Issue 352

18^th May 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Did you notice that yesterday was Global Accessibility Awareness Day? Apple certainly did, and they had a huge banner across their home page linking to a marketing site for the accessibility features of iOS.

So, why not take up Duncan Babbage’s challenge to himself, and you to create the most accessible app possible over the next 12 months?

I really like that Duncan’s challenge is set over a year rather than a shorter time period. Accessibility isn’t something you do once and then forget about, and over the course of this challenge it will hopefully just become part of what you think about as you develop software. Get started here with Apple’s accessibility documentation.

Dave Verwer

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News

Felix Krause, who taught us the dangers of trusting SDKs a few months ago has continued that research and now put together a listing of popular SDKs along with information on whether they use best practices, like hosting their download over HTTPS. The good news is that the vast majority do, but this is not a comprehensive list of frameworks by any means so if there are any missing, please contribute.

I’m really pleased to see that the TensorFlow fork of Swift that used to live here is already back underneath the apple/swift repository on a tensorflow branch. This post by Ted Kremenek is a good summary of what’s going on, and very encouragingly includes tentative plans for this branch to eventually be merged back into master (possibly with some feature flags). Great news!

Tools

This is really, really cool. The latest version of Visual Studio uses ML with a model trained from open source code to predict the best fit for autocomplete, and it’s context aware too. The automatic inference of formatting rules is also fantastic!

Great tip from Axel Kee for turning off automatic execution for your Xcode playgrounds. I tried this out and I think I prefer it. I was always hitting ⌘+R through habit anyway! 👍

Code

I mentioned last week that MLKit was usable on iOS through Firebase and sure enough Martin Mitrevski has provided us with this example of smile detection with MLKit. 🤖

At first glance implementing Touch ID and Face ID looks simple and of course, it is. There’s more to implementing it than just calling the method to do the authentication though. Michael Brown has this article on some of the other things you need to think about before adding the feature.

What can iOS developers learn from looking at the architecture of WordPress? Well, one possibility is to read Tyrone Michael Avnit’s article on how we could use a plugin based architecture instead of things like delegation and observation.

Business and Marketing

This six part series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) of posts from Cate Huston that wrapped up last week is definitely worth a read. She starts by talking about developer and team success, but then moves on to consider the problem more broadly. I found the research and data from part 3 on the success of users especially interesting about how happy and successful users spend less time in apps.

Up to Speed

This is a six part series on everything you might need to bring your app up a level or two in terms of quality. It covers everything from adding tests to an existing project and using SwiftLint to adding fastlane and setting up CI.

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And finally...

I love that they even included the “click” navigation sound. 😂