Issue 363

Comment

The big news this week is that Apps and In-App Purchases are being removed from the iTunes Affiliate Program on the 1st October. As many people have pointed out this is a big blow to independent App Store journalism, and sites like Touch Arcade may be untenable without it.

This is the controversial sentence from the announcement though:

With the launch of the new App Store on both iOS and macOS and their increased methods of app discovery, we will be removing apps from the affiliate program.

Apple is well within its rights to do whatever it likes with the affiliate programme, including shutting it down. They owe us nothing. But implying that it's because the new App Store provides enough discovery by itself is arrogant, and also wrong! I'm a huge fan of the new App Store stories but they are just one part of what's needed.

Unlike most of what I've read on Twitter, I don't think that this is a services revenue grab and I definitely don't buy that this has anything to do with preparing for a reduction in their 30% cut. 😂 I think this is just something they feel they don't need to do anymore. They may not need to do it but that doesn't mean they shouldn't.

There are other ways to make money writing about apps, and sites will find ways to survive but this is disappointing news. 😞

News

Apple Is the First $1 Trillion U.S. Company

I don't talk about financial news here and market cap is a fairly meaningless number at the best of times, so why am I linking to this Bloomberg article? There's a fantastic graph at the bottom charting the rise and fall (mostly rise) of Apple's stock price over time against key events from their history. Even if you don't care about the stock market, it's worth spending 5 minutes with this.

VPN and Content Blocking API crackdown

I had missed this a few weeks ago, but came across it thanks to Michael Tsai's post this week. I'm not particularly surprised to see this happen though as Apple have a history of cracking down on apps that are using APIs in ways they were not intended. Blocking ad content outside of the iOS content blocking APIs certainly seems in line with that, but it's a shame nonetheless. I didn't use this app (or the other apps that were caught in this) but it doesn't seem like they were doing anything terrible, just not what Apple intended.

I just hope that this doesn't end up affecting Charles though, which apparently uses the same API.

Tools

Useful code completion in Xcode

I almost didn't link to this piece by Daniel Jalkut as I have always used auto completion in Xcode by just typing the name of a method or property rather than the prefixes to it. But then, I figured that if Daniel didn't know this, I bet there's a lot of other people who don't!

Hammerspoon

This is something I came across this week and have instantly fallen in love with. This isn't an iOS development tool, but I'm an iOS developer, and this is a tool, so that makes it an iOS developer tool... right? 😂 Anyway, I think you'll love it. Create Lua scripts for all sorts of purposes and bind them to keyboard shortcuts. I've been wanting the perfect macOS window manager for years and have never been happy with any of them. This week, I got to quickly and easily make my own, and it's perfect. ❤️

Open Selection in GitHub

Talking of keyboard shortcuts, this is a great idea. 👍

Code

Migrating an Objective-C class to Swift: a piecemeal approach

I've been lucky enough to never have to work on a mixed Objective-C/Swift codebase but I know that many of you are not in such a privileged position! If that's you, this article from Ole Begemann will be a good read.

Never

Making a claim that something will never be the case can feel like an invitation for the universe to prove otherwise.

This is the kind of article that always made me love NSHipster. Taking an obscure feature, in this case the Never type in Swift and diving deep on it. This won't be something you'll use every day, but knowing why it exists and how it works will make you a better Swift developer.

Scrollable UIStackView

Agnes Vasarhelyi with a great article covering a couple of topics, first up is how to make UIScrollView play well with Auto Layout. Then, how to make UIStackView play nicely with them both. I generally favour the (in my opinion) easier route to building a view like this one from the article with a table view rather than a stack view inside a scroll view, but there are certainly cases where this would be a good approach.

Building arrays with compactMap

Like Jesse Squires, I use this technique all the time too.

Videos

Videos from ADDC 2018

ADDC was only a couple of weeks ago in Barcelona, but already there's a full selection of conference videos from it. As you might imagine from the title of the conference there's a good mix of design/development talks here.

And finally...

iPhone and Mac wallpaper going back 15 years

Mike Rundle points us towards another beautiful trip down memory lane. I was fairly late to the Mac (I bought my first Mac during the 10.3 era) but I do remember a lot of these.

Issue 363 August 3rd 2018