hopeful that this will make it as an official feature at some point. The first time I came across multiple cursors was in TextMate many years ago and that vein of editors (Atom, Sublime, VSCode, etc...) all rely on the feature heavily. I miss it in any editor that doesn't have it.

TeaCode

Have you ever found yourself wishing for more power from Xcode snippets? Or wishing you could use the same snippet not only in Xcode but in other editors. If so, this might be the tool for you. Not only is it cross-editor compatible snippets, but the language makes it much more powerful.

Code

iOS Springboard Security

There's a couple of lessons to be learned from this article by Damien Laughton. Just because something worked when you developed it, doesn't mean it'll work forever and test on multiple, real devices not just the latest and greatest phone that you personally use.

CloudKitGDPR

I mentioned Apple's guidance on CloudKit and GDPR a few weeks ago and hot on the heels of that, Artur Grigor is here with a useful library to help you export, or delete all data stored for a user from the CloudKit back end. This should make your job a bit easier!

Bringing animation to UITabBarController

There's no animation with the default tab bar, but should there be? I love this subtle animation from Jille van der Weerd, so here it is along with the code to implement it.

Let’s talk about self-documenting code

Every time someone tells me about their policy on self documenting code over comments, I think exactly what Graham Lee has written down here.

Design

Designing Better Notifications

I think it'd be great of iOS were to learn more about when, and what kind of notifications that we value but in the absence of that there's also things we can do as app developers.

Business and Marketing

Three-day no-meeting schedule for engineers

If you work in a company that has more than 10 people, your week is probably a sea of interruptions. I like this idea from Pinterest to block out 3 days/week with a meeting blackout. This takes some guts to enforce, but as Brian Donohue explains, it's working.

Up to Speed

Delegation in Swift

It's John Sundell's turn to take us through some of the basics of iOS development this week with the low down on delegation.

And finally...

Trying to create an app is almost always a bad idea...

😂

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Issue 350 May 4th 2018