Issue 356

15^th June 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

WWDC week is all done for another year! I had a short vacation before returning to the UK and now we’re into what is probably my favourite part of every year, the three months leading up to the public releases. This is when we all really get to unpack what Apple have been working on since last year…

So let’s get started, shall we? 🚀

Dave Verwer

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News

I mentioned last week that my favourite announcement from the conference was Siri Shortcuts, but how can we hope to understand this feature as developers without first understanding it from the point of view of the user? Federico Viticci (who else!) has written up a long and detailed piece on the technology that will potentially show you the possibilities for your app.

Tools

There are good reasons for why the Xcode assistant editor ends up in “Manual” mode from time to time, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating when it happens. Jesse Squires suggests that instead, using the “Navigation: Uses focused editor” preference in Xcode is a better way to take advantage of that second editor pane.

Code

Mattt Thompson with a great article on training CreateML to identify programming languages from snippets of source, with just a few lines of code and a model generated from some simple inputs. This is really impressive and CreateML certainly seems like the missing piece of the puzzle for people who are/were not machine learning experts.

This, in my opinion, was the one of the biggest weaknesses of enums in Swift prior to 4.2. No more! The CaseIterable protocol now adds an allCases collection to enums and Ole Begemann is here to give us a detailed look at it. I’m really looking forward to removing many manual implementations of this from my code.

Dominik Wagner with some thoughts on Swift that generated a lot of discussion this week. I remember saying when Swift was first announced that it probably set the progress of iOS development back by 3-4 years just through the sheer disruption that was inevitable with a brand new language, no matter how good it was. However at this point I really don’t agree that Apple should pivot back to Objective-C. That would set us back several more years and there’s just no need for it. Swift is a good language, yes it’s not perfect (nothing is!) and there is some truth in here, but I don’t agree with the conclusion at all.

There’s more on free trials in this week’s Business & Marketing section below, but before we get to that, take a look at this article from Jamin Guy on the new IAPKit framework from Black Pixel. If you’re looking for a drop-in free trial system for your app, complete with UI and everything else, this could be the solution.

Greg Heo with a piece on the new #error and #warning directives in Swift 4.2. These are a welcome addition to the language, but the article isn’t really about them (there’s not much to talk about there, really!) Instead, it’s about how these were implemented and how you could potentially add more of your own.

Design

Try and ignore the click bait title on this article, it’s really not a good representation of what this article actually says. Instead, a more accurate title would be something like “How to make sure you’re using tab bars correctly”. Tab bars can still be relevant, and there’s some good tips in this article by Fabian Sebastian.

Business and Marketing

Drew McCormack with a look at free trials in the modern world of the App Store. He articulates really well some of the things I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. He digs into why free trials can be confusing for the user and gives his opinion on why the free In-App Purchase version of implementing them is better.

Videos

I’m going to spend the next few issues linking to the sessions that I am enjoying from this years WWDC. Last week it was tvOS and this week I’m going to highlight this session on making sure your animations are on point in your app. This is an incredible session that you might have skipped over from the title, but don’t. Watch it now. 👍

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And finally...

I saw John Siracusa’s tweet during the keynote, but I was (of course) watching the announcements and so I didn’t investigate why he tweeted it and just kept scrolling. Now it all makes sense after he talked about it on this week’s episode of ATP.

The “It’s Road Trip” slip up has always been a favourite of mine, mainly because that tiny autocorrect mistake that any one of us could have made then gets blasted all over a video for the next several minutes (this bit especially makes me laugh). 😂I also love that they fixed it before publishing the official video. It’s fantastic to see Apple make a cheeky reference to it like this. ❤️

Is this the longest explanation ever accompanying an “And Finally…” link? 😀