Issue 360

13^th July 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I mentioned the ten year anniversary of the App Store last week but nothing could have prepared me for the explosion of tweets and articles this week with so many memories of the journey we’ve all been on.

Remembering right back to the beginning, Craig Hockenberry had an astute observation that the App Store immediately blew away our expectations of the types of apps that would be popular. It’s really easy to forget just what a new frontier it was.

Looking back at the first apps that I bought it’s been a little surprising to see that some of them, that I loved and were incredibly popular are still going strong. It really did change the world of selling software.

I also want to mention the amazing coverage of the anniversary that MacStories have been publishing all week. I’d recommend Alex Guyot’s summary as well as the articles by Stephen Hackett on a timeline of changes and Ryan Cristoffel on the various controversies over the years.

Oh, and don’t forget it’s not only the App Store that launched ten years ago! 😱

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

Get your iOS apps in the hands of your testers faster with the new auto-provisioning capability in App Center. We’ve added this capability into the install portal, so you can automate the distribution process, enable testers, and team members to install the beta version of your app with one click. Sign up and enable automatic signing today.

News

Apple released transcripts of the 2018 WWDC talks this week and it reminded me that I hadn’t linked to ASCIIwwdc yet this year! Of course, having transcripts in both places is great, but I must admit I prefer the unofficial site as it seems to have better search coverage.

Did you see the “Taiwan” bug that was fixed in iOS 11.4.1 this week? More interesting than the bug was the reason it existed, and even more interesting than that, the incredibly detailed explanation that Patrick Wardle always provides.

This bug also reminded me of this Google Maps story from 2014. Politics really does affect all aspects of our lives, even our operating systems!

Code

NSHipster is back! 🎉 I always loved the idea of a blog which explored the outer reaches of the galaxy frameworks, so I’m really happy to see it return to a regular posting schedule.

I’ve previously used Sourcery to do something similar to this in the past, but GYB looks great too! Tony Arnold also had some good follow up on using Build Rules in Xcode to make integration easier.

This is an interesting idea from John Sundell and while I’m not 100% convinced, it’s certainly one way to tackle the massive view controller problem. It’s also always good to think in a completely different way every once in a while.

Dejan Agostini with a good article on os_log which has been around for a couple of years now, but is an API that you may not be using the full power of. He also goes into detail on using the Console app to view your logs.

Talking of throwbacks to the early days (yea, yea, I know we haven’t had Swift for that long!) this article from Vadim Bulavin made me think about atomic properties for the first time in ages. It’s a good piece on the locking APIs as well.

Design

More 10 year anniversary content, this time from Michael Steeber with a look at how some of the earliest apps changed over the years. I especially liked the look back at Facebook here which shows just how much they experimented with various UI concepts before settling on their current design.

I see it too, and I like it. Navigation bars are still a bit of a problem but there’s a definite trend southwards. I’d love to see some standardisation and guidance on this from Apple though.

Business and Marketing

Brent Simmons on the release note process from The Omni Group. It’s an interesting article and you’ll learn something from it, but the thing that stood out to me was that I didn’t realise that Apple had a public style guide! You learn something new every day!

Videos

I’ve been really bad at remembering to include my weekly WWDC video, but I ended up watching another one this week. Inspired by Keith Harrison’s post on readable table view widths I ended up watching this WWDC video, and it was 💯💯💯!

Sponsored Jobs

Help us innovate mobile! Swipe right for mkodo.

And finally...

😂