Issue 366

24^th August 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I’ve seen plenty of tweets this week with people wrapping up support for Siri Shortcuts and various other features. There’s naturally plenty of rumours about the hardware event too, although if it all comes true then we’re in for a 14 hour keynote! 😀 With beta 10 rolling out yesterday, it feels like we’re getting really close!

Dave Verwer

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News

Of course, there have been highs and lows. Pin stripes and Brushed Metal and Linen and Rich Corinthian Leather. Transparency and Vibrancy. At times, Apple had led the way into new design trends, and at other times, they have fallen behind the rest of the industry.

What a fantastic piece of work from Stephen Hackett. I spent a good amount of time browsing the versions that were out before I got my first Mac, which came with 10.4. It’s also interesting to see how things have changed over the years.

This now brings the number of countries where apps can be promoted to 13, which I can only take to mean that this programme is performing well for Apple. Is it performing well for consumers, and developers though? Actually, it’s not as bad as I thought. Search ads are usually relevant and they are well designed, so they don’t feel overwhelming. I’d predict they’re here to stay.

Tools

The files revealed by this script from Gary Bernhardt aren’t automatically problematic, but it’s a good smoke test. A small enhancement would be to filter pbxproj files, which were top of the list in every project I tried it on! 😀

This script from Håvard Fossli looks useful. It turns dull timestamped log files into a colourful, information dense way to see exactly what is slowing down your build/fastlane process.

Code

Validated from Brandon Williams and Stephen Celis is a tiny library for collecting multiple errors together rather than bailing at the first sign of trouble! 😀 It reminds me a little of Active Record validations from Rails.

There are plenty of situations where a single screen of an app might have several states. For example an empty state, a loading state and then the “normal” state where data is displayed. StateViewController from David Ask helps to manage this common scenario.

Everything you wanted, or needed to know about NSPredicate, all in one simple web page from Axel Kee. If bookmarks were still something that people used, I’d suggest bookmarking this for the next time you need to use NSPredicate. 😂

Quentin Jin with a smart looking Timer library, not just for delaying events relative to the current time, but also to schedule events for specific times. I particularly liked the ability to tie a timer to the lifetime of another object. Really nice.

Ryo Aoyama with a library designed to work with performBatchUpdates on table and collection views to allow fast differencing and updating between two data sets. I’d suggest checking out the playground to get a sense of how easy this is to use.

Design

Tom Brow with a remarkable statistic from his app, Pod. I know I use a non-default font size but these numbers still surprised me. If you don’t support dynamic type, this tweet should be enough to get you to fix that.

Business and Marketing

This is all just common sense really, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded of common sense! 🤯

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And finally...

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